Chapter 9

The Quizbarlings gathered around, awaiting their visitors from the stars with polite disinterest.

One might have thought that the advent of alien guests from a republic that stretched across multiple planets, stepping through a portal ripped in the fabric of reality, might have caused more excitement among the members of a civilization which had only just recently discovered crop rotation. And it had, the first time. But this had played out many times by now, and what was once spectacular had become commonplace. Some might have lamented that they had lost their sense of wonder, but most intelligent species had this adaptation to prevent them from having heart attacks when the sun rose every morning.

The Quizbarlings were tall, lithe, handsome (at least by humanoid standards, which meant to most other species they were hideous). They dressed in long, loose robes dyed a relaxed blue and chatted casually among themselves. These were the religious elite of Quizbar, and they were arranged there by the head of the church. Quizbarlings changed their names when it suited them, and the High Priest was called Minor Fuss, so named because his position was considered the most stressful one on the planet. A minor fuss was the most anyone ever needed to worry about when your god lived among you.

Despite his name, and despite the fact that he was the head priest of a global religion, Minor Fuss was a pretty laid-back kind of guy, and he looked it. He wore his hair long and tied back in a thick ponytail, and his face had the sort of landscape that a lifetime of sincere grins and laughter eventually wore into it. He sat awaiting the Americans in the High Throne of Greeting and Divine Welcome, which was a wooden rocker with a bit of a creak in it.

He approached life with the kind of confident ease that complete certainty in your faith gives you. It’s the nervous sorts, the ones that don’t actually hear the voice of their god, who will get all antsy and start suggesting that maybe they should burn unbelievers at the stake. When you were as certain as Minor Fuss was, you paid such doubts no more mind than you would a neighbor who stubbornly suggested that up was down. You’d be a little concerned about them, but confident that whatever confusion they were suffering, obvious reality would soon reassert itself.

Obvious reality, of course, was more obvious for him than it was for most Quizbarlings. After all, as head priest, he regularly got to commune with The Radiant One. But even if he didn’t, he thought it likely that he’d believe. After all, so much of the natural world of Quizbar was simply made for the people who lived there. His garb was woven by the clothesworms, who just so happened to weave their cocoons in the shape of a comfortable robe; even now the blunderhogs were coming in from the woods to politely settle upon the grills they had laid out, in anticipation of their welcoming feast; and the wonderful Pirikki bird was engaging in its mating ritual of dropping off a drink of lightly fermented fruit juice into his hand. Everything was just as it should be.

The only theological trouble he had ever had was when the Americans had first shown up. Quizbarlings, despite not having much in the way of technology, were not incurious; they had eyes, they saw the night sky and the stars, and some even had theories about celestial bodies. But it was one thing to know the void was out there and that The Radiant One had created it. It was another thing entirely to discover that actually, the void was full of talking lizards and metal men who claimed dominion over hundreds of worlds that had never at all even heard of The Radiant One.

But for Minor Fuss, his god’s explanation had averted any spiritual crisis. He was, he explained to them somewhat sheepishly, a sort of resigned god. He had made the universe, yes, but he was more or less content to let it get on with spinning away on its own; he now just wanted to putter around on Quizbar and live a quiet sort of life. In his quiet moments, Minor Fuss did have to admit to himself that he was a little perturbed by the fact that his entire civilization was essentially The Radiant One making a retirement home of sorts for himself. But upon reflection, when you had a world this beautiful and perfect, did he really have anything to complain about?

Still, he liked it when the Americans came for a visit. He liked getting a glimpse into what was going on out among the stars. It seemed appropriate to him that The Radiant One, being such a kind and gentle god, would have filled the stars with such strange but friendly people. Even if they did keep making very forward suggestions about democracy and elections and all that. Minor Fuss wasn’t opposed to the idea of democracy; in fact, he thought it sounded like a pretty good system, all things considered. Just utterly unnecessary, when you had The Radiant One around. But good people, those Americans. Good people.

Which is why it was such a shame, what had happened to the last team.

The air before the gathered congregation wobbled, rippled, except it wasn’t really the air. It was reality itself unknitting, pulling itself apart until a tear opened, one that poured out misty light, sparking and spitting. There was a groan like an airliner with a stomachache. Minor Fuss watched this with the mild interest of a man who’s seen a portal opened before and is blissfully ignorant of what catastrophic portal failure is.

