There wasn't really time for farewells after that, I had only a moment to... well if you want to know the human word for it, they call it 'barking'. My race has no word for hello or goodbye, we make a loud noise for either condition, and its decibel level tells you in context how we feel. Quick and sharp for annoyance, long and high for sadness, that sort of thing.

But you aren't reading this to learn about me.

My professor didn't really notice my farewell, he was busy catching up with his 'adoptive' human family, and I didn't even see where my fellow students went as a crowd of people passed between the others and I as I shuffled along with my hosts.

Humans have a lot of crowds, that's unusual for even the most social species over the greater part of the galaxy. At least among intelligent races, my own for example, we create large labor centers for big projects, but otherwise we stick to small pack groupings of no more than fifty to one hundred at a time. Among the more insectoid species, high number socialization begins early, but they rapidly isolate themselves early on until they connect via distant communication such as thread taps or long noise calls.

But humans are not bound by the normal rules of logic that apply to other species. This family of three seemed utterly at ease moving through crowds of hundreds, though it is worth noting that their small human was carried at all times, this is very common among species wherein the young are ambulatory but not rational, and so are prone to self harm. Or where there are ample predatory dangers to be had. I knew enough to anticipate this and so said nothing, but what I wasn't prepared for was the child's abject curiosity.

They studied 'everything' and in his soft blue eyes, I swear I could see them processing all the details around him, it was like watching a computer build itself. Humans are high sensory beings, perhaps due to evolving as active predators, when their children are very young, their brains are not fully developed. At least not in the usual sense. Rather they have the 'hardware' of a brain, but the many neural connections form in their early years based on sensory information. The mother and father, I noted, made a bird like 'cooing' noise over their little one whenever it pointed something out and named it. Praising every single thing, no matter how ordinary.

This gentle care was very different than most predatory races, the Xenobians for example, will beat their young to stimulate aggressive threat responses early on, subjecting them to violence and hardening their bodies against some of the fierce predators of their home world.

Human infants however, were very soft. If I could pick one word for them, it would be 'squishy'. They are very warm, and very squishy. This particular tiny human person seemed to find 'me' to be of particular interest, and stared at me a great deal. The only trouble was, at his particular age, he was not especially verbal. Tiny humans learn languages with shocking ease, but in their early stages of development, they use singular words, or at most 'pair' words, which I will explain further when we reach the part dealing with 'nap time'.

However despite their lack of verbal skills, they seem to understand far more than they can say, and make up for their lower verbalism with gestures.

Adult humans however, are very verbal. William, the male of my host family, was fairly tall, and I had to tilt my head to look up into his eyes when he spoke to me, notably, he stood within reach, close enough for a handshake or a fight, but not quite close enough to embrace the way my professor did with the aged members of his host family. When our eyes met, after a lot of random confused staring by myself, he addressed me saying, "So... Bailey, are you really going to be with us for fifty years? I admit, I didn't really believe it when my grandfather said it would be that long."

"It's a generational study for a triple tier... what you call a PHD program. So, yes." I answered and I looked away, my tail lowered a little, a question like that felt doubtful, as if he wasn't sure about his decision any longer, "Is that a problem?"

"No, no." Jonathan quickly shook his head back and forth, "It came highly recommended by my grandfather, and we're really looking forward to it." William smiled at me when he said that, and here is where it gets complicated.

You see, a human smile can be faked. A human can smile at you and not mean it, unlike other species that cannot deceive socially with things like alarm, happiness, anxiety, distaste... humans can deceive with every social cue. And they frequently combine social cues together to deepen the deception. A smile may reveal a lie or conceal it, or it may be completely real. Or they can hug you, and whisper words of sympathy while they secretly revel in your pain. It makes them very hard to read, as species go. In the end, I decided that at least on this occasion, William was speaking the truth. His head shake, smile, and above all, the haste in his voice, were all things I'd seen in video entertainment that occurred when someone was trying to reassure someone. Quicker responses are harder to fake, and his response was instant.

