Chapter 9: The Groom May Now Kiss the Bride

“Are you sure about this, Stardust?” my Mom said, later, because Ziggy had to call in to his headquarters, and let them know what was happening and apply for some special leave to merge egg-lines, and from the flashing colors, it looked like he had some explaining to do. “I mean, he’s an alien.”

She eyed Ziggy. “If you don’t want to, your Dad could probably arrange something, maybe we could send you to Mars and fake a dead husband or something.” She shuddered. “I mean, how could you even think of ... aiiyahhh...”

“Sex?” I said, helpfully, just smiling as I watched Ziggy’s muscles ripple so beautifully under his lovely rubbery skin, all smooth and shiny, and those lovely tentacles were flexing and waving as the colors washed across his skin, flickering so fast I could barely make them out, but some of them were starting to make sense.

“Yes, Stardust. Sex,” Mom said, and she was all tense. “I mean, I’m sorry your Dad and I were rude about some of those boys you’ve dated, Stardust. Honestly, I’d rather you married one of those horrible fascists you liked dating than ... than...” She looked like she was going to cry. “Even that old pervert back dirtside ... at least he was human...”

“Mom!” I said, and okay, I was a bit hurt, but I did understand. Ziggy was an alien, and he did look a bit like a giant octopus, and those tentacles, well, I knew she was weirded out by this, and I needed to do my best to explain, I really did, because this was important. Ziggy was going to be her son-in-law, and I loved him, and I was going to have his baby, and Mom and Dad would be grandparents, and I at least wanted my Mom not to be weirded out by him, but when I looked at Ziggy’s tentacles myself, I just shivered with excitement.

“Mom,” I said, and I knew I had to find some way to get through to her, because I loved Ziggy so much, and he loved me, so I reached out and took her hand, which I hadn’t done in a long time. “Mom, come and sit down and drink some jasmine tea, and I’ll try and explain about Ziggy.”

And I did, I made her jasmine tea, and we sat down on the couch, and I talked and talked and talked, telling her all about Ziggy. How he grew up, his childhood, joining the Space Marines, and how courageous and brave he was, because he’d already done two tours fighting the Spiders, and how determined he’d been to volunteer and be selected to come to Terra and fight the Spiders alongside aliens like us, because we needed all the help we could get. How he liked Earth music, and he was so interested in our culture, and what made us tick, and...

“Sex with human girls...” my Mom said, a bit cynically, but she was starting to understand, I could see.

“He’s a Space Marine,” Mom, I said. “You know what our own Space Marines are like, why would heptapods be any different, but he loves me Mom, and I love him. I know it seems really weird and everything, but once you get to know Ziggy better, you’ll really like him...”

“Okay, okay,” my Mom said at last, and Ziggy was still on his communicator, and it looked like things were more routine now, the colors weren’t rippling and flashing quite so intensely, and his tentacle-waving was a lot more subdued. “He can stay as long as you like, Stardust, and he can stay here after you two are married until you decide what you’re doing.”

“We already decided, Mom,” I said. “He’s a Space Marine, he’s a Spider-Killer, and that’s like our Space Dragon’s, his job’s to fight, but after this mission he’s going to be sent back here to work at the Embassy as a Military Attaché, and he talked to the Ambassador, and I’m going to be attached to the Heptapod Embassy as a trainee-translator, and he’ll be assigned an Embassy tunnel, they’re really nice, and I can do my university degree at the same time and we’ll have lots of help with the children, and we’ll see you and Dad all the time...”

You bet we’d have lots of help. Everyone who wanted to author a Clinical Study was eager to help, but I did wonder what our baby would be like. Mind you, so did everyone else...

The wedding was beautiful, the bride was dressed in dress whites, my Mom cried all the way through, my bestie, Manda, Amanda Chan, was the bridesmaid, and my Dad walked me down the aisle to where Ziggy stood waiting, elegant and impeccably dressed in his lovely black and silver Space Marines of the Heptapod Water Paths harness, because Heptapods didn’t normally wear anything at all, but he wore a kilt for the wedding to make my Mom a bit happier, and Security-Major Chu was the best man.

We even had an Arch of Sabers, and all my friends from my School Militia Rose Klang unit, in their pink and white parade uniforms were on one side, and the other side was a row of the biggest toughest most-battle-scarred heptapod Space Marines I’d ever seen, not that I’d seen that many.

“Squids from my old Tentacle,” Ziggy whispered to me, flashing happy and proud colors. “They wanted to do this for us after Chewy explained it was an old human military tradition.”

Ziggy and Chewy were already good friends, and Chewy was responsible for our security now, because a few people had said really rude and impolite things about me and Ziggy, and there were a few death threats as well, but with Chewy, and our bodyguards of Hegemony Space Dragons and Waterpaths Spider-Killers, well, I didn’t worry at all.

