“What’s a Glornok? Is it a kind of pet?”
The human Julia sailed past in my peripheral vision, emitting careful corrective puffs of pressurized gas from her EVA pack.
“Not exactly. They were our closest evolutionary cousin, as chimps are to humans, differing only in that our aristocracy selectively bred them to match our outer appearance in every respect.”
Her fumbling frustrated me. I wanted to reach out and position the component correctly for her but of course I was forbidden to do so.
“For what? Sex?”
I responded with a bout of laughter, which supposedly humans find terrifying. It’s a cacophonous honking/trumpeting noise, which they often compare to the calls of geese.
“No! For Hurndigon’s sake, no. There may be some degenerates among us who-...nevermind. But no, not for sex. They were bred to resemble us exactly in the same way your own aristocracy bred dogs, so they could be playmates for children.
I myself frolicked in the mud with Glornoks when I was little, making up names for each of them and devising simple arithmetical games to test their abilities. It helps our young to develop a theory of mind, as they learn to distinguish between intellectually complete children of their own species and the superficially identical but mentally deficient Glornoks.
By way of typical childhood games, which the Glornoks readily learn and enjoy, differences in aptitude and depth of thought become apparent. In this way we teach our young, in a very intuitive manner, the reality of biological inequality.”
I couldn’t see Julia frown but I felt it. There are very stark philosophical differences between our species, ones they consider very important but which are, of course, irrelevant to us. Friendship Station, the structure presently being erected in low Earth orbit to commemorate first contact between humanity and my kind, was willfully misinterpreted insofar as I could tell by all humans I’d worked with as a tacit affirmation of their politics, despite everything we’ve said so far in contradiction of that.
Following the initial burst of data towards our orbiting colony ship, we quickly surmised that the species we were dealing with were most of all incurable egotists. Their history was a series of letdowns wherein they first discovered there existed a universe outside of their planet, then that they weren’t at the center of it, then that their own star didn’t orbit their all-important planet, and then the final indignity: that the universe wasn’t created for the purpose of having them in it.
Much riotous honking resulted from that initial data burst. It was difficult, at first, to see how we could possibly cooperate towards productive ends with these creatures.
Their most recent expression of egotism, and the least self-aware yet, was their development of a philosophy that all sentient beings are absolutely identical with respect to their innate intellectual capacities.
Naturally, they expected a more advanced alien race to enthusiastically affirm the correctness of what they felt was a tremendously enlightened perspective, one which flattered humanity even as it deprecated us. Imagine their dismay when instead, we asked to meet Hitler.
Not once or twice, but a full six times we were asked to repeat or clarify that request. Once satisfied that they understood us correctly, we were informed that the 1936 Berlin Olympics broadcast which first alerted us to the existence of humankind no longer represented their society, and that a typical human lifespan is well under one hundred solar years. We would only later come to fully appreciate the significance of that first bit.
Their popular culture depicted aliens as intellectually advanced, but physically deficient; a product of their own conceit that to excel in one area we would need, for some unspecified reason, to lack in others. Perhaps it was intended to offer comfort, in that at the very least, if it came to blows they might outmuscle us. That was also cause for much riotous honking in our ranks.
Even their conception of nonhuman beings is self-flattering. They designed us before they met us, with the properties they felt we needed to have such that we could at the same time be much more intelligent (which they correctly predicted) yet also inferior in crucial ways to humans and thus easily defeated.
There was not only no point to military altercations between our species (something we were quick to communicate to their military authorities) but it was a profoundly charitable act that we even stopped, took notice of them and agreed to the construction of this diplomatic embassy. If it could be called that.
We are in fact an insult to their senses; Our craniums dwarf theirs, resembling most closely their African elephants, without the ears, tusks or trunks. We shared the most in common morphologically with mammals, except that all land going animal life on our world has a hexapedal body plan.
Our own bodies are laid out such that two muscular forelegs dominate and bear most of our weight while two slender hind legs mostly help balance and prevent us falling backwards. Our dominant forelimbs have ten digits each, of which four on each paw are opposable.
As you might imagine this made us unappealing to the human public, our image was not the elegant (but impotent) E.T. they hoped for. We are instead by most descriptions “horrific space monsters”.
Despite every effort to gradually acclimate the average human to our appearance, the first formal meeting at their U.N. headquarters still resulted in a few faintings. One of our males, naked, could demolish their most fearsome war machines by directly grappling with it or even falling on top of it. Fully grown, each of us towered above an adult male human by roughly two and a half times, fifteen feet by their preferred metric. Measured, of course, by the length of a human foot.