He looked more like a tree than an animal. Or a big mushroom jellyfish? I had never seen anything like it, not with my own eyes. And yet, he looked familiar. I could see them approaching our unit from my second-floor window. Where had I seen this particular alien species before? One, two, three, four, five legs. Then it hit me. My science textbook! My science class had a chapter on exobiology earlier in the year, and we had covered our house guest’s planet!
I dashed over to my backpack and sent papers flying. Nothing. Where was that textbook? I checked my desk, under the piles of papers and workbooks. Finally, I found it. The front was blue and green, with a cloud of Alpha Centaurian spores on the cover. (Boring as hell, those spores, and mindless, but visually very striking. They made for a good visual on the cover.) I flipped through the pages. Would it be faster to look it up on tap? Too late, already found it.
Pention – a life form from the Emerald Galaxy (formerly known as Fornax A), approximately sixty million light-years from Earth. Their home planet is Kkx (pronounced “KAX”), which is also home to the Graye Flyers (see p. 16). The adult Pention typically has five, six, or seven legs, arranged radially around their central axis. They begin their lives as a plant-like “tuberette” and develop animal-like characteristics, later on in life, as they mature. They are highly intelligent and social creatures, known for their rhythmic, musical languages, and for their mathematics. Like us, Pentions are carbon-based. Their metabolism involves nitric oxide, formaldehyde, methane and arsenic.
OK. So. Now I knew something about our houseguest. I didn’t think the 60 million light-years from the textbook was correct. Until very recently, astrophysicists thought that red shift was a good indicator of how far away stuff was, and so all of our distances were based on that. Once they realized that red shift was a red herring, they had to reconsider just about everything. But that’s not important to this story… I snapped myself out of my daydream and noticed a little doodle in the margin of my textbook.
Mrs. Compton had told me, laughing, that last year my book was Antonio White’s. The kid who made everybody laugh, all the time. It was like his superpower. This doodle could only have been his. He had drawn a crude picture of a five-legged creature’s butt — or butts, rather. Picture five lines, all coming out of a central point, like the spokes of a wheel, and an oval in each of the spaces between the legs. “Middle big mac buns” was scrawled sloppily with arrows pointing to the little ovals in between the legs. And there was a face too. Classic Antonio. I never would have considered the five butt angle. Antonio was a straight up genius.
Five butts, huh? This I had to see for myself. My dad and his guest were chatting in the living room, and I decided I needed to take a closer look.
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