Overall, the vessel was almond shaped. Such a simple, basic, logical shape for a seed. A tempting shape for a spacecraft, even when a sphere would be the most efficient and easiest to manage. But, so obvious it might be cliché in cultures beyond any on Earth.

Mind you, ʔetekeyerrinwuf wasn’t a sphere or an almond shape. It had a sphere in its design, in the forward hydrogen tank (which really carried much more than hydrogen). It was kind of anchor shaped from the models I’ve seen. So, obviously, other design considerations came into play for megastructure engineers than simple efficiency.

My hosts all called this almond shaped craft ‘The Dancer’.

It hovered, magnetically locked, in one of the smaller shipyards that line the outer hull of the habitat cylinder.

When I tell you the size of the shipyard, go ahead and go to a map of your home town and compare that to your local neighborhood. And please believe me.

The Dancer, if I had a guess, was about the size of a NASA space shuttle, while the shipyard that it inhabited was six by three by one-half kilometers in dimension. Half a kilometer tall, six long, three wide. And we were viewing the Outsider’s vessel from inside the central control room in the Antispinward wall of the shipyard.

The shipyard walls were colored, orange in the Aft, green to the Fore, and a purple to pink gradient for each of the other sides. 

And it was illuminated by strips of lighting in the corners that couldn’t possibly do the work of a sun. Maybe several stadiums worth of candles, or something like that. The shipyard was dark in the centers of the walls, floor, and ceiling, and the details of the other control rooms, airlocks, and nanite nozzles that speckled the walls were barely even visible from where we were. The difference in scale between architecture used by people and the architecture used by construction equipment and spaceships was that great.

And the Dancer was not quite a speck itself. I could see its shape without altering my eyesight to accommodate. But it was tiny in comparison and it didn’t glint. It was not shiny, like some people might expect almond shaped spacecraft to be.

It was black, and appeared to have hairs all over it.

Mutabenga told everyone in the control room that the dark color had been chosen to help it retain as much energy as possible, to absorb any light that might hit it. It was a deep space probe and designed to function in as close to perpetuity as possible.

Niʔa, who was there in person, in their organic body, not an exobody, nodded.

Niʔa had discovered the Dancer.

For as well as I knew Niʔa at this point, I hadn’t seen their personal vessel yet. Our Terran visitors tended to keep to themselves on ʔetekeyerrinwuf and let me and Sarah make other friends, unless we specifically sought them out. But Niʔa in particular had been keeping their original body in a secretive location, or just at home and we hadn’t properly visited yet.

Seeing them like this for the first time had me more distracted than the Dancer did.

I could see their age. 

In the most recent chapter of yärrayoaʔuf’s book, Niʔa was described as being three ʔetekeyerrinwuf years old, and vaguely described in ways that made them sound like a human child. But here they were clearly not human and they were now close to 450 Earth years old. They were younger than Ashwin by less than a generation.

Even though I can get exact numbers from either the Auditor or Phage’s gift if I concentrate, I’m starting to abhor them like the Elder Ktletaccete do. Maybe it’s from being overwhelmed by it all.

Anyway, Niʔa looked maybe 60, by human standards. Of course, that’s hard to gauge in another species with completely different biology. Especially a child of Phage.

They had a somewhat elongated face, almost a snout, with slits for nostrils that angled up above their mouth. Their jaw was nearly as delicate as a human’s and they almost had a chin, even. Their eyes were large with no visible sclera, with deep purple irises and something reflective behind their pupils. I hesitate to use Terran terms for their anatomy, because I don’t know how close it really matches, despite similarities. Their skin was in the same range of violet with indigo undertones that Geri had beneath rrems scales. And they had hair on the top and back of their head, similar to a human’s, that was a dark, dark navy where it hadn’t turned white, and loosely curly. Their ears were complex and somewhat rounded, but did not have the same pattern of wrinkles and contours of human ears.

They had no tail.

And they dressed in what amounted to a pair of homemade shorts and a T-shirt, with sandals, and they stood upright with their hands in their pockets.

The effect was that I felt like I was looking at a human cosplayer or an actor on a sci-fi set, doing their best with what they had to look alien, except that when I looked closely enough at their features or their complexion there was nothing Terran about them.

