Humans have several names for their planet: Terra, Terran, Home, and the Little Blue Dot. But when they formally entered interplanetary communication with our parliament, they called it Earth, so that is what I will call it.
Preliminary data from Earth indicated that it was hospitable to my species. The vast majority of sapient life breathes oxygen, after all, and oxygen-rich atmospheres are necessary to protect a planet’s surface from solar radiation. Given that I would be able to breathe here, I was not concerned with much else.
We Chintilik are uniquely suited for exploration, or so I thought this morning. Our homeworld, Chint, has a widely variable climate as it circles its sun, and it encourages some unique adaptations. We internally regulate our temperature, and our scales can change color to absorb or reflect heat as necessary, though most of us use the color as a fashion statement now that we have climate control indoors. Personally, I am fond of a light lilac color, as most species don’t have strong associations with it, and it makes me easy to locate in a crowd. The Chintilik also filter toxins from the air and our food readily, and can even identify a few by smell or taste alone. Our immune system is also structured in such a way that we are immune to the vast majority of alien diseases, but I am not a specialist on the subject. I just know that what gums up my respiratory tract a little will leave most species bedridden for a week if not longer.
Most importantly, Chintilik have expressive faces that most species identify as friendly or even childlike. We have large ears—evolutionarily for regulating body temperature—but some consider them cute. We also have larger eyes than most other species. All this means that even normally aggressive species usually leave us alone.
I knew, going to Earth, that humans would feel the same way. I prefer to remain fresh when I survey a planet, not to read analyses or theories about its sapient life, but I am not a complete idiot: I learned the minimum about humans to keep me safe. I learned what they find threatening and how to conduct myself during the initial greeting.
What I had learned has assured me humans would not be liable to attack me on sight, however, so as my transport descended through Earth’s atmosphere, I was excited, not afraid. My ears had been jittering so much that my neck was getting sore.
When the transport doors opened, the terminal was nothing special either, except that it was very clean compared to most of the interstellar transport stations I’ve seen in my life. There were a few other travelers on the transport, and I let them disembark before me. When I descended the ramp onto the stone floor, I was greeted by a barrage of digital displays, squawking advertisements, multilingual chatter, and roaring engines.
I made my way through the throng, ducking around several Udomach, a large and ubiquitous species of traders and cargo handlers. I descended stairs, following signs that I was fairly sure led outside. As I went, the place warped from a large, universally-suitable design to what must be the human average. The ceilings stayed high, and I navigated easy, but an Udomach or any larger species would have had great difficulty.
I paused at the end of a long, shallow staircase to jot down my first notes about the planet, which I had yet to even see, as this area had zero windows, but before I could even finish a sentence, I heard a voice. New languages and translation devices don’t always play nicely, but Human English is well documented, so my implants handled it.
“Excuse me,” Someone said. I looked behind me and saw my first human. I don’t quite know what I expected, but given the descriptions of their combat prowess and ruthlessness, I was expecting some talons, at least, perhaps hooked teeth, or poisonous barbs. Instead, I saw a strange, soft, fleshy creature with brown skin and long fur on top of its head. They were dressed all in black, and the lower half of their face was covered, but I could see that their jaw jutted very peculiarly away from their neck: not like a muzzle or a snout, but something else entirely.
“Are you looking for something?” The human said, “You aren’t supposed to be over here.”
“Greetings,” I said, “the stars are bright tonight. I am looking for an exit from this place. I am meeting a human scholar.”
“May I see your papers and visa, please?”
I handed over the thin metal card to them, and they scanned it using a handheld device. After a moment, they handed them back and said, “Follow me, please.”
I followed them through another corridor, to a booth where two more humans were waiting, these two armed with crude projectile weapons that they carried across their bodies, ready for use at any moment. They asked my name, verified my identity once again, and then permitted me to pass through the station to the outer lobby of the building.
At this point, I was too curious to restrain myself. I passed through the checkpoint, turned back to the guards, and asked, “Are you protecting yourselves from us, or us from you?”
They all looked at me with their strange, white-rimmed eyes, and thought about it for a moment.
Finally one of them said, “More the second than the first, Sir.”
I set aside the matter of my title, “Why is that?”
They raised and lowered their shoulders, “There are a lot of people who are scared of aliens, and even more who’d like to take your identification card and use it to get off this planet. That’s why no one gets in or out without being logged in our system.”
That was a curious response indeed, but before I could ask more, the door behind me opened, and a wave of heat rolled into the building.
“Dron Acharya?” A new human said. This one was dressed in a loose outer garment that put me much more at ease than the all-black uniforms and weapons.
“Yes?” I said.
They walked quickly toward me and took my hand, shook it hard with their five-fingered one, and I saw that humans did have talons after all, but they kept them cut short so they wouldn’t be sharp. Their grip was surprisingly strong. “My name is Sandra Wright. I’m from the University of California.”
