“Can you show an anatomy diagram of your species please?” I asked. “Why?” came Alli’s blunt response. “Well I had this cool girlfriend at Uni. She was studying Human Movement and was into massage and yoga and herbs and stuff. Mum was getting into the same stuff with her degree at the time so I learned quite a bit having massages from both of them.” I paused hoping this would make sense but all I got was a blank look. “Massage is one of the ways we preen each other,” I said matter of factly and Alli smiled. “If I can see what muscle structures you have maybe I can do some massage an’ I can sort’f, do a cross species preening ...”
Alli gave me her big grin and twittered. It must’ve be her actual laugh and it was beautiful. Kinda like a Magpie song crossed with a Blue Wren’s call I’d reckon. She brought up an airscreen and there was an Otteroo in that Leonardo Da Vinci pose, slowly rotating. Quite beautiful really. I could see some the semi aquatic adaptations. The fur, the small ears positioned more to the top of the head and the slight webbing of the six digit hands and feet were the most obvious.
Alli waved her hand and the skin came away. The pouch was now very obvious and their was my first view of Otteroo reproductive organs. Two ovaries I suppose with a tube each leading to an oval shaped organ that attached to the surface near the base of the inside of the pouch. It looked half marsupial half monotreme to my very untrained eye. Definitely had to ask more about this later.
The internal organs vanished leaving only the muscles and bones. I reached to the screen and expanded the image so I could see the shoulder and neck structure better. I frowned as I couldn’t clearly remember the human myofascia properly so I brought up a human image in the same position and did a side by side comparison. It was amazing how similar some of the arrangements were. As my old girlfriend had told me, biomechanics is straight forward and muscles only ever pull one bone towards another. So it was obvious where the similarities and differences lay.
“Can you sit here and turn around,” I asked Alli and she sat in her awkward fashion on the low stool I pulled across to her from under the armchair she was sitting on. I sat in the armchair and she on the stool leaning against my legs. We sat facing the windows that look across to my neighbours yard and their dog was out there in the night huffing and growling as it walked up and down the fence. I hadn’t really thought of other animals and Alli but I suppose dogs in particular would sense the occasional difference in smell if her nanoskin wasn't filtering her breath properly. Let alone what that mutt can smell about my new renovations.
What is it with dogs, something about their sniffers being a hundred times more sensitive than humans. And that thing about a dog bonding with its human family more than with other dogs. Thirty five thousand years of co-evolution has made them more integrated with us than their own species. The anthropologist in me thought of all the things humans couldn’t do without dogs, and the aussie in me thought of all the native animals made extinct by the arrival of dingoes here only five thousand years or so ago. The wild crossbred dog problem though is now a horrible threat with kids around camp sites at risk of being mauled and eaten. Dad had taught us all to shoot as kids and feral dogs and cats had all been fair game. I wondered what sort of ecology Alli’s home world had and I really hoped that I’d get to see it soon.
I put my hands on Alli’s shoulder, “can you reduce your nanoskin to the minimum to keep us safe from each other?” I felt her skin fizz under my hands as it detuned and the details of her shoulders slowly changed and I linked my screen to my hands so that whatever I was touching showed in detail in another window. Slowly I got the feel of what was what and began using the massage I’d learnt without studying. Alli had a spine structure similar to ours, and her limbs attached with a sort of shoulder and hip. But where our shoulders are not attached to our spine so we can climb trees and so forth, hers were attached which must have given her extra strength for swimming and diving and holding onto prey.
I worked into her shoulders and felt the muscles twitch as something like a human jump reflex fired off when I held pressure into the belly of her main neck shoulder muscle, something like our Traps. “This is so interesting,” I said out loud. “Really!” Alli said sarcastically, “and here I was thinking you had finally worked out how to torture aliens!” and she twittered again.
“So why are we so similar?” I asked thinking out loud. “We are both hydrated carbon environment beings,” and Alli’s voice held that mix of pain and pleasure I’d learned to recognise as the sign of a good massage. “We both come from water worlds and carbon based ecologies. We share what you call Beta DNA as the most effective way to store and transfer biological information.” Alli paused and started purring. “Evolution will always achieve the most efficient structures for any environment. Our ecologies are similar so of course the biologies of our planets have evolved similar answers to the challenges of survival of the fittest.”
“Well I must congratulate you on remaining coherent,” I chuckled. “Someone starts massaging me and I just turn to jelly!” “Is that edible?” Alli asked. “Ha ha, smart arse!” I laughed at her.
“Shut up and just preen will you!” she said and she was definitely purring. What a lovely sound, I thought.