This is the first entry of the Third Contact Dialogues. If we write many more of these, we’ll make a page for them, but we’re also putting them in our blog category.
If First Contact is when two cultures first meet each other, and if Second Contact is, as suggested by Star Trek: Lower Decks, when the bureaucrats of the two cultures start hashing out the nitty gritty of the treaties, then we suggest that Third Contact is when people start having lunch together. Or tea. Or jam sessions. Whatever. When the cultures start interacting on a personal level.
‘etekeyerrinwuff and Earth haven’t had Second Contact yet. We’re putting that off as long as possible, for a number of reasons. But for those of us who have had First Contact, we’ve started Third Contact rituals already.
These are the conversations we’ve had that haven’t made it into any of our books. Mostly between Sarah and Goreth and the people of the Sunspot.
You might want to read the Tunnel Apparati Diaries first, for context.
A lot has been vaguely waved at by me and Sarah in regards to the instances of apparent parallel evolution between life on Earth and life on the Sunspot.
At some point, I started prodding my Ktletaccete mentors about it. I couldn’t exactly go to anyone I knew on Earth to discuss the matter. Not directly. Of course, I had access to the Internet and all the papers I could solicit from experts in the field who would talk to any curious individual on the matter of Terran evolutionary history. But they wouldn’t know anything about any aliens, and I wasn’t planning on bringing that subject up.
I figured I’d develop questions for them after starting the discussion with our Tutor, Metabang. And mostly it would be just to clarify things, so that I could improve the conversation overall.
I make this sound like I really thought about it before I opened my big mouth. And I kinda did? In as much as I tend to script things out multiple times before saying anything, a lot of the time.
But anyway.
When I did speak up, I wasn’t alone with Metabang.
Sarah was there, as usual. And so was Ashwin.
We had visited a food artisan in Rewärkyef, which is forward of the Ring Mountains, to sample their favorite dishes and bring them with us on a hike through the forward planes. None of us needed to eat, of course, thanks to our nanite exobodies. But as I’ve already established in my book, The Sun Also Hatches, the nanites wouldn’t let the energy in the food go to waste, and it was still very much worth doing for the sensory experience of it.
Our goal, as was our habit by this point, was to follow some of the local trails and find a nice place to eat the food.
We call them the planes, but they’re really a lot of rolling hills. The environment doesn’t seem all that far off from Eastern Washington of the U.S., in the area between Spokane and Winachee. I mean, as far as alien environments go.
The atmosphere and biological traces in it are fairly different from Earth’s. I don’t think a human being could walk around on this ship and survive without an encounter suit of some sort. But there isn’t really any danger of that happening anyway. Not until someone figures out how to transmit matter through the Tunnel Apparatus and no one is even trying to do that. It seems like a bad idea on a number of fronts.
The animals and plants around the area are as bizarre and bizarrely familiar as the people of the Sunspot. And those that move are pretty reclusive, just like on Earth. (The words “animal” and “plant” are absolute misnomers in a scientific or academic sense, but useful to describe visually active versus sessile organisms, and their relatives.)
So, the plan was to find a good place to delight our senses while having a nice conversation, and then drop our exobodies and explore the area as dispersed clouds of nanites in hopes of catching sight of more of the fauna without scaring them.
I wanted to see what I think it was Abacus had described (too casually) as the “prairie canids of the forward planes”. But, also, I shared Sarah’s interest in the rräofen’i, which were kind of but not really at all like a cross between barking geckos and meerkats, each the size of one of Sarah’s legs.
We’d get to searching for them, but first, food and companionship, as Earth-style as we could make it here.
We found a rocky outcropping on a hill overlooking the Shetyik river, just aft of Rewärkyef, and there were enough natural seats for those of us who needed them. Which meant Sarah and Ashwin were lounging on rocks while Metabang hovered nearby, and I’d started loafing, with my tail curved around three of my limbs.
I left my right foreleg free to manage my food in a vaguely civilized manner.
The sun was just about right above us.
