“See what you mean,” I said. Though “aesthetic” isn’t the word I would have chosen. It was almost ugly—but then so were the Martians until you got used to them.

I went back to my workstation and considered the pictures of the ship, thinking of it in terms of a living organism. I’d studied Terran invertebrates, of course, and remembered a seven-legged starfish. I clicked around and found the one I remembered, a pretty British creature, nicely symmetrical and less than a foot wide. There was also a seven-legged one from New Zealand waters, almost a yard wide, that looked octopoid and menacing, and in fact a footnote warned that if it grabbed your wet suit, it was almost impossible to pry loose. But it was the slender British one, Luidia ciliaris, that resembled the starship.

Nothing but its shape was relevant, of course. The only other creature I could find with seven legs, other than sadly mutated spiders, was the extinct Hallucigenia sparsa, a tiny but mean-looking fossil.

The only picture we had of the Others was a simple diagram they sent that we interpreted as having six legs and a tail. Maybe they did have seven legs, instead. So built a starship in their own image.

It was an odd shape for a vehicle, counterintuitive, but maybe my intuitions would be different if I had a seven-based number system.

Zero gee isn’t conducive to abstract thinking, which may be one reason space pilots have not distinguished themselves as philosophers. Another reason may be that they are basically jocks with fast reflexes. I pinged my pilot and said I was going to nap for a while, and he joined me in the bedroom for a few minutes of not napping. Then we did doze together, floating in midair with a sweat-damp sheet wrapped around us. I dreamed of monsters.

Chapter 3 - THE GRAND TOUR

3

THE GRAND TOUR

The humans of course wanted to interrogate me as soon as Spy went back to its ship. But I hadn’t learned all that much about the creature. It asked all the questions.

We first went to the Martian quarters. It already knew the basic principles of our recirculating ecology; in fact, it knew more about some of the science and engineering than I did. It appears to have a memory like mine, perfect, but it had studied Martian physiology, for instance, with more depth than I was ever exposed to.

Part of what we discussed there is not translatable, because it has to do with an intimacy between Snowbird and me that has no human counterpart. To answer the obvious (to humans) question, it is not a sexual relationship, nor does it have anything to do with emotional bonding. It is a practical matter that has to do with being ready to die.