I knew from the stories that Phage had taken its most recent favorite form from Niʔa, copying what Niʔa would look like as an adult, but adding a tail to differentiate and to put more of the Ktletaccete at ease.

Niʔa looked as alien to the rest of the Ktletaccete as I felt.

Niʔa was the spitting image of someone who had been born on their predecessor ship, Feruukepikape, which had had a draconian breeding program that would have been the envy of Nazis, as I understand it. But from what I knew of Ni’a, personally, they were about as opposite of a Nazi as you could get without being Jewish.

Niʔa, seeing me looking at them, redirected my attention to the Dancer by explaining, “This is not the original Dancer, of course. It is one of its children. We have been working with the Dancer to continue its mission, which is to contact other civilizations, by creating its children and distributing them across this galaxy as we traverse it.”

Geri grinned. Nifirri nodded. Sarah walked forward to the windows and put her hands against them, and I looked sharply back at the Dancer.

I commanded my exobody to magnify my view of the alien vessel, and it felt like I naturally just focused on it until I could see more detail.

The surface reminded me of the body of a fly. It was dark, but not actually black. It had an iridescence. And that, coupled with the spines or antenna or whatever they were that looked like hairs, gave it that distinctive look. This made it seem even more organic than the almond shape alone did.

It even had something I might have called eyes. Four low domes near the narrow end of it, of a redder iridescent color.

I also saw, with my enhanced vision, a network of nanite webbing that also moored it to the walls of the shipyard. This webbing might be acting as conduits for materials and energy, maybe like a placenta.

“You can talk to it, if you like,” Niʔa said. “We’ve since learned its language. But it won’t speak Inmararräo, Fenekere, or anything spoken with a mouth. You’ll need to use the Network and a translator. It has expressed that it would like to talk to you, if you will accept.”

“Me?” I asked, looking back at Niʔa.

Sarah, in the corner of my eye, turned and gave me an amused scowl.

“Both of you, of course,” Niʔa said.

I ambled to the window to stand beside Sarah and look out at it from a slightly closer angle. Geri and Nifirri joined us shortly afterward.

“You should,” Nifirri said.

Geri agreed.

Part of the problem of making new friends on an alien spacecraft or world, within the first few months of having moved there at least, is that you will frequently become distracted from them and overwhelmed by new utterly Earth shattering experiences.

And may I remind you, I’m autistic.

I don’t like telephones.

I don’t like calling people, and I don’t like answering calls.

I don’t like voice chat.

I don’t like video chat.

I even have a lot of trouble, that I very purposefully mask for, with meeting new people in person.

It’s all supremely stressful.

I do like people watching, a lot. Like a bearded dragon that sits by a desert game trail and waits for the local megafauna to take a dump and attract flies. I love going to crowded places and just being there to see people go about doing their things, and to pick up information, stimula, safely. And if someone just happens to wander over to say ‘hi’, I can usually handle that reasonably well.

But being told, ‘you should reach out and contact this person for the first time’ is pure Hell to me.

Ashwin and Niʔa had done a lot of the legwork of contacting Karen at Listra Luachra Press, for instance. I’d just waited for her to show up at Aunti Zero’s.

Sarah had similar problems, but not quite as bad because I’d done most of the fronting before we’d transitioned. She had a bit less trauma around it all.

I looked back at Niʔa and said, “Um.”

Sarah reached up and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Ah, yes,” Niʔa said. “Shall we converse as a group to make it easier. I will ask it if that’s OK, if you want to.”

I nodded.

A moment later, they said, “Inmararräo?”

I looked at Geri and Nifirri and nodded at them first, then turned to Niʔa and said, “Yes.”

Sarah also said, “Yes.”

Everyone else nodded, or, really, lifted their chins. After a while I started thinking of that as nodding, too.

“Your Arts inform me,” came the most formal greeting for a group, in Inmararräo, with a voice that defied description. 

It wasn’t the voice of the Dancer specifically, but the default voice the Network gave to anyone who could not talk. It had sound, but was of such a mild pitch, resonance, timbre, inflection, and reverberation that I had trouble remembering it as audial. It somehow sounded like my inner voice given just enough physical presence to be recorded by a microphone if you used one.