“Brothers and Sisters,” he announced, “Our visitors approach!” There was a smattering of polite applause and someone whistled for more Pirikki birds.

The first one to step through the portal made Minor Fuss a little concerned. It was a man encased in metal, painted red, white and blue, which not so long ago he would have thought was just a funny costume. But he had talked to some of the previous American visitors, and to The Radiant One, and had since learned what the ghastly business of war was. And that man’s armor was covered in scorch marks and other signs of being…well, used. It made him distinctly uncomfortable. Not just the reminder that there existed something as cruel and as senseless as he knew war to be, but that this American had decided to visit them while ready for it. The closest Quizbar ever came to having a war was when the farmers had to jostle over stall positions in the markets, and the casualties were measured in stubbed toes and passive-aggressive apologies.

Still, he was humanoid, as was the next girl who followed him out. Her ears were a bit pointy and hairy, but eh, close enough. Humanoid visitors were always easier to deal with. It wasn’t that he questioned the wisdom of The Radiant One’s creation, but some of their visitors had been…very strange. They had at least made him wonder whether his god had a peculiar sense of humor.

But this lot seemed normal enough. Another humanoid, this one wearing a funny hat, and green, but that was fine. Minor Fuss had a purple cousin, after all. A little walking lizard, all dressed up in a formal suit–oh, the kids would love that one. And then–

And then–

Minor Fuss gasped and rose to his feet as the most exquisite creature he had ever seen in his life walked through the portal.

She was alien, undoubtedly so. Especially alien to him, on whose planet evolution had skipped right over exoskeletons, and where the ecological niche fulfilled by arthropods on other planets was instead occupied by a variety of worms, hyper-specialized mammals and very, very small birds. (Clothesworms wove cocoons for hibernation, rather than to transform into any new form).

But the way the sun danced in iridescent colors across her shell! The rainbow of colors that swirled in her lidless eyes! Her mandibles, a jaw so complex he had never seen…!

Love is one of the most peculiar phenomena in the universe.

On the surface, it shouldn’t be. To many socially inclined sapients, its main function seems fairly obvious and straightforward: encourage breeding by impairing someone’s judgment about another person.

Good judgment famously gets in the way of pair bonding. Thoughts such as “Should I really date someone who’s got such a large collection of knives?” and “Maybe I shouldn’t have a child with someone who has stabbed me three times” are the sort that, as far as evolution is concerned, really just get in the way. The only question evolution really considers, when it comes to sex, is “Why aren’t I having it right now?”

But evolution got itself a little turned around when it came to intelligence. The evolutionary benefits of intelligence are fairly obvious, but if we’re being serious here, evolution was in a bit over its head when it started fiddling with the idea of higher-order brains.

Evolution is a little bit like an infinite number of monkeys stumbling into an infinite factory floor. After endless fumbling (and a lot of dead monkeys) they might put together something that worked like a car, which was great as far as monkey transportation went, absolutely revolutionary, but whatever machine they built was likely to do a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff as well and break down a lot besides.

That is to say, things can get weird and nonsensical when it comes to intelligence because intelligent beings can afford to be weird and nonsensical. Or to put it simply, life is as strange as it can get away with.

With the advent of intelligence, love became detached from the idea of a simple engine for breeding and became seriously weird. Whatever you’re currently thinking, it’s not weird enough. There were intelligent beings that became attracted to beautiful paintings or abstract concepts. Even when love was aimed at an evolutionarily viable target, it became associated with all sorts of bizarre rituals. There are planets out there where clearing your throat is considered a formal courtship gesture. Some others consider it an act of high infidelity to use the wrong fork. One really weird species thinks that getting down on one knee and offering a bit of compressed carbon is a marriage proposal.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Given all this strangeness, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that in an interstellar republic like America, completely sexually incompatible aliens might fall in love with each other. There were scientists hard at work on trying to slap genetics around until such bondings were able to produce children. But there were other strange phenomena in love, as well, and one of those was known as Cosmic Infatuation Disorder.

CID (also known colloquially as First Sight Fever, the Awwstronaut effect, or Contact High) happens when someone, upon seeing an alien species, finds them overwhelmingly beautiful despite their complete strangeness. It is the opposite twin of the far more common Cosmic Loathing Disorder (also known colloquially as the Space Shakes, Lovecraft’s Leeriness, or Being an Asshole).

Minor Fuss, the moment he saw Moyom, got CID real bad.

