When Kyshryn set out from the Safiric Nebula, it was with cargo and an important mission. His people, a towering arthropodal race, long and thin with delicate, chitinous exteriors and sensory antennae which perceived the universe as a pageant of chemicals, had sent out probes to worlds thought habitable. Though they’d neared FTL speeds, the galaxy was a vast place, and it was centuries before the probes reached their destinations.

The probes sent back several negative reports, as expected. But a few promising surveys were returned—and one that was peerless.

The planet was about the same size as their own, not tidally locked, atmosphere primarily a nitrogen-oxygen blend. Water coated the planet in liquid and was frozen at the poles, and data from the probe implied a slew of biomes as well as a diversity of native life.

To think they’d been fortunate enough to stumble onto a garden world!

Kyshryn, one of his people’s foremost xenobiologists, was chosen to staff a one-being craft laden with several fertilized eggs. The ship would coast along on autopilot for several of his species’ lifetimes, both Kyshryn and the ova frozen. The scientist would be periodically unthawed to ensure there were no issues. The plans were made; great shelled claws drifted over one another in farewell. Then, the cargo safely loaded, Kyshryn’s journey commenced.

A voyage of ten thousand years took, to his experiencing, about a month. There were no issues—not until the very end.

His vessel coasted out of slipspace within the blue marble’s orbit and that’s when Kyshryn realized something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. As slipspace melted into reality, he realized too late that the composition of the planet’s atmosphere had changed in the intervening eons.

The planet was now coated by an almost invisible cloud of debris, most of it metal and some of it derelict, and said debris was on a collision course with his craft. Though he was no longer FTL—in fact, he was moving infinitesimally slow compared to his former speed—it was impossible to veer away in time. The vessel crashed into the debris and he was sent on a collision course down towards the planet, his fate completely beyond his influence.

---

Rural Montana. It was vast. It was empty. It was sweeping.

It was just what Tanya needed.

The young woman spread her arms out on the old ranch house she’d inherited from her grandpa. It had been an unexpected gift, but one she’d appreciated, especially after such an ugly breakup with Clancy. A retreat from the bustle and noise and heat and heartbreak of Phoenix and a skip north by a thousand or so miles had been what she’d needed to hit reboot on her life. The nearest ‘town’ was little more than a gas station, a convenience mart, and a few motels and was a drive of nearly fifty minutes, provided the weather didn’t leave the roads in choppy conditions. Tanya didn’t mind. The quietude and solace were just what she wanted.

And as she was pondering that, an honest-to-god meteorite crashed into the woods about half a mile away.

The impact was like a low-magnitude quake, knocking Tanya on her ass with a surprised squeal. Far above her, the distorted, muted sound of the sound barrier breaking rocked the atmosphere.

For a few minutes, all she could do was sit there on her porch, legs splayed, eyes wide. Her chair rocked of its own accord from the aftershocks. Inside, a picture had fallen from its hanging, the glass shattering.

“Fuck’s sake,” she muttered, finally picking herself up and dusting herself off. “What else could go wrong?”

The hike from her property into the woods wasn’t a hard one, but she still took her time in case other meteorites were on their way. Thankfully, her fears were unfounded; by the time she arrived at the impact site, she was confident there was nothing else coming down.

She quickly found herself agape with shock. The material smoking down in the crater was warped and mangled, but indisputably a spaceship. It was about as tall as those big Volkswagen vans they had in the sixties, and half again as long; a smooth oval of unknown metal, once sleek and solid, now cratered and charred. It was still recognizable as some sort of tech via distant hums and pneumatic hisses and the glow of lights.

A feathery sound brushed her ear; Tanya whirled, seeing a real-life, honest-to-god alien staring back at her, a big bug like in those sci-fi flicks.

Her mouth wordlessly tried to speak and her eyes rolled back into her head, and as she collapsed, she was positive these were her final moments.

She needn’t have been so dramatic.

When she came to, she was laid out on a woven rug inside of her ranch house, the fire she’d left merrily burning in her stove now smoldered down to embers. A chittering sound met her ears as the whatever-it-was investigated her kitchen.

Ah, there you are. Awake.

The sensation was so disorienting that Tanya almost fainted again. The ‘speech’ was not speech at all. It was… was like having a thought impressed into her brain that quickly faded away, like a handprint left in a new mattress. It was not so much words as ideas and concepts that communicated themselves to her. The communication was through scent as best she could tell; a foreign typhoon of aromas, subtle, seemed to wash over her. The smells were indisputably not of Earth, so her brain filled in the next best approximations. There was a breath of mango and cinnamon followed by the pungency of fresh tar, all overlaid with the smell—yes, the smell—of a new violin. The change in aroma occurred in milliseconds and immediately impressed the alien’s thoughts into her.

“H-How…?” she choked.

Ah, so you communicate aurally, the reply came. We had considered that a definite possibility for other sapients. We use pheromones, and I’m pleased to see that they translate.

Shakily, Tanya turned to view Earth’s newest visitor.

