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Laliari was a youth when expedition team αδβ first discovered the historical documents.
She remembers the elders’ hushed exclamations of excitement over discovering a new race, a new people.
But Laliari did not understand that at the time. At the time, she saw the historical documents, watched them, and discovered humans.
They looked so different from Laliari’s people, with only two tentacles and such terribly long mandibles. And then there was the fact that they seemed to cover themselves. She saw that some had odd protuberances on their front sides and some did not. And she saw them on vehicles completely propelled by their own power. And she could not help but think that they were beautiful.
They were prettier than the xyingquhqi she had wanted as long as she could remember and more gentle than the cqrlthingtha.
When her family unit gathered that day she turned from the historical document and pointed at it with one tentacle.
“Can I have one?” she said, voice pathetically hopeful.
“May I,” her mother unit corrected. “And no, you most certainly may not. They are another people, another intelligent race. You cannot just own one.”
Laliari felt her eyes grow cloudy, tentacle quivering. She wished that she could once, just once, have what she wanted.
Mother unit gently lowered Laliari’s tentacle to the floor. “It’s impolite to point Laliari.”
*
When she was a scholar at the local academy of knowledge, Laliari often heard others talk about their ideal mate.
“He will have blue skin with pink shading,” Hyluntir would say, waving a tentacle for exaggeration. “And we will breed three sets of spawn.”
“Oh, I want four,” Gthur would say, eyes turning iridescent with longing. “Four breedings and a grullp.”
“As if you’ll ever merit four breedings,” Hyluntir would say archly. “You are no Jessica Tate to attract the attention of such a mate.”
“Well, if I am no Jessica Tate, you are no Carolyn Stoddard,” Gthur would say. She would then blow a heavy stream of air from her orifice. “Blue skin? Not likely you could ever attract such a thoroughbred of a mate.”
“I could attract a blue-skin. Could I not, Laliari?” Hyluntir would ask.
“Oh you could not either. Am I correct Laliari?” Gthur would ask.
Laliari would bury her face in her book. Perhaps if she pleaded distraction she would not have to deal with such ridiculous questions, she thought.
She would spend a second wondering, as Gthur and Hyluntir bickered in the periphery, what precisely the humans got out of their books. Laliari dutifully created one to try and glean more knowledge on the workings of humans, but she could not see the great interest in looking at white sheets with small scribbles for hours on end.
*
There came a time when her fellow classmates began to pair off. They often went out together for an evening and monitored the local wildlife.
Laliari would spend these evenings working on creating a short history of the humans. It was a bit confusing, vampires and demonic pregnancies and escaped convicts fitting in some time after Lucy’s attempt to sell Vitameatavegamin and some time before the first explorations of the NSEA Protector.
Occasionally one of Laliari’s age-mates would attempt to convince her to join them in their evening of recreation. Laliari never felt the inclination.
On one such evening, Laliari was persuaded to join from the simple fact that the male Gthur had proclaimed interest in had mated another. Laliari was the only consolation Gthur would accept and Gthur must have her consolation.
“I feel as though my main breathing apparatus were broken in two,” Gthur said, waving her mandibles and a couple legs for emphasis. “How can one go on from this?”
And although Laliari had no first-hand knowledge of these feelings, she did understand how difficult it must be for one who did to move on. After all, in Laliari’s culture, once one mated, one mated for life.
The part the elders failed to mention was that even in the pre-mating days, one could grow attached to such an extent that they were good for nothing else afterward.
“I shall be like you, Laliari, destined to never mate and instead spending all my energies on foolish whims no one cares for,” Gthur said. “I shall be forever unmated. And boring.”
It made Laliari’s skin cold—which was foolish. The air was a perfectly acceptable 1014o Dxlitotcktin. The thought of having cold skin at such a temperature while older than a podling…it was unacceptable. It was just such a slap in the face to hear one of her own closest age-mates describing her thus. A slap with suckers.
Eventually Gthur’s eyes cleared and she stopped her ceaseless keening. “It shall be well enough. You shall teach me to like your foolish little fripperies.”
*
Gthur was mated less than six phases later. She was one of the lucky ones.
It was not discussed, nothing louder than vague rumblings and murmurs of disquiet. The mating of this turn was down. It was nothing extreme, only down about five percent, but it still left feelings of unease.