There was a true-coriolis breeze that didn’t smell nearly as shitty as the great forests aft of the mountains. Clearly, what my psyche interpreted as feces was simply the rot of the woods, as I’d guessed on my first visit to the Sunspot. Here it was drier and more free of the discarded leaves and other matter of old growth trees and other vegetation. The water of the river smelled just like water, and I could pick that out in a way that my nose on Earth could only barely achieve (still better than most allistic humans, though).
As I picked through my fried hafrrit, arranging it in rows by size and color, occasionally picking up a piece to sample its fragrance with my tongue, I said, “So.” And then I glanced at Metabang.
Both Sarah and Ashwin glanced up at me as well.
“Yes?” Metabang prompted me.
“On Earth, back in 2024, I think it was,” I started blabbing, “there was this meme going around for a bit, along with a couple of blog posts to elaborate on it, claiming that all land animals, at least, were descended from something called a lobe-finned fish. Even birds were, too. And that supposedly meant that we were all, actually lobe-finned fish. At least, in the sense that we were all evolutionary variations on the single common ancestor that was a lobe-finned fish.”
“Right,” Sarah said. “I remember looking that up, too.”
“Right, and scientists basically say something like, taxonomically, categorically, it’s true. But colloquially it doesn’t make much sense,” I nodded and popped a hafrrit in my mouth to chew it thoughtfully.
A hafrrit is like if you made a fritter out of mushroom and algae paste with pebble sized bits of fruit and nuts in it. You could probably simulate it reasonably well with ingredients on Earth, to get the concept and texture about right. But as for flavor, it’s a bit like eating fried puree of gym sock with hints of nine volt battery, some kind of bleu cheese, galvanized nails, and a random half of your aunt’s spice cupboard. I’m describing it about as well as I could describe wine. It’s good to me. Just, those are the closest olfactory notes I could identify. And I wouldn’t try for that if I were you. For a cultural equivalent, I’d go for mulling spices with dried apricots and roasted walnuts.
“Anyway, I’m wondering,” I finally got to it, “if you went back to the common ancestor of all of your land fauna, would you find something that’s also basically a lobe-finned fish? Like, ours had to walk up onto land, and it had to have the limbs necessary to gain land mobility. And, apparently, when we went through our fossil records, we didn’t find that happening more than once. So, we’re all basically lobe-finned fish. Does that make sense?”
“I think I understand what you’re saying, yes,” Metabang affirmed.
I gestured at the Garden of the Sunspot around us all, and explained, “Like, here you have all sorts of beings that could be called chordates, not in that they’re descended from the chordates of Earth, but that you have something we’d call a central nervous system and it strongly resembles ours. More than anyone would have expected. And you’ve got skeletons with boney limbs and all that. Some of the chemicals are different, so you’ve got what we’d call XNA rather than DNA, or Xeno-Nucleic Acid. But, so, to get here, did you go through the same set of milestones? And specifically, was something we could call a lobe-finned fish one of them?”
Ashwin had what appeared to be a shredded fibrous tuber, cold, with little black specks in it, called kirlaub. Nem was stirring it with a common utensil that looked like a two pronged fork that was long and thin. Nem merely nodded in thought as a reaction.
Sarah smirked and popped another roasted nut in her mouth. She’d opted for the simplest of the treats. I’m calling them “nuts”, but were they scientifically more like bulbs or fruiting bodies of something not quite like fungus or slime mold? I don’t know. Culinarily, they were like nuts.
Metabang wasn’t eating. It rarely did, since that required manifesting something of a mouth, which it didn’t like doing in company. It continued to hover in its place while it considered my question and reviewed the ship’s records.
“We don’t have any sort of fossil records like your scientists do,” it began. “The Epoch of the Exodus Ships has been so long and so chaotic that we have lost most of our original knowledge, and can only piece things together from the scant evidence found in lifeforms here today. So, I don’t think anyone on the Sunspot can answer your question with any sort of scientific rigor.”
“Mm,” I acknowledged.