“Good meeting, Sandra Wright. I look forward to traveling with you.”
“Yes, uh, well met. Would you like me to carry one of your bags?”
I handed one over, the heaviest because I wanted to see what human strength was like, and they hoisted it over one thin shoulder and carried it like it didn’t exist out of the door and into the heat. I followed them across an artificial rock slab to a vehicle, and we loaded the bags into the back. I expected there to be a driver, or a computer driving for us, but Sandra climbed in behind the steering apparatus and directed me to sit in the front of the vehicle in the other seat.
“We call that riding shotgun,” They said, “because way back, an armed guard rode next to the drivers on stagecoaches.”
“Fascinating,” I said. The heat outside had shocked my scales into turning nearly white, and I was concentrating on getting them the right color again.
Sandra started the vehicle with the push of a button and we began to move. She also adjusted the climate control, and the heat began to dissipate, which was very welcome.
We rolled through a metal gate, again with armed guards flanking, but they let us roll through without inspection. I saw Sandra relax as soon as we were away from them. They sat back and breathed out.
“You don’t like it there?” I asked.
“I don’t like anywhere with armed guards,” they said. And then, “as soon as we get away from there, I’ll pull over and we can actually introduce ourselves.”
True to their word, as soon as the terminal disappeared out of sight, they pulled over to the side of the road and parked the vehicle, turned to me, and held out a hand again. “I’m Sandra, my pronouns are she/her. I’m a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, and I can’t believe I’m talking to an alien right now.”
I flicked my ears at her and took her hand. “I’m Dron Archaya, planetary surveyor. I work for the exploration section of our Galactic Library. I don’t believe your language has a corollary to my social station, so you can use whatever you like to refer to me. My whole job is talking to people from other planets, so I’m sorry to say you aren’t anywhere near my first. Can I ask, why are you covering your face?”
“This?” She touched the mask over her lower face, “it’s to stop us from spreading disease when we’re ill. We wear them around aliens so we don’t accidentally give you a disease or pick something up from you.”
“You don’t need to wear it around me if you don’t want to,” I said. “My species has an extremely robust immune system, and I’ve been inoculated against every disease I possibly can. Including some of your diseases.”
She paused, then pulled off the mask. And then, to my horror, she bared her teeth at me. They were white and straight, and she very clearly had canines for eating meat. I froze, ears back, and my pupils dilated so wide the sunlight was blinding. Rarely have I been so overcome by instinctive terror.
The human was none the wiser. She turned away from me and dug into a pocket. “I need to let Dr. Samson know I picked you up alright. May I take a picture for him?” I didn’t reply right away, and she said, “are you okay?”
I collected myself, “Yes, I’m fine. I was just caught very off-guard by you… Doing that with your mouth.”
“Doing what?” She asked, “Smiling?”
“What’s that?”
She bared all her teeth at me again, and this time I shuddered back in my seat away from her. The smile vanished.
“Yes, that. It’s alarming.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I didn’t even think about it. Is it my teeth?”
“Yes.”
She smiled again, this time without exposing her teeth. “I’m very sorry. It’s our way of being friendly and expressing happiness, but even among animals on this planet, it’s usually a threatening display, so I get it.”
“I see,” I took a deep breath, “For my people, showing your teeth is a death threat, or very close to it. I need time to get used to it.”
“I’ll try not to do it anymore. Can I still take that picture?
“Yes, go ahead,” I said.
Sandra leaned over the console toward me and took out an electronic device. She clicked a button, and we both appeared on the screen, in a camera. She smiled without teeth, and I perked my ears up a little. There was a click, and the image stabilized. Sandra sat up straight and tapped the screen a few times, then hit a button with finality. “Alright. They know we’re on the way.” She took hold of the wheel again and started the vehicle rolling. “We have a long way to drive, so I hope you’re comfy.”
“I am,” I said, “Thank you for agreeing to travel by land.”
“Oh, I like driving. I should be thanking you for giving me an excuse to take a road trip. We are going to have to stay overnight somewhere on the way back.” I caught her starting to smile again before she caught herself. “Why did you want to drive? Do you not like flying?”
“I prefer flying when I’m trying to get somewhere quickly, but being a planetary surveyor means you need to see the planet you’re on, so there’s no point flying over it.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
I watched the new world pass by out my window. It reminded me of home: dry, brown, and scrubby. I thought I might even see some animals similar to home: tiny furry creatures and flying lizards that got their water from gathering dew on their wings.
“I will say, this isn’t the drive I’d choose to show off Earth,” Sandra said. “It’s all desert, you know. For hours.”
“My whole home planet is desert,” I said, “It’s nice to not be assaulted by forests as soon as I land on a new planet, but judging by how cold this vehicle is, I’ll be seeing some soon.”