But Laliari was far too busy to think on this. She had been accepted into the new-NSEA program. She and a hundred of her fellow Thermians were going to begin a new intergalactic exploration team. Being accepted into this program was a coup, and the first good thing to come from her obsession with the humans.
Upon arrival to the training area, Laliari was almost overwhelmed with the number of Thermians standing around in confused disarray.
The male next to her turned with a slight wave of his lesser mandible. “Hello,” he said, excitement rising in his voice and giving his skin an iridescent glow, “I am Teb.”
“Hello Teb,” Laliari said, touching tentacles, “I am Laliari.”
“Is this not a brilliant endeavor?” asked Teb, voice quivering with suppressed energy. “The idea of communicating with aliens… making a new alliance. It is enough to give me chicken pox.”
“Goose pimples,” Laliari said. As soon as she realized what she had done she heated, skin turning a soft blue. Correcting a fellow team member, and on such a foolish human saying… Laliari felt as wrong-footed as a newly weaned youngling.
Laliari ducked her face toward the ground. She knew what would come next. Ridicule. The same ridicule she had faced since the first time she had discussed the foolishness of The Skipper with Hyluntir.
But when Teb spoke, it was not with ridicule but reverence. “Goose pimples,” he said, skin turning green with joy. “Goose pimples.”
*
Among the Thermians there were two schools of thought. There were those who believed the historical documents were the answer to what was going wrong with their culture, and there were those who did not wish to change—who saw the humans of the historical documents as nothing more than a strange animal as unlike Thermians as Thermians were unlike the hrthy of the plains. The Thermians who favored the historical documents viewed them all equally, Bob Newhart equal to Jerry Springer.
Laliari did not admit it to anyone, but she was of a third school of thought. She thought that as much as each of the historical documents was important in its own way, the stories of the NSEA Protector outweighed them all. She watched the movements of Captain and crew with rapt attention, noting all the differences between the crew and her people. And when she was alone she often caught herself wishing she could be part of that original crew.
*
Laliari trained by both the light of the day and dark, body going limp from overexertion. She studied the rites of the Mak’Tar and the wars of Earth and the rituals of enough alien planets to give her a true taste for ceremony.
The new-NSEA was constructed, slowly but surely, first the members, then the actual spaceship. Teb spent hours studying schematics with Ygrb and Lahnk, making certain the lines were straight, angles exact. He would share noon-meal with Laliari and explain the exciting accomplishments his team had made, skin changing shades more quickly than a mowrth beetle.
Laliari would not talk at these lunches, instead she would sit and listen to Teb and let her mind catalogue everything she had learned thus far that day. She would think of all the cultural impacts of the Romulan war and Black Friday and how each one affected the economy, the infrastructure. Or she would remember the terrible day that President Kennedy had been shot, or, worse, JR, and she would think of how it would affect a country, how it would affect a family.
And on the days where there was just too much—information spinning through her faster than she could absorb—she would sit with Teb and wish, just for a second, that she could be a human.
Not that she would wish to wake up one day a human, never to be Thermian again, but the thought of being able to hug one’s podmates, the idea of dancing, bodies undulating to the strange keening noise humans called muzak, left her yearning to be able to experience it just once.
*
After a year of planning and preparation, the ship was finally constructed. There was great joy and excitement at the public unveiling.
“Look, Laliari. See? I have constructed the strange shelf-like structures humans store themselves on, and the water system with full storage tanks, and Lahnk has constructed the odd coverings humans conceal themselves with.” Teb gestured to a room with a bunk on one wall and a bathing facility set into the other. And in the back of the room were clothes. They were simple, merely the plain gray of the crew of the NSEA protector, but all the more beautiful for it.
Laliari touched one with a tentacle. It looked wrong next to her purple skin.
She felt a brush against her hind side and then she was turning around into the presence of her chief commander.
“Laliari, I require your assistance,” Hlxtaka said, a tentacle swaying in the air.
Teb backed away eyes wide. To be sought-out by the commander was practically unheard of for those of Laliari and Teb’s years. He would doubtless go and tell of Laliari’s sudden rise in importance.
“Yes commander,” Laliari said, watching Teb go and envying his freedom. She had planned to document more information on Barney Fife, but instead her evening would doubtless involve monitoring radio frequency or other such uselessness.
“Come,” the commander said and led Laliari to her office. Once there, she opened a closet then a catch inside the closet and then they were walking into another room. “There is something on which I need your opinion,” the commander said, walking over to a low table. There was a device on it—one Laliari had never seen before.