So my tail perked up, and I saw him relax. This highlights one of the things that makes humans so dangerous on the intragalactic community stage. They are masters of social cues in even alien races. If they can perceive it, they can understand it, and William concluded in mere minutes that my tail meant a rising sense of dejection, and immediately responded, relaxing when my drooping tail went back up.

"Since you're going to be with us for so long, Bailey, why don't you let us know how we can help you the most? Or what would you like to see? What would you like to do? And please don't worry about the cost, as long as we submit receipts, it's all paid for by the government. The world is your oyster as far as we're concerned." William cracked another smile at me, it seemed he was very eager to make me feel comfortable, but the way he said it brought up another lesson I should mention here.

"Your world is an oyster? Are you telling me that your species evolved on- no... that can't be right?" I asked, my head cocked and I scratched my left four ears, and Rebecca began to laugh, while William tried very hard to restrain himself, but his chest was spasming and he bit his lip to hold his laughter in.

"Doggie!" Their little one shouted and stretched out his arms toward me again.

"It's an idiom. A kind of metaphor, an expression, it means you can do almost anything here, because it's your home, like the way a pearl lives in an oyster." Rebecca explained through fits of chortling laughter that still fought free of her attempts at restraining it.

"Ohhhhh..." I said and nodded, "But ah, why was that so funny?" I asked, and both William and Rebecca reddened a little in the face.

"It wasn't, I'm sorry, but the way you looked at us... it was like dogs do when they're curious about something they've never seen before... and it was just... we couldn't help ourselves. I hope we didn't offend you." Rebecca said it as gently as she could, and my ears went down, I wasn't quite sure what to make of that.

"It'll make more sense when you see dogs up close." William promised me, and then reaching out, he put his hand on my shoulder and applied a little pressure.

Humans, it seems, love metaphors, so much of their communication is indirect, not only in the nonverbal sense, but they convey their meaning through analogies, metaphors, and symbols. You may recall stories about how when that human colony on Golga IV was surrounded by Zenti pirates with no hope of relief for weeks, rather than surrender, the humans renamed their colony 'Massada'. The Zenti did not understand that this place in human history was a fortification where a last stand took place, where the defenders resolved to fight to the death or commit suicide rather than be captured. The Zenti's failure to understand human resolve and willingness to rally around a symbolic meaning alone, such as a flag, a name, a battle cry, was almost unlimited. As a result, the Zenti siege went on until the human fleet arrived in force and destroyed the pirates. Over sixty percent of the human colony's population was killed, but it was still theirs in the end.

When studying humans, 'never' underestimate the value of their symbolic words, deeds, references, or materials. One single symbol or hard hitting slogan can revitalize the dying as if they were fresh to the fight.

That may be a lot to say after a single explanation of metaphor use, but it applies so broadly that as you study this species further, you will return to this lesson again and again.

I contemplated their question about what to do, and to be blunt, I was at a loss. I was expecting my hosts to give me instruction, not the other way around. While it wasn’t unheard of to indulge a traveler or guest, humans are unnaturally, no... 'unusually' giving hosts. When they have taken you in, magnanimity is the word of the day, sadly my film studies hadn't let me catch this offhand. In retrospect I now understand my initially poor grades in tests on 'visitor rituals'.

I lowered my tail and my ears and answered truthfully, "I don't know. I have a long list of things, but what to do first, where to begin... it's all so much."

William clapped me on the back and put a spring into his step. His mate, his wife, moved a little closer to him and he answered in a booming voice, "Not to worry! If you have no idea what you're doing, you can't do it wrong!" He chuckled and added, "We'll take you home, get you settled first, and then work out what to do first. I got a few weeks of paid vacation coming, and I figured this might happen, so I submitted it last week and it got approved starting today."

"Paid vacation?" I asked him about this and scratched my head again, prompting the tiny human to reach for me once more, again shouting my incorrect species identifier.

