Scriber’s attitude toward aging is necessarily different from mine, since she will be transferred, literally, to a new body in a few years, a sort of brainless clone produced from one of her cells, which is how I sometimes used to feel about Sandra. Scriber’s done this nine times already, and will keep doing it until she gets assassinated, or bitten on the head by a flying viper, or struck by lightning—all of which are major worries on her lovely world. She says the record for transferrals, although it may be myth, is held by a female who supposedly went through thirty-three clones—by which time she was so befuddled she fell asleep with her face in a mud puddle and drowned. I asked her whether the story was supposed to have a moral. She said it was “Don’t fall asleep face down in a mud puddle. You will die.” I’m not sure whether she was joking.

My other alien friend is not old, at least for its kind, nor female, nor strictly bipedal, but can breathe oxygen when its diplomatic duties require the sacrifice. It doesn’t have a name, just a smell signature, something like an old sock. Oxygen makes it cough blue flames, but it controls the coughing and turns it into an approximation of human speech. This makes for a lot of give-and-take in conversation, since it has to breathe for three minutes in order to talk for one—and it does have to talk after three minutes! Otherwise the flames seek a less polite avenue of egress.

It asks a lot of questions about Earth, which it visited in its extreme youth, sometime around A.D. 1837. It was not able to establish communication, unless you consider scaring the living shit out of everybody a form of communication. It looks sort of like a metallic winged demon with horns, and breathing fire at people just wasn’t condoned in those unenlightened times.

Of course my favorite alien is Prime, more vampire than demon. We talked for a while this birthday. I asked her to appear as she used to, unclothed. For the past half-century or so, she has generally materialized wearing some modest, perhaps nostalgia-provoking, attire, I suppose to protect my feelings. I wanted to check her appearance against my memory. Thought I looked better than that—sorry, old girl. You’re pretty sexy for a cybernetic simulation.

Speaking of such things, let me go on record as admitting that I miss VR as much as anything supposedly “real.” They’ve forbidden me use of the machine ever since I had that fit a few years ago. It was the only way I could feel the world, the worlds, the way they actually are. Even when the eveloi transshift me to another planet, I have to see and hear it filtered through these dim old portals.