“Your Art informs us,” Niʔa replied. “You know me. I am Niʔa and my pronoun is now they. I like it. You may remember a different one from my conversation with your parent.”

“Yes,” came the reply. “Regards, Niʔa whose pronoun is they. I am the Dancer’s hundred and seventh child, also called the Dancer. My pronoun is it.” The Inmararräo equivalent, as used by Tutors usually.

Niʔa looked at us.

“My name is Nifirri, and my pronoun is gem,” Nifirri said.

“My name is Geri, and my pronoun is rrem,” Geri followed.

“My name is Ashwin, and my pronoun is nem,” Ashwin said.

“My name is Mutabenga, and my pronoun is it,” Mutabenga said.

Sarah squeezed my shoulder and said, “My name is Sarah, and my pronoun is she.”

And then it was easy, no problem, a script I could follow, “My name is Goreth, and my pronoun is they.”

The Dancer made a point of then repeating each of our names and pronouns in order, as it had done for Niʔa.

“Remember,” Niʔa sent us all over a private group channel, “it is not speaking Inmararräo. It has simply just commanded the Network to perform our greeting ritual for it. ʔetekeyerrinwuf is speaking for it, and for you. And the translation is still not perfect. Keep your sentences simple.”

I had a thought that maybe this wasn’t a spaceship, that it was the alien itself.

I looked out at it.

“Sarah and Goreth. I am told you are also Outsiders. Where do you come from?” the Dancer asked.

Sarah and I looked at each other, and she tilted her head up quickly, indicating that she’d talked.

“We come from a planet we call Earth,” she said, shooting me a Network linked thought, I’ve always wanted to say that unironically.

“Where is that?”

She thought about the answer for a few seconds and said, “I can tell you that it is the third planet from a star we call Sol. And that Sol is in a galaxy we call the Milky Way.” She was inserting English names into Inmararräo, and we had no idea how the Network was translating them for the Dancer. But she concluded, “but we do not know how far away that is from where we are now. And we do not know in which direction. We traveled here through the Tunnel Apparatus.” Then she turned to Niʔa and asked out loud, “Does the Dancer know about the Tunnel Apparatus?”

Niʔa nodded, hands still in pockets.

Sarah explained, maybe unnecessarily, “Our end of the Tunnel was placed on Earth a long time ago by one of ʔetekeyerrinwuf’s ancestor ships. Records have been lost. Calculating trajectories and velocities of the Exodus Ships since then is nearly impossible.” Then she turned to Niʔa and said, “I hope that’s simple enough. I’m not good at this.”

Niʔa shrugged and then nodded at the Dancer.

“I understand,” it said. “Do you have questions?”

Sarah shrugged, and asked, “Where do you come from?”

“I come from this shipyard,” the Dancer replied.

Sarah opened her mouth to protest, then silently chuckled to herself. She grinned back at everyone else, then turned and said, “Where does your parent come from?”

ʔetekeyerrinwuf rattled off a number of coordinates for the Dancer that were meaningless to me, but Niʔa commanded the Network to project a chart for us in the middle of the room.

And looking at it, I realized that it was still mostly meaningless to me. Glowing lines amongst glowing stars showed the past trajectories of ʔetekeyerrinwuf and the Dancer, and the Dancer’s rhythmically squiggly line eventually led back to what I presumed was a planet around a star, but I didn’t know where any of this was.

I didn’t know what galaxy we were in!

What it did tell me was a timeline.

It was ancient as fuck.

It also told me just how fast the Dancer could accelerate, which was nearly unbelievable. I mean, it was unbelievable, but everything else around me was unbelievable too. I was unbelievable now.

Through an application of physics I could force myself to understand and engineer myself, now, but that I absolutely refuse to teach to the human race yet, ʔetekeyerrinwuf had reached 0.99c, just below the speed of light. This would have visual effects on the starscape outside. And it was still constantly accelerating at a rate that would have gotten it there within ten years.

Just under a Sunspot century ago, ʔetekeyerrinwuf had sped right past the Dancer, narrowly missing it by cosmological scales. 

ʔetekeyerrinwuf had been broadcasting the Sunspot Chronicles in its direction, complete with a linguistics guide designed for aliens who might not know language at all, but not soon enough. The Dancer had received those transmissions in a readable wavelength just moments before ʔetekeyerrinwuf was already past it. But the Dancer had already started matching trajectories.

