According to Quotidian health and safety standards, the air supply of Koen's room circulated through a mucus-coated mesh above the ceiling. This marvel of chemical and genetic engineering captured and destroyed all potential pathogens, as well as any traces of the smell from the rest of the embassy.
Mark, Laura, and Ambassador Li therefor had no idea what they were missing. They were back in the meeting room, tablets held at the ready, trying not to appear nervous in front of each other. Laura was worried about Koen, and feeling foolish for it, but Mark and Li were dreading their guest.
"She should be here any minute," said Mark, looking at the door.
Li grunted. Laura nodded absently.
Mark wished he could stop sweating. "Translator," he said, "where is our guest?"
"Quotidian Sty mix Sty 2-iota is 2 meters away."
Mark and Li both jerked in their seats, staring at the door. It was more than two meters away.
"Clarify?" asked Mark. "Our guest is already in this room?"
And three of the ten humans in the world heard a knock.
Ambassador Li rose, bowing toward the door. "Welcome, Quotidian mix Sty!"
The two other humans followed the lead of the high-ranking male, but Mark didn't bow. He'd been watching the door, and he didn't think anyone or anything had knocked on it.
Li cleared his throat and gave Mark an expression that eloquently communicated, "I shouldn't have to tell you to go check the hallway."
Mark scrambled to obey, but while he was looking up and down the short, empty corridor, the knock came again. It was followed by a scratching, as of chitinous teeth against transparent epoxy.
Mark pulled his head back into conference room and turned to see Laura and Ambassador Li already looking out the window.
Where an enormous eye stared back at them.
The humans would have said it reminded them of a toad's eye, because none were sure what a toad's eye looks like. Toads in fact have the same sorts of pupils humans do. This eye, however, did not have a pupil. It had a pair membranes, opaque but for a single transparent strip each. One membrane stretched over the other like the skin of an onion, and its transparent strip ran vertically up the middle. The inner membrane's strip ran horizontally across the eye's equator. The result was a dark, filmy cross inscribed on a watery, moss-colored orb the size of a grapefruit. It quivered.
The humans swallowed, throats gone dry. The males widened their stances, as if to protect a cave. Laura thought about calling Koen.
The eye receded and rotated out of view, bringing to bear an array of jaws like Swiss-army-knives. Finger-sized elements unfolded and scritched again on the window.
"The Quotidian," said Ambassador Li.
Mark calculated whether he should point out that they ought to let their guest inside. No, the Ambassador liked to give orders, not receive them, and he seemed inclined to protect Laura from the slimy nonhuman.
So Mark waited until the Ambassador figured out what he ought to say, felt ashamed that he hadn't said it sooner, and snapped, "what are you waiting for? Open the window."
"Of course, sir." Mark slid forward as smoothly as a butler. He fiddled with the catches on the window while the Quotidian perched outside in the rain, eye vibrating with un-guessable emotion.1
"I would never expect our guest to come through the window," Ambassador Li muttered to himself. "Is this normal? We will have to take firmer control of this meeting."
"I'll call Koen," Laura said.
"Press the two opposite catches at the same time," said Mark's translator bug, at the command of his guest. He did so and the window swung inward, letting in a blast a of warm, mud-smelling air and a trio of frog-sized Quotiditian males brought along for the purposes of ritual negotiation and snacking.
"What are those?" demanded Li, and their guest let herself in.
Four blunt-tipped, origami limbs reached past the frame of the window and anchored themselves to the wall. The jaws thrust into the room, jointed finger-teeth clasped politely.
Mark and Ambassador Li looked at each other.
"Come in," said the Ambassador eventually.
Their guest did so, and Mark edged past her to close the window before anything else followed.
The city that the humans called the Zogreion dangled beneath and around them, framed by the leaves of the ivy-like plant (actually a kind of slime-mold) that grew up the face of this building. Mark peered more closely at the edges of the window.
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"Oh," he said, "I never noticed the hand-holds."
He closed the window to find the Quotidian looking at him.
A Quotidian's transparent eye-membranes are not as clear as a human's cornea (and they only have the one eye), so in order to gather enough information to make a useful picture, the eye must move constantly. The membranes stretched and compressed, tugging the pupil-strips up and down and side to side. The black square where the two strips overlapped grew and shrank, flickered, and scanned across the room, the table, the two humans.
At first, it focused on their crotches.
The mouth chattered and squelched.
"You have inexpressive faces."
Mark followed the flitting gaze of his guest and cleared his throat. "My, uh, face is up here?"
The Quotidian glanced upward, and she squelched again.
"Oh," said Mark's translator. "Your body is upside-down. I remember. Therefor, I will sit on the ceiling."
