Symbios Read Free

relations. Making first impressions and all that crap.
    Everyone considered it a joke class — we’d visited hundreds of planets, and never encountered any life form smarter than a cockroach.
    Now I felt like that was the most important class I ever took.
    I began by using words and miming motions. Pointing to myself I said, man. Pointing at its ship I said, ship. And so on.
    It watched, and repeated, and within an hour it had picked up several verbs and began asking questions.
    “Man here long?” it said in my voice. Then it pointed to the ground.
    “Fifty cycles,” I said. I flashed fifty fingers, then pointed at the sun, slowly moving across the horizon.
    “More men?”
    “No.”
    “Ship?”
    “Broken.” I pulled up a nearby weed and cracked it in half, illustrating my point.
    It gestured at its own ship with a three fingered leg and also yanked a plant from the ground.
    “Ship broken.” It ripped the weed in two.
    “Man,” I said again, pointing to myself. Then I pointed at it.
    “Zabzug,” it said, pointing at itself.
    “Hello, Zabzug.”
    “Hello, Man.”
    And so began mankind’s historic first communication with an intelligent alien species.
    I was so excited I wasn’t even thinking about the other intelligent alien species I had just finished devouring.
    Voice Module 195579
    Record Mode:
    After communicating for several hours, Zabzug and I went back to my ship. He moved slower than I did, sometimes tripping over foliage. One time I helped him up, getting my first close look at those teeth on his scalp. How he could imitate me so perfectly with a mouthful of fangs like that was anyone’s guess.
    “Thank you, Man,” Zabzug said after getting back to his feet.
    I smiled at him. His teeth twitched, which I took to be a smile too.
    He was very excited at the sight of my ship, and began speaking rapidly in a series of grunts and snorts. I sat and watched him explore it top to bottom. He stopped in front of the pantry and stayed there a long time, snuffling, trying to open the metal door. Liquid poured down from his head and over his eye plate like tears.
    “Hungry,” Zabzug said. “No eat long time.”
    “Man hungry too,” I told him.
    He beckoned me over and we struggled with the pantry for a while, not budging the door a centimeter. Zabzug’s drool smelled like a sour musk, and being right next to him made me realize how big he really was. Three times my mass, easy.
    And those appendages of his had incredible strength behind them, putting huge dents in the thick steel door.
    But it was all for nothing. The pantry stayed closed.
    Voice Module 195580
    Record Mode:
    Zabzug explained to me how he crashed by drawing a very detailed schematic in the dirt. His ship runs on a bastardized form of fission, using a refined chemical to help control the reaction. I guess the chemical could best be described as a form of lubricant, as oil was used in combustion engines back on ancient earth.
    So basically he’s stranded here because he ran out of oil, stalled, and got sucked into the same wormhole as me.
    We made some limited talk about putting my power supply into his ship, but the parts were so fundamentally incompatible that it proved impossible.
    Zabzug tried eating some plants, doing me one better and actually swallowing a few. He became violently ill. I must admit to some perverse amusement at watching black foam erupt out of the top of his head like a volcano, but that only served to remind me how hungry I was.
    Two intelligent species, meeting for the first time in history, each with the capability of interstellar travel, and both starving to death.
    It might be funny if it were happening to someone else.
    Voice Module 195581
    Record Mode:
    After a week together, I consider Zabzug a friend. He’s told me much about his planet, which seems to be located in the Hermida Galaxy. Like humans, his species have used up their natural resources, and have begun scouring the universe for food, fuel, and