It—he? She got a definite masculine vibe from it—was a tremendous… well, insect was the only term that really fit. He was closest in appearance to a jungle centipede—the sort you saw on nature programs that lived in the Amazon and grew to be the length of a man’s forearm. He, though, was probably a good ten feet long, his body flat and as broad as the width of her shoulders. His armor was a soft reddish-brown, interlocking together in solid plates with spidery limbs sticking out of each plate. And his face… it was vaguely grasshopperlike with its big eyes and mandibles, but flat like the rest of him, with two long, wiry antennae.

She swallowed dryly.

Surely you realize that if I meant you harm, I had opportunity already. I could tell by scent this place belonged to you, so I took you to it. He scuttled forward, and Tanya stopped breathing as his antennae swept over her, trying not to flinch.

He paused. Surely I am not so frightening? I know that your planet boasts many creatures like me.

“None of them are as big as you,” she said. “And a lot of people—erm, humans like me—consider them to be… scary.” She’d almost said pests, but decided that wouldn’t make a good first impression.

I see. ‘Humans,’ you say… When our probes surveyed your planet ten thousand of your years ago, there was no sign the hairy simians were on the cusp of achieving true sapience. Ten thousand years is a hiccup on a cosmic scale, but you’ve been busy evolutionarily, haven’t you? As he ‘spoke,’ the scents wafting out of him shifted swiftly, reminding Tanya first of decaying leaves, then of fresh-cut grass, then of treacle. Regardless, had we known of you ‘humans,’ we would not have selected your planet for colonization so cavalierly.

“C-colonization?” Tanya said, sitting up rigidly. “W-wait, but—”

Oh, don’t worry. His… ‘voice’ wasn’t the right term for it; his mood, the timbre of his scent-based communication, was suddenly inflected with a far-off quality. I survived the crash, but my cargo was not so lucky. The eggs shipped along were destroyed, each and every one. He took his antenna from her and moved in a circle, pacing almost absently around her. I suppose I could repopulate… but it seems crass to try and displace native sapients, to say nothing that by dint of numbers alone, any war would be brutally one-sided.

His chitinous legs tap-tap-tapped across the wooden floor of the ranch house as he uncoiled from her. “Repopulate… how?” Tanya asked. “There aren’t others of your species on Earth, are there?”

The pheromones took on an almost amused, playful scent, like lilacs laced with capsaicin. Can your species not sire yourselves on others? he queried. Well, I suppose due to the variety of species on your planet, that’s to be expected. Nearly every life form on mine is an arthropod like my people, and though we are the only sapients, it is simplicity to breed ourselves using them…

“You think that would translate to species on a different planet?” Tanya asked. She couldn’t help but feel skeptical.

The pheromones couldn’t hide the newcomer’s amusement. I suppose if I wanted to put it to the test we could see, he replied with an undercurrent of supreme confidence.

Almost without realizing it, Tanya found herself comfortable with this interstellar interloper. He was, despite his hugeness and formidably intimidating visage, more or less just a guy, and they exchanged names—Tanya, Kyshryn—and she awkwardly invited him to stay in her ranch house’s loft.

As she slept on her side, hearing him scuttle overhead, the sounds creaking through the wood like pebbles striking the boards, Tanya couldn’t help but wonder—what had she gotten herself into?

---

Kyshryn made several expeditions to the crash site over the remaining days, sometimes accompanied by his new ‘human’ friend, sometimes alone. She seemed hesitant to discuss the eggs, but he didn’t know why. They weren’t his, and should he so choose, they were easily replaceable. Only as he came to understand their species—they only bore one child at a time and typically mated for life, to say nothing that they couldn’t rely on other species to repopulate in times of crises—did he come to understand that children were both more difficult to obtain for humans and spent more time with their parents, so the bonds were closer. She was projecting an imagined pain onto him.

Almost none of his tech was intact, and Tanya seemed paranoid that the ‘G-men’ would investigate at any time and haul him away for dissection, so after salvaging what he could, Kyshryn enacted the liquidation procedure. His ship dissolved into a mass of melted chrome that cooled into an inorganic lump squatting at the bottom of the crater.

No ‘G-men’ showed up that Kyshryn knew of, but about five days post-impact, a team of scientists stopped by Tanya’s house looking for the source. She led them to the crater and kept Kyshryn hidden in her loft for a few days while crews of humans arrived with crude-looking yet undoubtedly effective technology to excavate his ship. The liquidation was successful; they failed to pick up that it was anything other than an inert heap of metal and hauled it away to be catalogued and stored away in some lab.

And that, as Tanya said, was that.

“Wow,” she said, watching the last of the trucks drive away. “I actually pulled one over on Uncle Sam. If only the IRS was this easily to fool…”

Kyshryn didn’t know what this IRS was, but he was glad to finally be free to explore this Earth uninhibited. After all, even if his plans of colonization had been smashed by a human satellite, he was still a xenobiologist with a whole planet to catalogue. Hopefully what tech he’d salvaged wouldn’t be difficult to repurpose into an ansible to direct the information back home, but even if not, simply satisfying his native curiosity would have to be enough to provide meaning to his new life.