“Now,” the commander said, voice strong, “when you think of humans, how would you describe them?”
“They are tall,” Laliari said, gesturing with one tentacle raised high in the air, “and pale, with no color to their skin at all. They have only four tentacles, two of which are not tentacles at all, but something called arms. They have a dark fur on their heads and a strange protuberance on the front of their faces, and their mouths face out instead of down.”
The commander ran an instrument over the device, clicking wires into new slots and twisting them into new shapes. And then the commander was handing the device to Laliari, saying, “Think of yourself, what you would look like as a human.”
And Laliari’s mind snapped into place. She had thought about being human so many countless times before, thinking about it again was like falling into an urlthug glacier.
There was a gasp from the commander and then Laliari could not take it anymore, she couldn’t help but look down at herself.
The strange lumps sticking out the front of her were breasts and the divided bits on the end of her arms were fingers and that brush of tickling along her face was hair.
“You appear—“ the commander said, tentacles waving wildly through the air. “You appear extremely altered.”
And then the commander was holding up a see-me and Laliari was looking at—
Herself.
Herself as she had never been before. Herself as she was always meant to be.
She ran foreign-familiar fingers over her foreign-familiar body and when her skin gave new responses, when her eyes tracked differently, she could not help but smile.
*
After that she was often to be found in human form. Others wore the human skins as well, although most felt uncomfortable in the strange shapes.
Laliari never felt uncomfortable.
After a time she found others who took to the human form as readily as she did. Teb was one of those comfortable with his human appearance. And Mathesar was another.
Mathazar was an unexpected transfer. He had been working for the minister of prime, but upon hearing of the new-NSEA, his transfer had been immediate.
He was as much in love with humans as Laliari, and he never seemed frightened to show his inclinations.
When Mathesar was chosen as second-in-command for the first mission, Laliari was at his side. And when he requested congratulations, she was the first to grant them, human to human.
*
The first time the actual crew of the actual NSEA set foot aboard the new-NSEA, Laliari felt her body would break. To see all of the most important humans from all of history in one place was enough excitement for fifteen spans.
But she felt her excitement somehow escalate when she saw Tech Sergeant Chen. There was something about his crooked eyes or his crooked smile or the way he was so relaxed in their presence, that made her, for the first time in her life, understand the wish to become mated.
When they left for lunch, she hid in her room mind moving too fast to make the morning comprehensible.
Mathesar followed her.
“I saw,” he said, hand patting her back.
“It is not right,” Laliari said. “It is wrong.”
Mathesar said nothing for a time, then he spoke, words coming slowly. “How do we know it is wrong? It may not be wrong at all. It has not been done before.”
Laliari did not say anything. She could not say anything.
“I do not believe it is wrong,” Mathesar said, hand patting again.
Laliari felt her shoulders shake. She did not know why they shook.
*
“You seem kind of familiar. You’re sure we’ve never met before?” Tech Sergeant Chen asked, eyes crinkled in concern.
“Quite certain,” Laliari said, warmth stealing across her face.
Tech Sergeant Chen’s mouth turned up at the corners. “I was sure we had. Maybe at one of the conventions.”
“I could not fail to remember you,” Laliari said, head ducked forward.
“Oh, just—“ Guy said, gesturing wildly from the other side of the room. “Can’t you, like, buy a clue? He’s hitting on you.”
“Tech Sergeant Chen is not hitting on me. He cannot be as his body is not in any way touching mine,” Laliari said.
“He’s flirting with you,” Guy said.
Laliari looked up at Tech Sergeant Chen and Tech Sergeant Chen smiled his shining smile at Laliari and Laliari felt her face warm again.
*
“You know, you can call me Fred,” Tech Sergeant Chen said, with his bright smile and curving eyes. “Everyone does.”
“Fred,” Laliari said, name familiar-foreign on her tongue. “But if I call you Fred, what shall you call me?” she asked, worried about offending him.
“How about ‘up for a date?’ Does that work for you?” Fred said, looking at Laliari, a question in his eyes.
She processed his statement and felt her mouth turn up of its own free will. “It would be pleasant to go on a scheduled romantic trip with you, Fred.”
“It would be pleasant for me too,” Fred said, and then there was a mouth touching hers.
It felt nothing like the historical documents led her to believe.