The Floating Cradle

Three

I've got no problem with them. I mean, I've never actually met one, but I see them on TV and the Internet all the time. We had a unit on them in fifth grade where we all made papier-mâché models of their home world, Cognata, wore tantic clothes, and listened to their popular music (which is terrible, by the way).

They live in a solar system about a hundred and seventy light years away, on a planet slightly smaller than Earth, and which doesn't tilt as much on its axis. They stand a little taller than humans, but we're roughly the same size. They have lungs and brains and blood that carries oxygen, but they've got to wear compression suits for a couple hours every night because our atmosphere's Nitrogen content is greater than theirs, or the pressure is different, or something like that. Their skin is reddish-brownish (some darker, some lighter, but there's not as big a range as in humans) and doesn't have any hair on it, though they do have these scale things that grow out of their heads and lower backs; the scales look a lot like feathers, but tanta can make them go rigid and sharp if they want to. From what I've seen on TV, it only happens when they're surprised or frightened. As for their feet, they're weird, like a dog's crossed with an owl's crossed with a camel's. Tanta don't wear shoes if they can help it, which is unfortunate, because I really hate looking at those things.

I was a fetus when they reached Earth, but Lord knows we've all heard the story a thousand times. When their ship was gliding past Saturn, the tanta co-opted several of our satellites to transmit a missive to the Earth at large. It took two days before anyone managed to convert it into a usable format and share it on the Internet.

The first time I saw the video, five or six years after the fact, I laughed: around twenty tanta are packed close together, some of them sitting on others' laps or discreetly elbowing their neighbors for more room. They're all looking straight ahead, blinking, as the center tantum speaks slowly, her voice like a chainsaw duetting with a lowing heifer. The translation goes something like this (tanta have a funny habit of saying two things at once, but I've done my best to separate speech from sub-speech):

"Hello to all the peoples of the third planet from this star. | It looks so beautiful—you should be proud. | We have traversed space for the equivalent of four of your planet's years to arrive here. | It was a nice trip, really—we're going a bit stir crazy but we planned well and everyone's healthy. | We seek only a future of friendship and learning, and are most willing to share our knowledge with you as well. | You seem utterly fascinating—we listened to this metal disc thing on the way, and wow!"

She then brandishes a large golden record—one of two affixed to the Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977. As the story goes, the tanta had used an incredibly sensitive remote probe to pinpoint Earth's location from radio waves almost three decades before, but delayed launching a manned expedition for the sort of banal reasons you'd expect: money, technological constraints, philosophical disputes, war, religion. They did get off the ground eventually, with most of Cognata's blessing, and on the way they happened to scoop up dinky old Voyager 1, the ultimate, one-in-a-billion message in a bottle. I guess, if I'm being honest, that part does blow my mind a little.

But I still don't know how I feel about tanta and humans mixing—not breeding, obviously (that's impossible) but in general, as friends and more. In the seventeen years since first contact, over seven million tanta have come to Earth and stayed, working and living mostly on the coasts and in cities. I'm not saying it's an invasion—twice as many humans have opted to go to Cognata, God knows why—but it's mixed up the fundamentals of being human, I think.

This is usually the part where an online troll would call me a close-minded, conservative cousin-fucker, but hear me out. It just doesn't seem healthy, giving your mind and heart to a being that originated across incomprehensible leagues of dark, freezing space, a being who shares none of our evolution as Homo sapiens. And isn't that what we learned in biology class, that evolution is the whole reason that humans can love at all, that we love because love first meant survival?

(Mama would say God created love, but I've read Genesis and love's not mentioned any of those seven days.)

Choosing to love a tantum is like sending something precious into the void—what is able to appreciate it out there? What are the odds a tantic soul could ever truly touch a human one? I fear the essence of human emotion—and to be fair, the tantic equivalent, whatever it is—would slip through the cracks of a receptacle never intended to hold such a substance, like water through cloth, light through glass. It's like trying to love a tree or a robot. The love drifts off like wasted heat.