In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [87]
A. I’ll be sleeping out that part, remember?
B. Wait … they come upon the underground cavern. There’s no guards anymore and the hinges have rusted off the door. The nomads break in, they pry open the fridge, and what do they see?
D. A wedge of leftover Brie, half a head of celery, a thing of yogurt way past the sell-by date … Let’s have coffee. This is shade-grown coffee, so don’t look at me like that. Oh yeah, they also find that damn pike you caught last summer, sweetie, it’s stinking up the entire freezer, what exactly are your plans for it?
B. Don’t be frivolous. This is about his head. They open the freezer, and they see …
C. I think I know where this is going.
B. They see protein! They say, Get the cooking pot. They say, Feast time!
A. You are a pathetic, sick, psychically damaged individual.
B. I’m just a realist.
C. Same thing.
Cold-Blooded
To my sisters, the Iridescent Ones, the Egg-Bearers, the Many-Faceted, greetings from the Planet of Moths.
At last we have succeeded in establishing contact with the creatures here who, in their ability to communicate, to live in colonies, and to construct technologies, most resemble us, although in these particulars they have not advanced above a rudimentary level.
During our first observation of these “blood creatures,” as we have termed them—after the colourful red liquid that is to be found inside their bodies, and that appears to be of great significance to them in their poems, wars, and religious rituals—we supposed them incapable of speech, as those specimens we were able to examine entirely lacked the organs for it. They had no wing-casings with which to stridulate—indeed they had no wings; they had no mandibles to click; and the chemical method was unknown to them, since they were devoid of antennae. “Smell,” for them, is a perfunctory affair, confined to a flattened and numbed appendage on the front of the head. But after a time, we discovered that the incoherent squeakings and gruntings that emerged from them, especially when pinched, were in fact a form of language, and after that we made rapid progress.
We soon ascertained that their planet, named by us the Planet of Moths after its most prolific and noteworthy genus, is called by these creatures Earth. They have some notion that their ancestors were created from this substance; or so it is claimed in many of their charming but irrational folk tales.
In an attempt to establish common ground, we asked them at what season they mated with and then devoured their males. Imagine our embarrassment when we discovered that those individuals with whom we were conversing were males! (It is very hard to tell the difference, as their males are not diminutive, as ours are, but, if anything, bigger. Also, lacking natural beauty—brilliantly patterned carapaces, diaphanous wings, luminescent eyes, and the like—they attempt to imitate our kind by placing upon their bodies various multicoloured draperies, which conceal their generative parts.)
We apologized for our faux pas and inquired as to their own sexual practises. Picture our nausea and disgust when we discovered that it is the male, not the egg-bearer, which is the most prized among them! Abnormal as this will seem to you, my sisters, their leaders are for the most part male, which may account for their state of relative barbarism. Another peculiarity that must be noted is that, although they frequently kill them in many other ways, they rarely devour their females after procreation. This is a waste of protein; but then, they are a wasteful people.
We hastily abandoned this painful subject.
Next we asked them when they pupated. Here again, as in the case of “clothing”—the draperies we have mentioned—we uncovered a fumbling attempt at imitation