Me? I wore my Major of the Peoples Militia Dress Uniform, beautifully styled Dress Whites, with a lovely white veil, and a diamond tiara that the Chairman himself gave me as a wedding gift, and the media made me look totally stunning, and our wedding was watched system-wide, because it was actually the first ever human-alien wedding, and the Chairman himself had caught a shuttle up to sit with my Dad and Mom, and he was one of the official witnesses, although we did have a few glitches.

Like when the celebrant said “the groom may now kiss the bride,” and no-one but no-one, including me, had caught that one beforehand. It was really hard to explain on the fly that Ziggy didn’t have lips to kiss with, he had a beak, and you sure didn’t want to kiss that beak, because it was sharp as a razor and besides, it was sort of up under him, ringed by his tentacles, and right next to where a heptapods excretory outlet was, because that was where he ate, and I wasn’t going to bend down and stick my head up to kiss him there. No way, Jose, and nobody would understand if I kissed one of his tentacles, which would have been actually the correct thing to do, but the optics wouldn’t have been so good.

So I whispered to Ziggy, “keep still,” and I kissed him under his eyes where his mouth would be if he was a human, and nobody except me and Ziggy, and maybe Heptapod Xeno Specialist Huang, knew any better, so everyone was happy and honor was satisfied, because Ziggy had slipped that lovely diamond ring on my finger, and I’d slipped a big gold armband on one of his tentacles, and we’d both signed the five hundred page inter-species marriage agreement with appendices, duly notarized, and we were husband and wife, and our genetic egg-lines were officially merged, depending on which section you read, all signed, sealed, and with about fifty initials on every single page, because there were all sorts of clauses and addendums and appendices and qualifiers and sub-clauses and clarifying additions and amendments, and that wasn’t even looking at the attachments, and the list of those was an appendix that was ten pages long.

The wedding banquet went really well to, and the wedding planner had totally exceeded expectations, and I figured the Aliens Affairs Bureau should hire her, because she’d figured out a menu that was totally acceptable to the heptapod guests, and to us Chinese, because everyone knows Chinese eat anything, and heptapods were really into seafood, and it turned out raw fish was a big hit, so the wedding banquet was a Sushi Fest in the Great Hall of the People, and we got a few Jacuzzis installed and the heptapods just dived in along with a few buckets of live fish from the fish farms.

Ziggy and me, we had a Jacuzzi of our own, because I wasn’t so keen on live fish swimming around me, so Ziggy just reached over and got his from the Jacuzzi next to us, and I didn’t look when he ate them, because it was a bit weird, and I was glad I’d made sure he sat next to the water filter intake, and I wore a cheong-sam to the banquet and for the speeches, and then a cute little red bikini in the Jacuzzi with Ziggy, and it all went great until one of the heptapods got a bit carried away and flowed up the glass wall and into one of the big wall aquariums, and he decimated the fish there, and a couple of the guests got way to drunk and sort of flowed into one of the Jacuzzis with some heptapods, and then the party really got going, and if Peoples Morality Commissioner Liu had been invited, which he wasn’t because by then he was about one week out to Ganymede, with only a couple more to go, he’d probably have been shocked catatonic.

I was surprised though, when I saw Manda in one of those Jacuzzis, and she was locked in a writhing mass of tentacles that belonged to one of Ziggy’s big battle-scarred Spider-Killers, and she sort of looked at me and smiled a big happy smile, and I sort of thought maybe Ziggy and I might have been the first, but it didn’t look like we’d be the last, and then it was time for Ziggy and me to leave, and we had a complimentary honeymoon suite at the New Beijing Shangri-La, which was totally cool, and the press were there when we arrived, and everyone oohed and aahhed, and I felt like a total celebrity and everything as we walked through the lobby, Chewy and our bodyguards around us.

“What do we do now, Stardust Wong?” Ziggy Yai!lith’s vocoder said, once we made it to our suite, and, finally, it was just us, him and me, and even through the translator, he sounded puzzled.

“Ziggy,” I said, taking the nearest tentacle in one of my hands, and gazing fondly into his saucer sized eyes. “We’re married now, so my genetic egg-line name isn’t Wong anymore. I’m Stardust Yai!lith now.” And yeah, I couldn’t say his genetic egg line name, but the little vocoder did it rather well.

“Understood, Stardust Yai!lith,” Ziggy said, and his tentacle spiraled up my arm, sending little shivers through me. “This suite is very attractive.” He flowed through into the bathroom, and I heard his vocoder. “A Jacuzzi, a really big one, Stardust.”

“Mmmmm,” I said, smiling, as he flowed back out, because they only had one suite with a Jacuzzi, and the wedding planner had had to ask my Dad to get it for us in the end, and he had. He’d come through, and I just loved my Dad, because I knew he was still a little freaked about me and Ziggy, but he’d accepted him because I loved him, and my Dad knew that, and I knew he’d get used to Ziggy eventually, and I couldn’t wait to see my Dad holding his first grandkid, although no-one was sure what it would look like.

