I’m sure some of my colleagues will wonder if my affection for humanity represents an anomaly in me rather than any power or quality of theirs to affect other lives. As I watched the human lawyer representing the Wolfbeard household retreat and whisper angry words into a cell phone and felt an admittedly smug satisfaction at his distress, I also watched the departure of my homeworld’s representative to Earth’s capital city.

Zenti, dlamisans, liantis, and peoples of all races who either read these words or are present as I speak them aloud in pursuit of my degree, I understand your skepticism. But when I saw my representative withdraw from the House of Walker, I saw his tail wagging. I could see his ears twitching with the telltale signs of confusion. He didn’t know why but I did. And now having felt the grateful and warm embrace of a human father, I had no doubt he would start down the same road as my professor, myself, and my classmates.

The students my professor chose were all bound to branches of the Walker family tree. This is another particular facet of humanity that is found little outside of their species. Some species center themselves around an ancient matriarch, or a royal family who is said by fact or fiction to be a progenitor of their whole race. But beyond that, few races keep a close monitoring on their own immediate relatives, and almost none can tell you anything about their genetic relatives beyond one or two generations.

Humans however have an intense fascination with where they come from and who they come from. ‘Genealogy’ is an enormously popular hobby in which the houses of mankind trace back the travels, names, and lives of their forerunners. They gather letters, birth, death, marital records, stories from older relatives who keep their stories alive. This leads to very complex webs of marital relations. I happened to speak to the human publishing agent who had my book bound, and out of sheer curiosity, I asked about his ancestry. It turned out that he knew a great deal, that his ancestors were some of the first European settlers in North America, that one of the first anti-slavery meetings took place in a family home of his ancestors in Pennsylvania, that his ancestors invented the wig-wag and traded the patent for free rail travel for life.

A human family is a web of stories and lives that have more variety than the seven musical notes could ever produce in song.

And it was into this web that all of us were thrust. My professor went to the eldest family, and all of us were scattered among the children of his human’s children, and their families, and the families their children began that took us all over the world.

I suppose we were lucky that Earth’s capital city, Louisville, was also a popular transportation hub and had been for centuries, making it easy for everyone to come together for an easy pickup.

This human concern for family bonds might at first seem to run at odds with my original thesis. After all, if blood relations matter so much, how can they bond so well to anything not of their blood? My professor theorized that early human studies of evolution which postulated an exosolar origin of life were in fact correct. That life began on some other world and was launched into space, carried on debris after the cradle of life was impacted by an asteroid… and all races of the galaxy are bound together as a result. All of us born of the same ‘warm little pond’ of their Darwin’s imagination, but far, far from where he imagined it might be.

If this theory bears fruit, then the whole of the galaxy truly is one family, and every fight and battle is a civil war. I for one, as an academic, must hold back my judgment, raising it only because it is at least one possibility.

But my answer lies in their communal nature. Humans tamed wolves and formed a symbiotic relationship with them that carries down into the present day. I won’t say it does not gall me just a little bit to look very much like their pets. But perhaps it has helped with my own integration into their society as well, I look like what they’ve been bonding to for tens of thousands of years.

Stolen novel; please report.

Watching the representative depart and feeling the waves of relief at my back as the weeks of worry came to a close, I thought… I thought we were in for some relative peace and quiet while waiting for the ponderously slow human courts of law to do their work. You’d think I would be used to being wrong by this point.

I was right for at least a few hours, the dlamisa guards took to sitting on the front porch of the Walker home and while they were shocked when Rebecca brought them food, their tails gave away their best efforts to remain stoic and silent.

Human guards were added to their numbers before lunch was served, two men in black suits, they quickly struck up a rapport with my people’s guards. I observed unobtrusively as the humans opened conversation with their counterparts.

A dlamisa is usually reluctant to speak to someone unknown unless they need to, we can do it, of course. But we tend to be reticent about those with unfamiliar smells. There is an island chain with tribes of ancient lineage in the Earth’s pacific ocean, and when strangers meet there, it is the custom to engage in long conversations about ancestry, trying to find a connection between each other so that they have reason to avoid violence. Dlamisa will engage in a long consumption of scents, trying to find a common presence that will ease our discomfort with a stranger. A place we have both been, a person we both know, a food we have both recently eaten. Without a ‘scent opening’ it is very difficult for us to speak first.

Humans solved all that by way of the spoken word, asking questions far outside the realm of scent and drawing us in. Observing these two sets of guards mingling together, the two giant bald males began to ‘talk shop’ about the job they were on.

Presented with an opening and an invitation to speak first, the dlamisa guards relaxed at least a little, and I listened in from the other side of the door as the two opened up.

It may be hypocritical of me to have been so reluctant to capture the whispers of my humans, but so willing to listen in unobserved with the four guards outside the door, but it was too good a chance to see more of my kind interact with humans. The shop talk about their professions led my kind to discussion of their favorite techniques of security and their preferred hand weapons…

We are one of the few predator races to evolve intelligence after all, so it is perhaps unsurprising that when two predatory species with similar interests come together, either conflict or common ground become inevitable…

“See the nice thing about krav maga is that when you need a weapon your opponent is always kind enough to just ‘give it to you’...”

“Maybe so, but a good bite to the throat and you don’t have an opponent for very long…” I could hear the dlamisa security guard open and snap his jaw shut. The human guards whistled appreciatively.

“Can we see that up close… those are some impressive jaws, bet you could rip a man’s throat out…”

The appreciative whistles on the other side of the door suggested that my counterparts had obliged and opened their jaws again to let the humans get a closer look at our favorite weapon. The utter fearlessness of some humans never ceases to fascinate some races.

Many a human has made their final words, “Hey y’all, watch this!” and then done something insanely dangerous. As a species, it is a wonder that they, particularly their reckless adolescent males, reach adulthood in great numbers. For my counterparts outside, having another species willingly come close to their deadly jaws was equal parts confusing and fascinating… and exciting. The one nearest to the door was wagging his tail so hard that I thought someone was knocking.

“Of course, we don’t have the best mouths for that, but we make really nice substitutes…” I could hear the humans outside opening their belt carriers and removing the tools of their trade. The buzzing noise of a taser, the tap of a thin metal baton against stone, and then the tap of phone screens.

“There’s a long history to human weapons, these are some of our favorite ones throughout history…” and the low rumble of my own people appreciating a very different cultural exchange from the sort I was engaged in, carried on.

When I left, the embassy security guard from our homeworld was saying, “A joint forces operation with the terran military might be worthwhile.”

That, incidentally, is where the first joint military operation between races got its start. The human security guard reached out to a former officer who reached out to his son, a current officer of high rank and after some simulations between himself and the dlamisan military high command… well that is how the story was relayed to me.

It’s fortunate that I left and wrote that down immediately after it happened, because had I waited it might have been lost in the chaos that began when the reporters showed up.