So instead of barking something cathartic and crass, Pei’s cheeks erupted in red and yellow – a reflexive display, at first, but she indulgently held the chromatophores in place, venting with a dash of purple.

Her skin didn’t look good because of the fucking scale scrub. She was shimmering.

She lay down and let the eelim decide what shape she needed to be held by. Nervously, she pushed up her shirt and lay her palm against her skin. She ran her fingers over the familiar scales and scars, and nothing felt different at all. But somewhere within her, the scanner had said there was – for the first time ever – a fully formed egg, and that egg was making her body pump out hormones that were screwing with her abdominal muscles and the shine of her skin. How had it not even occurred to her? The symptoms of shimmer had been drilled into her as a kid, and there’d been a time in her late adolescence when every random cramp or odd angle of light had made her go oh stars, is it happening? But she’d been too young for it then, and was on the cusp of too old now, and she’d long figured, over the decades of nothing happening, that she was one of the many who wouldn’t.

Why the fuck was it happening now? Here? On top of everything else? Was this really the best time her body could come up with?

Her head swam. She felt like the shuttle was upside down, or that the gravity had been switched off. It’s a lot to take in, her father Gilen told her and her siblings in an old, old memory. Your shimmer doesn’t care about your job or your travels or whatever plans you had. It’s a wonderful thing, but shifting gears like that is stressful, and that’s why it’s so important for us to make all the mothers who come here feel like this is their home for a little bit.

Pei remembered them, the women who’d come to the creche. Some had been nervous. Some had been shy, or quiet, or in a hurry. But most, she remembered, were really happy. They seemed it, anyway. It was hard not to be happy when you were on six tendays of culturally mandated vacation that every job in existence bent itself backward to accommodate. Six tendays of sex and pampering until it was time for you to lay your egg and get back to your life. Six tendays of knowing that you were doing something vital for the species, something you were so privileged to do, something your friends would throw a party for once you were back home. Pei had thrown a lot of parties like that for crewmates over the years.

She pressed her palm down, even though she knew she wouldn’t be able to feel it. The shell wouldn’t harden until the egg was fertilised. It was just a soft ball of protein and instructions at this stage, which was a bizarre thing to picture within herself. She thought instead of her creche’s incubation pool, full of greenish-white speckled-shelled marvels about the size of an adult’s fist. The light in there was kept low, but sometimes one of her fathers would lift one out of the water with heartbreaking gentleness and hold it up to the window so you could see the extraordinary being inside shift and pulse. She and her siblings had been encouraged to look at that, to hang out in the pool room whenever they pleased (so long as they didn’t touch). Her fathers wanted no secrecy in the matter, especially not for the girls and shon who would produce eggs of their own one day.

Four tendays. Pei had four tendays to get this egg fathered. After that point, the window would close, the egg would break down and be reabsorbed, and … that would be that. Opportunity lost. For most would-be mothers, there was only the one chance. This was Pei’s, apparently. She closed her eyes and pushed out what felt like every breath she’d ever taken.

Why now?

Pei thought about her mother, Seri. She’d never met her, but she carried her genes and her name, and knew her story well. Unlike her creche siblings, Pei had no biological relation to any of her fathers at the Tem creche; she’d been raised by them, not made by them. Seri, the story went, had been a soldier on deployment when she’d started to shimmer. Typically, soldiers entering shimmer were shipped out of combat immediately, but Seri was the commander, and the situation was one of those where she just couldn’t. So, she’d engaged in what translated as wild fathering. One of Seri’s comrades, a shon named Tova, had been the obvious pick for the task, given their close friendship, but Tova had been female at the time. Undeterred, Tova took herself to the medic, popped a hormonal cocktail, went through the shift as fast as medically possible, and had a few respectful, practical rounds of sex with his friend. The egg that had been pre-emptively named light blue glass blue misty green – in the Aeluon naming language, Gapei – was then laid in a portable emergency incubator and ferried back to uncontested space, where it was placed in the happy collective hands of the Tem creche fathers.

Pei had been told the story many times, both from her fathers (who constantly reminded her that having a shon parent gave her good luck), and from Tova herself, who had personally come to the creche one summer day to deliver the news that Seri had been killed in combat. Pei hadn’t been old enough then to understand what that news actually meant, but not having a living mother was of no concern to her. Some children at the creche got visits from their mothers – both regular and sporadic – but just as many did not. This didn’t matter either way to an Aeluon child. A mother was a nice thing to have, but then, so was a best friend, or a close sibling, or a father you were particularly attached to. Nobody had the same mix of people in their lives. There were no requirements when it came to what constituted a family.

And yet … Pei, as a child, had sometimes thought about the fact that none of the fathers at the creche had made her.