“Yeah. Where we’re going is a temperate coast with forests and hills.”
I clicked my teeth, trying to hide my disappointment. Humidity makes my scales itch. I was glad I was going to travel around the planet and not just stay in one place for my stay.
“What’s your planet called?”
“Chint,” I said, “it means hot-home or desert-home.”
“It sounds scary.”
“It’s a category two world,” I said.
She glanced at me, “What’s that mean?”
I should have guessed the general human population wouldn’t know how planets were classified: generally, integration with the galactic culture is driven by the species integrating itself, not the other way around. “Habitable planets are classified on a scale from one to five. Class five planets are Paradises, and class one planets are what we call Deathworlds.”
“So a class two is a place that’s really difficult to survive in, but you can do it?”
I dipped my head in a nod. “Yes.”
“So what’s the difference between a class two and a Deathworld?” She was curious: her pupils were dilated and her skin had flushed a little. Her stare had gone glassy. I made a note to myself that humans could think so hard they went into a trance: a good sign. Species capable of deep thought usually don’t make rash decisions.
“For Chint, it’s the fact that even though the surface of the planet is difficult to survive on, there are cities in rock formations and underground that do well. Also the food there is plentiful and there is lots of water, provided you can dig deep enough to get it, and none of the plants or animals that live there are adapted to attack the peoples who live there.”
She nodded, coming out of her trance. “Got it. So a planet like ours, with a lot of different biomes but some challenges will be a class three, maybe? Or a four?”
“Very likely a three,” I said, “forests and oceans are friendly to most species.”
“And will people want to move here?”
“No, not for a long time. Decades at least. Though your government should encourage tourism. There are a lot of very rich people who love to take tours of worlds in their ‘natural’ state. It’s a very nice way to fund your exploration of nearby planets and stars.”
Sandra sighed, “Well, we do have a lot of tourist attractions to show off.”
“If you do that, you should build a different port that isn’t in the middle of the desert.”
She exhaled hard through her nose and made a peculiar wheezing noise that I learned later that day is called laughing. “Hell no! This place is a tourist attraction. Area 51 is right around the corner, and that’s where people have been saying aliens are for decades. We’re gonna drive right by this crazy truck stop: you’ll see.”
“Should we be quiet so you can focus on driving until then?”
“Nope, we should talk. I want to know how you go about surveying a planet.”
“Generally I start by talking to anyone who will talk to me.”
We talked all through the next several hours of driving, sometimes about Earth and humanity, sometimes about Chint and Chintillik. Sandra was a scholar, an academic, and a scientist of a sort, and she wanted to know everything about everything. Eventually, though, we exhausted small talk. By then, I knew that humans had a planet-wide communication network called the internet, and that if I would probably need to use it very soon. I also knew that I would need to hire an assistant on Earth to help with my work here: there was simply too much I didn’t know and too many things I would need to see.
I was writing down a whole list of things to investigate and fleshing out some of my quick notes when Sandra said, “Why did you decide to come to our university?”
I looked up, “pardon?”
“Why our university?” She said again. “You could have gone anywhere. There are ten colleges I can think of off the top of my head that would have been better choices.”
“I prefer to stay away from the most prestigious institutions,” I said, “they tend to be insulated from reality, but I also need a base to work out of. The librarian and I considered a few different options, and eventually we settled on the University of California system. If your program hadn’t accepted me, we would have asked the Arizona State University.”
Her eyes went wide, “You’re way better off here, believe me.”
“I’m glad you think so.” I wanted to go to Arizona. The librarian had convinced me California’s system was better because it pushed immediately out of my comfort zone.
“Is that also why you didn’t get the government to pick you up and take you to the campus?” Sandra asked.
“Your government isn’t allowed to even interact with me more than necessary,” I said. “Any special treatment from a governing body means my work here is invalidated, and I would have to be replaced. I am strictly a citizen. They do know I’m here, though, and I have permission to travel around your world.”
“That’s disappointing. I was hoping you’d be able to get me into the White House for dinner with the President.
I flicked my ears at her in annoyance. I finished a note, and when a looked back out the window, a pair of the most ridiculous buildings I’d ever seen slid into view over the horizon. One was bright pink, the other a violent green. There were large vehicles—trucks, Sandra said—around them both. One billboard read, “Alien Cathouse Brothel,” and the other, “Area 51 Alien Center.” Both were accompanied by strange mockeries of faces, bright green with huge glassy insect-like eyes that took up their whole head.
I looked at Sandra. She was completely ignoring the road, just looking at me for my reaction. I looked back at the buildings, then back at her.
“Yeah, it’s weird. I know,” she said at last. “Welcome to Earth. It’s only gonna get weirder from here.”
This story was previously published on Archive of Our Own, where the story is being published in addition to the blog. To read more, follow me here or on AO3 or Tumblr