The planet Earth was vast, with a diversity of biomes; there would be no way for Kyshryn to catalogue it all in his lifetime. The sheer daunting nature of the task wasn’t intimidating to him; it was a challenge, a seemingly insurmountable one. How better to test himself?

One day after the human scientists departed, Tanya gazed at him from her veranda, watching as he ever-so-delicately arranged every type of plant life he could find. Strangely, she found some plants to be more special than others; the colored ones with scents that relied on his smaller doppelgangers to reproduce were most dear to her, while the long, thin stalks she more or less ignored, treating them as an extension of the soil itself. Others, prickled and hardy, she called ‘weeds,’ treating them as pests.

He had politely asked one day for the opportunity to catalogue her crops, to which she’d raised an eyebrow. The gesture was unnecessary; the mild confusion radiated off of her in scents and smells. Kyshryn found the fact that humans spurned olfactory communication in favor of sound to be fascinating, given how important a role scents still played in their biology.

“Crops? I don’t grow crops, but my neighbors do,” she’d replied.

Clacking, Kyshryn had glanced at the colored plants with their rich smells. Since she devoted so much time and energy caring for them, then surely…?

Just as he had done, the human read his mood without him having to say it. “Oh, those aren’t food,” she said. “They’re flowers. We keep them for… they’re, uh…” She trailed off, apparently at a loss for words. “They look and smell nice,” she finished, somewhat lamely.

So you cultivate simply for the aesthetic? Intriguing. Kyshryn found himself wishing that he were a cultural scientist, not a xenobiologist. He could piece together the chemistry and structure of these humans as a species, but the impulses that drove them as a society were far more fascinating—and also beyond his ken. Yet you told me your species are omnivores. How do you acquire plant matter? Foraging?

“Foraging? I mean, my ancestors did, thousands of years ago, around the time you sent that probe. But since then, usually just a few people cultivate a lot of plants, and then they give the rest to others.”

That is quite generous of them.

“Well, we do pay them.” She blinked. “You, uh… know what money is, right?”

Transactional material used as a substitute for labor in exchanges, Kyshryn said. My people used it for most of our history, though upon achieving a certain level of technology, every individual found themselves with excess and it lost its meaning.

A touch settled on his exoskeleton, making him clack with shock. He’d gotten lost in memories despite his best intentions. Tanya was staring down at the array of plants, resting her hand on his shell as she did so. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

Kyshryn clacked again. Truth be told, the touch of the human felt… pleasing, to him. He had felt nothing when he had gently dragged her from the crash site after their first meeting, but now? Perhaps it was only familiarity, but he came to appreciate her.

Or was something else at play?

Careful, he chided himself. The hormonal suppressors died in the crash, and your body only knows that there are no other of your kind around that it can see. The urge to repopulate will grow. That would be a problem indeed. He had no intention of souring his people’s potential relations with the first other sapients they’d encountered by succumbing to base urges. He would simply have to marshal his self-control.

It is my job, he told her. I was to safeguard the eggs shipped with me, colonize this planet, and categorize all information about its life. The former task is lost, and the second is in extremely poor taste now that I know your kind are sapient, but the third? I can do the third. He brushed one foreleg against a long, thin leaf he’d sawn out of the ground. (‘Grass,’ the human had called it.)

“I see,” Tanya said. Then she frowned and bent over, removing her hand from his shell to poke at the material he’d collected.

His body missed her touch.

“Oh, this isn’t a plant,” she said, gently touching one of the things he’d collected. “Easy mistake.”

What is it?

“A mushroom. They’re a type of fungus.”

What is a ‘fungus’? Kyshryn asked. Certainly it cannot be an animal, can it?

“No, it’s…” Tanya trailed off, scratching her hair.

(Hair. A feature of warm-blooded creatures on this planet that birthed live young and nursed them with milk. Kyshryn’s best approximation of it was that it was like being coated with thousands upon thousands of fine, insensate antennae. Human hair came in a variety of colors. Tanya’s was a coppery red that reminded Kyshryn of his people’s shells. He found it attractive and was disconcerted that he did so.)

“I really should have paid more attention in biology class,” Tanya said after a moment’s pause. “Fungi are like… they’re sort of like plants, but not? Most of them are parasitic, like they grow on plants or animals or their corpses. Some of them are edible, but others are toxic, so it’s best not to eat them if you don’t know.” She shrugged apologetically. “I’m really not an expert, sorry. But I know they’re not plants.”

Kyshryn released a small burst of pleased pheromones, communicating his appreciation of this insight. There was nothing like this on his home planet… how fascinating. Blushing and shuddering as the smell of his pheromones washed over her, Tanya fell in beside Kyshryn, placing her hand back on his shell. The touch distracted him. Yes, there were lifeforms here on this planet that Kyshryn was quite fond of.

---

That night, with Kyshryn dozing in the loft as usual, Tanya couldn’t sleep. She brought her hand out from under the covers. She’d rested it on the alien earlier that day, and his scent—playfully spicy, yet almost floral in a way—could still be faintly discerned on it. She breathed in and shuddered, feeling a heady pressure building in her loins. Something about his scent just…