I did wonder about our baby, and I had no idea how this was going to turn out. No-one did, because no-one had thought Heptapods and Humans were capable of inter-breeding. Would our baby be human? Heptapod? Or something in between, and I rubbed my tummy, thinking of our little one growing inside me. If our baby was a heptapod, how would it be born, and I sort of thought of the tentacles coming out first, and then pulling itself out, and okay, I was so going to talk to my gynecologists, and Medical Doctor Chiang, about a caesarean.

Ziggy wouldn’t mind, but he wasn’t that interested, either.

It wasn’t in his genetic makeup, I guess, and I’d been reading up while the doctors studied us, trying to figure out how it’d happened and the DNA and everything, and it turned out the males didn’t do any parenting at all. They fertilized the females, and the females had, like, seventy thousand eggs all fertilized at once, and after they were fertilized, the female deposited all the fertilized eggs somewhere protected, then cared for the eggs until they hatched, and about one percent survived being a hatchling to develop into intelligent youngsters, and follow adults up onto the land, where they were socialized and educated.

So Ziggy had never known a Mom and a Dad, and his earliest memories were of drifting in the sea, sleeping and eating, and then seeing an adult, and following it, and the fear of leaving the water and emerging onto land and first breathing air. But he’d never known his Mom’s arms holding him, or anything like that, and I did wonder what our baby would be like when it arrived.

“It takes their eggs about ten months to hatch,” Medical Doctor Chiang had told me, when he’d been scanning me, but I wasn’t too worried now, because he said there was only one baby, not seventy thousand, and it was the right size for a human baby at just over two months, and I was doing fine, and we’d know more when it developed a little more, but we knew for sure I wasn’t going to be laying any eggs or anything, so that was a relief, and Ziggy really wasn’t interested at all.

His DNA said his role in all this was to fertilize eggs, and he really liked it that I was eager to have my eggs fertilized every night, because heptapod females were really only interested in doing it once every couple of years, but Ziggy liked doing it all the time. So we were both really happy, and looking at Ziggy’s color patterns flashing as he flowed out of the bathroom, I was looking forward to a little more happiness before I drifted off to sleep cradled in his tentacles.

“Can you help me take my clothes off, Ziggy?” I twirled, because I was back in my cheong-sam now, and Ziggy was getting really good at removing my clothes. He’d had lots of practice, and tonight his tentacles just flew, and so did my clothes as they came off.

“Shall we jump in the Jacuzzi?” I asked, because I knew Ziggy did like doing it in water.

“You are more comfortable in bed, Stardust,” Ziggy said, his tentacles caressing my skin, vining around my legs arm arms, his suckers sliding across me, sucking, releasing, very gently, and I was just alive everywhere, my skin so sensitive, and it was the most amazingly sensual massage imaginable.

“Yes,” I said, half leaning back into the support of his tentacles, knowing his beautiful eyes were drinking in the sight of may naked body as his tentacles lifted me easily into the air, supporting me and holding me everywhere in that ever-moving embrace, warm ropes of muscle entwining me. “But I know you like water, Ziggy.”

“Stardust, my lovely wife,” Ziggy said, and the vocoder’s translation ability was getting more nuanced all the time, and there’d be a software upgrade a couple of days ago, or Ziggy was adapting, or maybe both, because I was really starting to be able to read some of those color patterns really well. “This is a special day for both of us, and I wish this day to be as perfect as I can make it for you.”

His tentacles lifted me, caressed me, eased my legs apart, teasing and tasting my sex, and I moaned in helpless excited as his suckers massaged my labia, and the penile extrusion at the tip of his tentacle eased inside me as he lifted me into the bed and he moved over me, his eyes looking down into mine, and I knew how heavy he was, how solid his body was. Not the solidness of bone, because he didn’t have a single bone in his body, but the solidness of compact muscle, and he was all muscle, everywhere, and now his tentacles laid me on the bed, on my back, and I looked up at him, smiling as he loomed over me, and his tentacle tip eased up inside me, filling me with exquisitely sized perfection.

His tentacle moved inside me sex, sliding into me, and the sensations were totally exquisite as those suckers massaged me everywhere, where he joined me, and all the way up inside me, and his tendrils massaged me inside, and he new exactly where my g-spot was and he was ... oh my god he was ... it was so good ... and his tentacles, he had seven of them, and one eased into my anal passage, slim and slow, not forcing, just easing into me in a long slow slide that held me on the edge, almost, but not quite there.

His tentacles were everywhere, all over me, teasing and touching, caressing, holding, and my back arched in helpless wailing pleasure, and that was when I found out something new. A heptapod has seven tentacles, and all seven can function as sexual organs, and all seven can ejaculate at the same time, and I hadn’t found that out before. I mean, I was a good girl. I was. I am. Security-General Zhao was a career move that went wrong, that was all, and we’d never, you know, gone all the way and dishonored my family, and those other guys, they were just dates, and they’d been fun, but I’d never dishonored and brought shame on my family with any of them, and as for my pregnancy? Pregnant at eighteen to a heptapod? Well, we were married now, and every girl can make a mistake, and who knew you could get knocked up by a heptapod.