“As you know, someday, somewhere, maybe when you’re nearby, Phage might say something that seems like an answer, but nobody will have the ability to double check its words,” it sounded like Metabang was talking through a smirk, even though it didn’t have a face to smirk with. “Ni’a might corroborate it, of course. But that still won’t give us any sort of data we could examine. We wouldn’t be able to describe the details of what either of them report.”
“Yeah. Dang.”
Sarah piped up, gesturing with a nut in each hand, “I remember someone telling me that there’s evidence that Sunspot life maybe has two planetary origins. Like, you met some biologically compatible aliens and intermingled somehow.”
“That’s a theory some have, yes,” Metabang replied. “But, as we’ve begun encountering Outsiders more recently, and now have detailed readings and records of their biology, that seems highly unlikely. Outsiders tend to have wildly different biologies at a cellular or even chemical level. What we have here on the Sunspot, though, are what look like two root level clades of what you’d call chordates that have different maximum numbers of limbs. The hexapods and tetrapods. And we think all people belong to the hexapods, despite most of us exhibiting the superficial structure of tetrapods. Amongst the fauna, the division looks a lot more definitive and hinting at two evolutionary trees of life. As if, perhaps, we had two different clades of lobe-finned fish that ventured onto land separately, either on different continents or different planets. But that’s assuming that none of this is more easily explained by the biological engineering of scientists and fauna management programs from any number of our predecessor ships.”
“What about the XNA evidence?” Sarah asked for me. “I thought there was something there that was harder to explain.”
“Not really,” our Tutor reported. “There are some anomalies that people used to think indicated early Outsider influence. But, again, now that we’ve seen the breadth and depth of differences in molecular encoding of self replicating information that different trees of life employ, even with just the handful of samples we’ve found, those anomalies no longer look significant. And, again, they could be more easily explained as the signatures of bioengineering.”
“Damn.”
“We could hazard a fairly solid guess, to answer Goreth’s question, though,” Ashwin interjected. “And the more worlds we explore through the Tunnel Apparati, the stronger that guess, I think.”
“What you’re suggesting is that the more trees of life we find that also mimic something Goreth is calling a lobe-finned fish, the greater the likelihood that we came from a similar origin?” Metabang asked.
“Not even that,” Ashwin turned nems head to the right, tilting it away from Metabang and looking over nems left cheek at it. “We could just look at bottlenecks of common ancestors that made some sort of environmental transition. The more often that happens just once for each tree of life, instead of exhibiting parallel evolution across an equivalent threshold multiple times, the stronger the case that it happened like that on our origin planet, Kepekape. And we are similar enough structurally to Terran chordates that we could safely conjecture that it had to be something with boney limbs, I think.”
Ashwin was talking about centuries worth of study to be done, of course, including a lot of diplomatic work starting from linguistic scratch with each world. Every alien people we encountered, we had to translate not just how we communicated, but how we thought. But, with how long we each could exist on the Sunspot’s Network, and how much help we’d have doing those things, that didn’t seem like something we each personally wouldn’t get to see someday.
It was a goal that was in reach for each of us, even if we left Earth behind in the process. In other words, sorry Earthlings, I’m not going to get to report to you any actual conclusions. Your descendents, maybe.
“Yes,” Metabang agreed with Ashwin. “It would be a guess.”
Ashwin gave it a raspberry, an expression which nem had learned from me and Sarah.
This was pretty funny to me because Metabang was effectively one of Ashwin’s parents. It had helped raise nem and nem had known it nems entire life. And I distinctly remember giving our own parents the raspberry on numerous occasions when we were much younger. But, until that moment, nobody on the Sunspot had blown a raspberry at their parent, for all I could tell. Ashwin might have been the first.
Metabang wasn’t confused. It had been to Earth, too, residing in our brain there, and had learned about the raspberry at the same time as Aswhin.
Anyway, it was at that point that I realized two things about myself.
One was that I would never get a definitive answer on this topic of lobe-finned fish.
The other was that I would never stop wanting to ask the question.