It had seen ʔetekeyerrinwuf from far off, the Cherenkov radiation from its drive a hundred millennia in the past reaching it and signaling what ʔetekeyerrinwuf might be, which had triggered its dancing. Which had in turn alerted the ʔetekeyerrinwuf to what it might be. Niʔa had really been integral to that part.

But once ʔetekeyerrinwuf had passed the Dancer, the Dancer was able to confirm the identity of ʔetekeyerrinwuf through the now detectable transmissions and had decided to engage its main drive. And it had caught up.

My intuition was telling me that the amount of time it took to catch up was irrelevant. But it had been less than ten years.

“How did it do that?” I asked. I turned to the window, “How did you – your parent do that?”

“With acceleration,” came the reply.

I looked askance at Niʔa, who replied, “We don’t know.”

I frowned. I asked, “And you are helping it replicate? You’re reconstructing its entire set of systems with the construction nanites?”

“Yes,” Niʔa said. “We can duplicate a thing without understanding it. We are definitely learning from it. But we have not yet learned that. We probably will, though. Given time and demonstrations.”

I nodded. Then said, “It’s just as well you can’t explain it to us. I don’t want to be interrogated about it back on Earth. If that’s actually a danger.”

Sarah nodded solemnly in the Euro-American Earthling way.

The Dancer heard that, since I’d said it out loud and it was translated for it, and asked, “What do you mean?”

I grimaced at my reflection in the window, then worried that might be read as, well, anything. Then told myself that the Dancer didn’t have a face that I knew of.

Where do I start?

It seemed to know the difference between itself and its parent. And it knew that Sarah and I were individuals with names. So asking it if it understood what people were was maybe not necessary.

But I didn’t want to assume anything.

“Can I explain this to you…” I didn’t know how to word the question. I froze up.

It assumed that was the complete question and said, “Yes.”

I sighed and just took that to mean I should go ahead with the most elementary explanations.

“Sarah and I are individuals from a lineage of lifeforms that are all individuals. We are social. We are cooperative. Our ancestral lifeforms are social and cooperative.” I stopped and then asked, “Is my language making sense? Do you understand that I am talking about people, and what people are?”

“Yes,” came the simple reply. And I felt I had to trust it. Maybe I should have asked it to explain back, but that felt rude.

“Our people are social and cooperative, but also individuals. And we form groups that do not agree with each other about various things,” I said.

“You come from a people who have evolved to support each other to survive but there is conflict,” it stated back.

“Yes!” I said. “OK, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I am sorry if I am assuming too much ignorance.”

“You are not. Every iteration of similar conversations clarifies understanding. Please proceed.”

I smiled back at Niʔa, who nodded.

“Our government, which is a group of groups, is one of many on our world, and there is much conflict between all of the groups, the groups within the government and between the different governments,” I said.

“Competition,” came the simple acknowledgement.

“Yes. Complicated competition,” I said. “A precarious balance of ability to compete. A lot of imbalance. A lot of deaths. I think this is bad.”

“You dislike the deaths caused by the competition.”

“Yes,” I nodded for my own benefit, wondering what it thought of such things. “If my government somehow believes I truly have knowledge of how you can accelerate so quickly, and how it works, I will be in conflict with my government. Oh, that sounds too complicated. Is that too complicated?”

“Maybe,” came the response after a few seconds.

“Your acceleration system is something my people do not know how to replicate,” I stated.

“You cannot do what we can do,” it echoed.

“If I learn how you accelerate and take that information home with me and give it to one of the groups of my people, they will have an advantage.”

There was a worrying pause, and then it said, “If you teach some of your people to do what we can do, you will unbalance the competition.”

“Yes,” I said with a sigh. “And I don’t want to do that.”

“Understood. It is against your personal wishes.”

“I don’t want to know that I am personally responsible for more deaths.”

“You don’t want to hurt your people, regardless of what groups they belong to.”

I admit, I started jumping up and down on my front limbs like an excited corgi. As a happy stim. But I tried to keep it gentle for Sarah’s sake. She did take a step away and smirk at me, though.

Contact and Arrival are two of my favorite movies. Stories like this are really big in the U.S. and across a lot of the world. Though, I stopped jumping when I realized that the greatest producers of them were colonialist cultures, like the U.S. and the U.K.

