Morning has broken after a night of hiking, and we have reached a fairly large area of land, around ten acres or so. The forest has been cleared here, and in its place are lush green and gold pastures. White post and rail fencing has been installed across the land. In some of the fields, alien goats graze. In others, crops grow, and in still others, fruit trees are lined up in a tidy fashion. It is a small and idyllic pastoral scene, gently rolling in the middle of the wilderness. It gives me a pang of yearning for a place I never knew, an odd sort of homesickness rising from the depths of my DNA. I have only ever known training simulations, wild terrain, and space stations. This is something different. This is a collaboration of sentient consciousness and nature, and it is very satisfying to gaze upon.
“What’s a bridge?”
“We refer to our territory as bridges,” Gruff says. “It’s an archaic term, lost to history.”
“And the fences? The white fences? That’s also archaic?”
“Easier to see against the green. Easy to see when they are damaged.”
This is not what I expected. At all. I was expecting something primitive and probably filthy. I was expecting the living quarters of an animal.
A path winds between the pastures. They are laid out in organic shapes, and so the path is also a winding one, bordered on each side by bushes and shrubs nibbled into tidy arrangements by the goats who put their heads through the rails and indulge themselves on shoots and leaves that venture too close. This doesn’t feel alien. It feels pastoral, and inexorably, inexplicably, human. I look at Gruff and I see complete alienness. I see a massive muscular body, a light pelt of fur, I see side-slitted alien eyes and the horns that set him far apart from any human man. I see a beast made to fight and rut and conquer the wild. And yet he lives in what feels like something out of an ancient storybook. A human one.
The hairs on the back of my neck have started to prick up. The wordscommon ancestorhave begun to dance through my mind. The most obvious point of commonality is the fact we all have goats. They have goats. We have goats. They look more like goats than we do, but…
“You’re cute when you’re confused,” he smiles.
“This is not what I thought I would find,” I tell him. “It feels like home. Not a home I’ve ever been to, or lived in, but a home, nonetheless. Something very strange is going on here. You should be more alien than this. I should be more alien than this. We should be incomprehensible to each other.”
“Should we? Who says that?”
“I…. I guess I was always taught that aliens would be very strange, and completely different than we are, that alien worlds would give rise to creatures very strange. But you’re not strange. And this isn’t… wait. Where is everybody?”
“This is my territory. I live here alone. Or I did. Until I found you.”
I was expecting, well, bracing, to be greeted by a tribe of aliens. Instead, a few dozen goats lift their heads and bleat at us as we go past, clearly expecting food. I know that sound. That’s aput things in my belly, or we are going to have a problem, sound.
“So where are the other people. The ones like you? Where are the women?”
It strikes me that I have not encountered a single female of his species yet, though I wouldn’t blame them from staying away from an area where males roam looking to fuck anything with a pulse and a hole.
“There are no females. Few females, anyway. That is why the wandering males are so aggressive with anything remotely female,” Gruff explains. He does not go into more detail than that, and I am left wondering what has happened here. I thought he wanted me here in order to meet his family, but I guess he never said that. Maybe he saidherdand I assumed he meant others like him but he really meant his herd of goats. Maybe we’re still quite a lot alien to each other in spite of superficial commonalities.
“Come,” he says. “The house is up ahead.”
The house was hidden by cherry-type foliage, red blossoms that create an enchanted walkway between gnarled trunks and roots. There is an air of undeniable fantasy about this place. I feel as though I have been transported into another realm.
“Oh my!”
The house is a thing of beauty. It must be made from the same wood these red cherries seem to be made out of. It is a large fairytale farmhouse, red wood planking painted white around the sills and sashes. The door is white too, a little worn at the bottom, and stands ajar to reveal an entrance straight into a large and welcoming kitchen where a fire burns in a big, old potbellied iron stove.
“Gruff. Did you make this?”
“I did,” he says, with no small amount of pride.
I guess it makes sense that this would be a rustic paradise. It was made by one man, and there are probably only so many ways wood can be hewn and shaped and then constructed into a house. I don't know why I anticipated a particularly odd structure. Roofs have to be pitched, or rain will pool on them. Walls have to have windows, or the house will be dark. I wonder if all our universal exploration will end up revealing that there are a few simple ways do do most things properly.
“This is very nice,” I compliment him, meaning it. It feels so cozy and homey. I can smell his musk here too, but in a comforting way, not in a sexually maddening one. Getting laid has helped process some of those pheromonal urges. There is not much in the way of decor, but there are benches in the kitchen and blades with which food has been chopped. A root vegetable sits partially deconstructed on a well-worn block, as if he was in the middle of preparing a meal when he was distracted by something. Clothes hang on a line that has been strung near the stove, but not so near it will catch alight.
“Do you weave your own fabrics?”
“No,” he says. “I trade for those. There is a weaver several weeks’ journey from here. I send my cheeses and raw fleeces to him, and he sends his cloth to the tailor, who…” Gruff breaks off. “It’s a chain of trade.”
“It’s cottage industry,” I proclaim. “You are practically human.”
Gruff looks insulted for a moment, which in turn insults me.
“We are not human,” he says. “We live in peace, and we do not send invading forces out to other planets to see what we can steal from them.”