He leaped to his feet, startling away the Pirikki bird which had come to serve him his second cocktail. He was supposed to remain seated in the High Throne of Greeting and Divine Welcome for the duration of this ceremony, but that was fine–The Radiant One wasn’t a stickler for sacraments. He rushed forward, trying not to make it obvious that he was going directly for this…this angel, this rainbow-shelled beauty.

Brother Old Chore and Sister Handy Basket were busy draping wreaths of flowers about the visitors’ necks. They glanced, surprised, as Minor Fuss elbowed his way between them. He shook each American’s hand, some meaningless greetings and pleasantries falling from his lips, until, finally, her hand was in his.

Was it female? Did it matter? Her touch was so smooth. He looked into her large, unblinking eyes, the narrow black points of her pupils. She bowed her head forward, and her antennae dipped to tickle his crown. He shivered.

“A meeting of the hands has come to us, in this hour,” Moyom said solemnly. “Grabbers kiss, in open air.”

Poetry. Her voice was a beautiful buzz. Well, the voice of the curious device hanging around her neck, anyway. And the clacking of the mandibles…

“It has,” he replied. Brother Old Chore was trying to say something, but he ignored the man. “If you don’t mind, would you tell me your name?”

The beautiful rainbow creature waved one of her arms toward the sky. “In the stars, mouths say that I am Moyom!”

“Moyom,” he said, rolling the name about his mouth. Americans always had such strange names, all sound with no meaning. But this creature made her name all her own, defined the sounds with her strength of being… “I am called Minor Fuss,” he told her. “It is tradition among our people to give visiting Americans a Quizbarlish name during their time here. Would you mind very much if I gave you one now?”

“You give me honor, to paint me with your mouth,” said Moyom. “What will you say?”

“I think I will call you Radiant Shell,” he said.

There was a small cough, and suddenly Minor Fuss was aware of the rest of the congregation staring at him. That would have come across a bit odd, to give this creature a name so close to The Radiant One. The Radiant adjective was holy by proxy, and usually only applied to moments of great beauty, like breathtaking mountaintop sunrises, or moments of sublime bliss and joy, or when a Quizbarlish boy would very much like a Quizbarlish girl to get down to the business of making some more Quizbarlings with him. But he didn’t care. It was appropriate, and Moyom, Radiant Shell, was busy clattering her approval at him with her complex and gorgeous mouth. It was like she had tiny, complicated little fingers in place of lips.

He wondered what it would be like to kiss her.

A cough again, and this time more aggressive. Not from one of his own, though. From Libby. Minor Fuss knew her well; she had come along with every American team that had visited them so far. He never really knew what to make of her. She had tried to explain to him what this “computer” and “hologram” and “Artificial Intelligence” stuff was, and it had all flown over his head. He just thought of her as the Americans’ pet ghost, or some kind of spirit. Of all the Americans, he never used a Quizbar name for her. She had one–Ghost Stars–and he supposed it was appropriate enough; it was just…a Quizbar name did not sit right on her. Few other Quizbarlings used it, either.

Right now a knowing little smile crept across her face, and he wondered just how much she had seen. He might not understand her, but he knew she was infernally clever. “A thousand glorious greetings, most revered High Priest of The Radiant One!” she declared in perfect Quizbarlish.

“Oh, please, please, call me Minor Fuss,” he told her. She knew him already, or at least, he thought she did. He wasn’t quite sure how ‘knowing’ worked with Libby. She had the slightly concerning habit of making multiple copies of herself, and he never could quite figure out whether they counted as individuals, or they shared all the same knowledge…oh, just thinking about it made his head hurt. The Radiant One’s guidance was to just treat every meeting with her as if you were talking to a brand new person. “There is no need for such formality here.”

She nodded. “Still, we thank you for once again graciously welcoming us as guests on this, the most temperate and comfortable of planets.”

“Guests are always welcome on Quizbar,” he replied, with the sort of magnanimous and universal hospitality that one can afford when one knows very well that if the guests should ever cease being welcome, their god will blink them out of existence.

The blunderhogs had turned themselves over on the grills while they were talking, and by now the breeze carried to them the scent of succulent roast pork, so they gathered for the feast. Minor Fuss insisted that Moyom take the seat by his side.

Of course, he couldn’t let himself be completely distracted by her. He did have a job to do. He raised a toast in honor of their American visitors, which involved a lot of well-meaning and friendly blather. But then, friendly blather was a long tradition on Quizbar. In fact, one might say that it was most of what Quizbar was about.

