Quenari
Our racism was strange to them and their racism was strange to us.
The Quenari only saw in the radio, microwave, and infra-red waves. They had huge bulbous eye apparatus on tops of their head stalks in amongst orange tufts of muppet hair. They had three legs that spread like a tripod and ended in hand-like, eight-toed feet. Three tentacles spread equidistantly around their body stalks and drooped semi-rigid like tails when they weren’t in use. The most alien race we’d encountered so far and the most ridiculous looking.
But aside from the orange tufts of hair, they were all blue. The exact same shade of earth-sky blue.
Under their skin, they had naturally occuring radio transmitters, heat sinks, and microwave generators. To the Quenari there were seven variations of these emitters that made them as different to each other and a Rembrandt was to a Pollock. These skin patterns were invisible to us. The Quenari remained a pallid, uniform blue to our eyes.
And to them, we were all the same boring patches of black, blue, and red that our body heat produced naturally, with no radio or microwaves to speak of. Our translator pendants made us all sound similar so they didn’t notice accents or languages, either.
Their sexual activity was a long five-stage egg donor, carrier, fertilizer, mitosis generator and harvester affair that held no parallel on earth. Again, it was the subdermal beacons that spelled out who was who in that regard. Very social beings and large family units as a result. Our rather quick and internalized procreation was odd to them but our choice of partner was of no consequence. They could barely tell the men, women and genderfluid people from each other and never thought to ask in any case, sensing social awkwardness. Sexual orientation and gender held no meaning for them when it came to us and we were hopelessly lost in the same way looking at them.
Appearance wise, we were mostly homogenous to them and they were mostly homogenous to us.
It changed us. News of them spread and they infested our consciousness like Dr Seuss creatures. Indeed, several children’s books about them were published and were popular.
Instead of calling each other racist or sexist, we started calling each other Quenarish. Or Blue. The ridiculousness of it all altered our society in profound and lasting ways. Subtly at first but more and more, like an unspoken agreement around the planet, we measured each other on the basis of tenacity, knowledge, and strength of character rather than gender or race. As a people, we saw the Quenari as ridiculous and petty and beneath us.
Maybe we substituted one form of racism for another but it helped us.
tags
The Quenari only saw in the radio, microwave, and infra-red waves. They had huge bulbous eye apparatus on tops of their head stalks in amongst orange tufts of muppet hair. They had three legs that spread like a tripod and ended in hand-like, eight-toed feet. Three tentacles spread equidistantly around their body stalks and drooped semi-rigid like tails when they weren’t in use. The most alien race we’d encountered so far and the most ridiculous looking.
But aside from the orange tufts of hair, they were all blue. The exact same shade of earth-sky blue.
Under their skin, they had naturally occuring radio transmitters, heat sinks, and microwave generators. To the Quenari there were seven variations of these emitters that made them as different to each other and a Rembrandt was to a Pollock. These skin patterns were invisible to us. The Quenari remained a pallid, uniform blue to our eyes.
And to them, we were all the same boring patches of black, blue, and red that our body heat produced naturally, with no radio or microwaves to speak of. Our translator pendants made us all sound similar so they didn’t notice accents or languages, either.
Their sexual activity was a long five-stage egg donor, carrier, fertilizer, mitosis generator and harvester affair that held no parallel on earth. Again, it was the subdermal beacons that spelled out who was who in that regard. Very social beings and large family units as a result. Our rather quick and internalized procreation was odd to them but our choice of partner was of no consequence. They could barely tell the men, women and genderfluid people from each other and never thought to ask in any case, sensing social awkwardness. Sexual orientation and gender held no meaning for them when it came to us and we were hopelessly lost in the same way looking at them.
Appearance wise, we were mostly homogenous to them and they were mostly homogenous to us.
It changed us. News of them spread and they infested our consciousness like Dr Seuss creatures. Indeed, several children’s books about them were published and were popular.
Instead of calling each other racist or sexist, we started calling each other Quenarish. Or Blue. The ridiculousness of it all altered our society in profound and lasting ways. Subtly at first but more and more, like an unspoken agreement around the planet, we measured each other on the basis of tenacity, knowledge, and strength of character rather than gender or race. As a people, we saw the Quenari as ridiculous and petty and beneath us.
Maybe we substituted one form of racism for another but it helped us.
tags