“No, they don’t.” Callie took a breath. “Just over three hundred years ago, humanity made first contact with intelligent alien life.”

Elena surprised Callie by breaking into a wide smile. “I never doubted sentient life existed out there among the stars. The universe is just too big, too full of planets, for humans to be unique. I did wonder if we’d ever encounter such life, given the vastness of space – it would be like two particular particles of salt in the ocean happening to bump into one another. I was chosen for my mission not just to bring the stored embryos to term and establish our colony, but also to study any alien organisms we might find at our destination. We never dared dream we’d find intelligent life, though. What are the aliens like? Are they… friendly? That sounds so stupid. God. Are we able to communicate with them?”

Callie smiled back. “Friendly? More or less. We can communicate, though it’s not always the smoothest.”

Elena leaned eagerly forward. “What do they look like? Their physical structure, I mean?”

“I’m not a biologist, or any other kind of scientist, but as I understand it, the aliens don’t correspond to any of the taxonomies we have for creatures on Earth. They’re smaller than humans – OK, I’m just going to say it straight out: superficially, they look more like octopuses than anything else on Earth.”

Elena blinked. “Talking squid from outer space? Really? Like in an old sci-fi novel?”

Callie snorted. “Actual scientists get mad when we call the aliens squid, or octopodes, because apparently there are a million major differences, but at a glance, the aliens have a central body with a sort of rounded hump surrounded by eyes, and a varying number of limbs that are more like tentacles than arms, though really they aren’t much like either one, and they’re mostly radially symmetric. When they stand up on their tentacles and run around, they’re about a meter high.”

“Differing numbers of limbs, you said? They exhibit that much variation as a species?”

“Ha. That’s just the beginning of their variations. We’re not sure what they look like in their natural, baseline form. Most of the Liars are big believers in self-improvement. Humanity has encountered something like fifteen hundred separate clans, or groups, or families, or tribes, and while there are broad similarities in their physiology, there’s a lot of variation, too. We’ve encountered tiny Liars the size of your palm – they look like skittering disembodied hands – and we met one group modified for unprotected space travel. Like, their bodies are ships. They’re the size of whales, drifting slowly through space, usually in hibernation. Those are extremes, but all the Liars augment themselves mechanically, or alter their genetic code, or reshape their bodies for different environments. That willingness to transform their bodies is the closest thing they have to a unifying culture.”