I told him all about the See Weeds’ waterlogged planet. I told him about the two suns, the elliptical orbit, the gray waters, the unmoving permanence of roots, the stunning vistas of a thousand eyes, the endless conversations of a million soundless voices that all could hear.

He listened with wide eyes and a fascinated smile.

“Is that the only other place?” he asked when I fell silent, trying to think of anything I’d missed. “Are the See Weeds”—he laughed once at the pun—“the only other aliens?”

I laughed, too. “Hardly. No more than I’m the only alien on this world.”

“Tell me.”

So I told him about the Bats on the Singing World—how it was to live in musical blindness, how it was to fly. I told him about the Mists Planet—how it felt to have thick white fur and four hearts to keep warm, how to give claw beasts a wide berth.

I started to tell him about the Planet of the Flowers, about the color and the light, but he interrupted me with a new question.

“What about the little green guys with the triangle heads and the big black eyes? The ones who crashed in Roswell and all that. Was that you guys?”

“Nope, not us.”

“Was it all fake?”

“I don’t know—maybe, maybe not. It’s a big universe, and there’s a lot of company out there.”

“How did you come here, then—if you weren’t the little green guys, who were you? You had to have bodies to move and stuff, right?”

“Right,” I agreed, surprised at his grasp of the facts at hand. I shouldn’t have been surprised—I knew how bright he was, his mind like a thirsty sponge. “We used our Spider selves in the very beginning, to get things started.”

“Spiders?”

I told him about the Spiders—a fascinating species. Brilliant, the most incredible minds we’d ever come across, and each Spider had three of them. Three brains, one in each section of their segmented bodies. We’d yet to find a problem they couldn’t solve for us. And yet they were so coldly analytical that they rarely came up with a problem they were curious enough to solve for themselves. Of all our hosts, the Spiders welcomed our occupation the most. They barely noticed the difference, and when they did, they seemed to appreciate the direction we provided. The few souls who had walked on the surface of the Spiders’ planet before implantation told us that it was cold and gray—no wonder the Spiders only saw in black and white and had a limited sense of temperature. The Spiders lived short lives, but the young were born knowing everything their parent had, so no knowledge was lost.