She skittered up the wall, nimble as a cockroach, and crouched between the lights, goggling down at them.
"No mucus," she said. "Most unhygienic."
"Our sincerest apologies," said Mark. "Next time we can meet in your office."
"Invaders will be dismembered."
Mark glanced at Laura, who was talking to her translator.
"No, I think it's too late to make a batch of jello."
Ambassador Li cleared his throat. "I am Li Xuanlian UN Ambassador to the Convention of Sophonts –"
"I know that," said the Quotidian.
"Um, and this is our Cultural Attaché, Mark Cafarelli and – "
"I know that too."
A bead of murky water formed on the Quotidian's dangling abdomen and plipped onto the conference table. Huddled in the branches of the dead ficus, a snack said, "mbip!"
"Yes," said Laura. "I think we do have ham somewhere. I'll get it."
"What is your name?" Ambassador Li asked the ceiling with all the confidence he could manufacture.
"I revise my opinion of your intelligence downward. You should already know, but since apparently you do not, I will inform you that I am Sty mix Sty 2-iota, the freak-show wrangler."
Mark and Li looked at each other, both intensely envious of Laura, who had found an excuse to leave the room.
"You said she was a cultural event planner," murmured the Ambassador.
"Translation error?" said Mark desperately. Why hadn't Laura left them with her translator bug? The whole point of hiring that Dutch guy was he was supposed to help with messes like this.
"I said I am a freak-show wrangler. A organizer of performing animals. A cultural event planner."
"I see." Ambassador Li smoothed back his hair and assumed his most dignified expression. "Let's sit and talk, shall we?"
"I am already crouched in a defensive and comfortable position."
"Good, good." Li glanced toward the Laura-less door. "Can we get you anything to drink?"
"Water flows abundantly for all, and you cannot presume to control it. Why do you not offer me something to eat? The snacks I brought are for you."
"Of course they are," said Li as Mark stiffened in his chair. Something cold and slimy had just landed on his pant-leg. It hopped back off.
***
An explanation of Quotidian breeding practice is probably in order.
Like many rotifers, Quotidians can reproduce both sexually and parthenogenetically, where a female gives birth to clones of herself. These clone-daughters are almost always born in pairs, and look rather like caterpillars. They are carried on the abdomen, where they can climb down into the cloaca and drink the yolk-fluid excreted by a pair of glands in there. These are called the "vitellaria," which is not important to the current discussion.
What's important is kin selection.
Any self-replicating organism, be it chordate, rotifer, or Vann Neumann robot, will have ancestors. Every one of those ancestors must have successfully reproduced at least once. Very likely, those ancestors were lucky enough to be born with one variation or another that made them good at reproduction. Opposable thumbs, a bigger brain, or high-powered lasers all confer reproductive advantage. But what about altruism?
Imagine an animal that selflessly laid down its life for some other animal, that gave of itself so that others could be happy. Now imagine how many offspring such a creature will manage to produce before it sacrifices itself. A student of evolutionary biology would be forgiven for assuming there is never any reason for anybody to be nice to anybody else.
But consider the clone. Any clone by definition has all the same genes as any other clone. An early proto-Quotidian might be born with a mutation that prompted her to give of herself even unto death, and that mutation might still be passed on. Assuming that the benefactor of her sacrifice was another clone, of course.
Thus it was that the Quotidians evolved: as generous as worker bees within a hive. Business between hives, though, could get quiet competitive indeed. To smooth those relationships, you need a male Quotidian.
A male Quotidian is a hand-sized, brightly-colored creature born in late fall or early winter. They have no digestive systems and not much brains. Traditionally, they are either given as diplomatic gifts to other clone-communities or, with ritual solemnity, eaten.
Of course, Quotidians take very seriously the selection of which males to give away and which to make into stew (or in some cultures, pickles). For them, an understanding of heredity preceded the evolution of general intelligence. Indeed, Quotidian philosophers argue that their ancestors intentionally bred into themselves the ability to have such a thing as intention in the first place.
Koen had told Li and Mark all this, and it made them very uncomfortable.
A politically-conscious human (as both Li and Mark were) might attempt to see the Quotidians as perfect communists and feminists. After all, they had no concept of property within a female-led clone-line. Between lines, they dealt with each other more ruthlessly than could any human Libertarian. To keep their civilization from flying apart, they enforced rigid rules, both bureaucratic and social, that would have warmed the heart of any imam, priest, or Central Committee bureaucrat. To top it all off, they practiced enthusiastic eugenics.
From the human perspective, the Quotidians seemed to combine the very worst aspects of every political system in history. Those few Quotidians who knew anything at all about humans thought the same, but in the other direction.
1 It was impatience.