First contact between humans had been a recurring reality across the globe. And we were, right now, discussing the results of that at the hands of my ancestors.

Shit.

“Do you understand body language?” I suddenly shifted topic, because I wanted to explain what just happened to me.

“Not your body language,” the Dancer said. “I understand the concept. I have been learning about some Ktletaccete body language. I am operating under the assumption that yours may be different.”

“We are also now its parents,” Niʔa explained. “Despite what it just said, it may understand body language better than translated spoken language. It is a very astute child, and we are proud of it.”

I looked back at the Dancer and said, “I jumped up and down just now in response to an emotion. I was happy that we are communicating. It is exciting. A new thing for me.”

“Thank you for explaining,” it replied. “You were happy to talk to me and expressed it.”

“And then, I remembered what we were talking about and it made me less happy, so I stopped jumping,” I said.

“Understood.”

You’re good at this, Sarah thought at me.

I’m really just infodumping, I replied. It’s always been my art. You know that.

That doesn’t change that you are good at talking to this alien.

I’d rather think I’m learning as I go, so I don’t assume.

Yeah.

“May I ask you what your ancestors are like?” I asked.

“Yes.”

There was no further response, and suddenly I felt like I was sharing a joke with another autistic.

“What were your ancestors like?” I asked, smirking as quietly to myself as possible.

“Bacterial,” came the one word response.

Well, it was a Fenekere root word, rendered in Inmararräo, chosen by the Network that translates to essentially ‘bacterial’ in English when we compare all the notes and science at our disposal.

Immediately, I was flabbergasted, imagining that this being might actually be a bacterial colony, or a collection of multiple cooperative species of bacteria, in a 45 meter long shell of technology it had created with biological processes and some sort of hive mind intelligence.

Then I pulled myself up short.

If the Dancer was coincidentally thinking like a human autistic such as myself might think, it might be thinking literally and going back to its oldest ancestors. I hadn’t been using the word ‘ancestors’ prior to that question, just ‘lineage’ and ‘groups’ and ‘my people’.

It might also be joking with me, teasing me, deliberately, for all I knew.

I opened my mouth, paused, and glance at Niʔa.

With hands in their pockets, they smiled and then made an expression I’ve seen on Eric’s face (and the face of so many others) when he wanted to express that I was probably understanding something he was only hinting at. A human smile, with tightened lips and widened eyes and raised brows (or wrinkled forehead), and a slight movement forward, as if to say, “go on.”

I haven’t seen any Ktletaccete do that, so Niʔa had obviously picked it up from us. Knowing Niʔa, and how they had helped develop the translation tools for the Dancer, I am pretty sure they knew what they were doing with that expression.

I looked back out the window.

“Are you a bacterial colony?”

“Yes.”

“The funny thing is,” Niʔa said. “And I think this is true for Earth as well. But all life here on ʔetekeyerrinwuf are essentially bacterial colonies, when you get down to it. The organelles of our individual cells are symbiotic bacteria. And the weight of the free floating bacteria in and around our bodies, and that make up our personal ecosystems, is not insignificant either.”

“Ah, right,” I said. Both Sarah and I had been nerds enough to remember that kind of thing from science articles and excited biology teachers.

“But what it means about that is significantly different than what I mean when I talk about our organic bodies,” they said. “And it understands that difference. What you are looking at out there is a generational spacecraft specifically for bacteria. But! ʔetekeyerrinwuf is no less our collective body than that vessel out there is for it. ʔetekeyerrinwuf is just a physically bigger colonial organism than it. But I am saying the physiology is different. And if you removed the bacteria from that shell, it would kill the person. Not the individual bacteria, the person. We’re a little different. The construction nanites are what make us a person.”

That last line was not at all how I expected that explanation to end. But I decided to worry over it later.

I turned to the window again. I had one more important question. I asked, “What do you think of us?”

“That you might one day understand us,” came the reply.

That hit me right in the emotions.

Every day after that, my mind found a new way to interpret that sentence. 

And sometimes that interpretation matched my own deepest needs regarding my own world, my government, my people, my neighbors, my housemates, my friends, and my parents. Maybe the universe itself.

And I cried.