But while he spoke, he intently scanned the faces of the Americans. He hadn’t risen to the position of High Priest for nothing. Competition in the official church hierarchy on Quizbar could hardly be called “cutthroat”–in fact it was more like a pillow fight–but Minor Fuss did have some keen interpersonal skills, and one of those was reading people. Radiant Shell and the lizard-man were a bit too alien to get a good bead on, and Libby, well, Libby always seemed happy in a way that he found a little unsettling.

But at least three of the Americans were similar enough to Quizbarlings to make a guess at what they were feeling. The soldier, the one who had first stepped through the portal–his name was Jack, but Minor Fuss had already begun to think of him as Encased Man–he looked jolly enough for all that war business.

But it was the one with the fuzzy ears and the big green one, the elf and the orc, as he was told–he could tell that they were both uneasy. A tightness about the eyes, the way they both pushed around the food on their plates but didn’t really eat it, the way the elf kept looking at her knife, then at the orc’s neck, and twitching slightly…

Minor Fuss wondered what it could mean, but he pushed it aside for now. It was enough to know that these Americans, even as they arrived, were already anxious. Stressed out, the poor things. And that just wouldn’t do. No one wanted a repeat of what happened to the last team.

He rose in his seat once more. “Ah, my good Brothers and Sisters, and my fine guests, a moment of your time, please?” So rowdy was the feast that he actually had to cough softly into his sleeve before people noticed that he was making an announcement. “Thank you, thank you,” he went on. “I would just like to repeat once more what an honor it is to have such wonderful guests. So, I was thinking to myself–perhaps it would be even more honorable and wonderful to have them much closer to home, would it not?”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Brother Wide Thumb, in a most suspicious and un-Quizbarly way. Minor Fuss frowned. He had actually caught Brother Thumb whispering that perhaps they shouldn’t be welcoming the Americans as guests. That Quizbar should actually refuse them! It was an opinion so scandalously rude that it had actually gone past the threshold of gossip; where rumor spread exactly because it was outrageous, Wide Thumb’s opinion had remained fairly quiet because it was so outrageous that everyone was embarrassed by it.

“I mean,” Minor Fuss said very pointedly, giving Wide Thumb a hard stare (which went undetected by the Americans since, by their standards, it looked like a playful wink), “that rather than having our guests take up their normal residences in the diplomatic village–why not have them come straight to the Grand Temple with us?”

A murmur rippled through the table like a pond that had a small stone dropped in it. The diplomatic village was where the Americans had traditionally been housed, an embassy of sorts. What he had suggested wasn’t radical, not exactly, but it was a last-moment change. Having Americans in the Grand Temple itself would be interesting, but more shocking than that was the fact that the diplomatic village had already been cleaned out and set up for them. Was all that hard work for nothing? But that was alright; one of the perks of being High Priest was that he could make calls like this and it wouldn’t be considered rude. He’d have some gift baskets sent to the cleaners.

After a few moments of the Americans whispering among themselves, Libby stood up. She held a cup of her own raised in toast, one that seemed made of red and blue light. Not real, of course. A ghost of a cup. Minor Fuss found that his head hurt again as he thought about the implications of this. Had he been a murderer every time he dropped the dinnerware? He’d have to ask The Radiant One.

“High Priest, we’d be glad to accept your invitation,” Libby declared. “I’ve always wanted to see your capital up close! I take this as a good sign that the friendship between our two peoples has grown ever-stronger. A celebration!”

Then with a lighthearted giggle, she threw her cup into the air. The Brothers and Sisters seated around her shrank back by instinct, even though they knew nothing about her was real. The liquid scattered through the air like drops of red fire, and then wove together in the image of a gigantic bird with stars trailing from the tips of its feathers, before it soared into the sky and then, for no good reason that Minor Fuss could see, exploded into a great blooming flower of red, white and blue sparks.

The Quizbarlings gasped and laughed among themselves and clapped for the show as Libby took a bow, though Minor Fuss could see no reason to do so. Certainly The Radiant One’s works were much more impressive than anything this clever spirit could do, and were all around them every day. Still, he clapped out of simple politeness, and smiled at Radiant Shell as she clacked her mandibles in celebration as well.

At least now he would be able to keep track of the Americans, and make sure that this time nothing unfortunate happened.