"Yes, see we realized long ago that the point of life isn't work, the point of life is to live it to its fullest. So while we do work a lot, at least relative to some of you all in the rest of the galaxy, to avoid creating a dystopian nightmare existence we mandate six weeks of paid vacation time per year, not counting weekends and holidays." This was what William told me, but it was so strange that... I still worry that I haven't recorded his words exactly, more my understanding of them. Still, he checked this portion of my manuscript himself early on, and said it was 'close enough'.

I accepted his explanation mutely, and then we stepped out of the busy transit hub and into the light of day.

Green was everywhere. Trees on every corner, and there were many, many corners. You see, the humans planted flowering fruit trees everywhere in public so that anyone who wants something fresh and healthy to eat, can do so even if they have no money. It is never considered 'theft' unless someone takes the fruit and intends to sell it. Humans require a high calorie diet, and as such they eat more frequently than most other species we know of, were they a fast life organism with rapid reproduction of vast numbers of offspring, this would be a problem.

However humans are actually able to control their reproductive process through chemical and medical means. Thus preventing overpopulation within families. The roads were laid out in a crisscross pattern, but at each intersection I could see, there was a circle about ten paces circumference, which they referred to as 'roundabouts' or 'traffic circles'. This allowed the motion of vehicles to continue unabated without dangerously swerving into oncoming lanes. An ingenious innovation that also kept the flow of people in constant motion without starts and stops.

I was at once impressed by the scale of human architecture around it as well. The area in which we emerged gave a marvelous view of what they call 'skyscrapers' giant buildings of tempered glass set in steel frames, each one could hold thousands of independent workers, almost like their 'ant colonies'. See figure six-four for a few photos of ants and their habitats.

The air was mainly composed of nitrogen, but what humans breathe is oxygen, a gas that is toxic, corrosive, and flammable. And yes, they breathe that stuff. In fact it will eventually kill them by corroding the very lungs meant to take it in. Incidentally, they also exhale carbon dioxide, a gas that is deadly to them, and to most other life except for their plants. Their plant life inhales... sort of, carbon dioxide, and produces oxygen. Thus not only have humans been widely referred to as 'death breathers' but 'also' become renowned by ecologists of many species. They became masters of their environment in order to ensure that their production and use of both toxic gasses did not throw their planet out of balance.

My reverie about this was interrupted when William spoke up and said, "Wait here, I'll get the car."

I watched him walk away and when he was at a bit of a distance I asked Rebecca, "Is there a reason we do not simply follow him to it? Some ritual or law that doesn't allow more than one to go inside at a time?"

She hefted the young boy in her arms, bouncing him off of her hips and said, "No, nothing like that. I'm just handling Michael here, so it’s easier for me to wait and for him to walk to the car. He was being polite and helpful. He's that kind of man." Rebecca explained this to me with, I suppose you could call it a note of pride. Humans take great pride in certain things, traits of their personality, much like their artisans over their work, as if to shape themselves is itself a work of art as surely as any sculptor shapes a statue.

That pride in turn is shared with one another as a kind of communal feast, Rebecca was proud of William, as the tie to him was also a reflection on her own merit as a person. It created a very interesting social dynamic that I have never found in another race other than mankind. I didn't understand this right away, I jumped only to the cold calculation of an academic. "So, it is a caloric preservative, you work less thus have more energy to care for your offspring?"

She frowned a little, and if she could have lowered her ears or stiffened a nonexistent tail, I think she would have. "I do work. Lots. I'm not lazy."

My ears drooped, I had insulted her without meaning to. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything negative. I'm only trying to understand these things. It's strange to me."

Thankfully she too had learned to read my body language, and I knew what to say to express remorse, and she quickly settled down.

"Of course, you meant in this specific moment, not in general." She clarified, and I quickly wagged my tail, her face brightened a little and she further added, "I guess it is kind of like that. We probably wouldn't ever say it that way, but yes. I get less tired if I don't have to haul our son around, we help each other out. If he were holding our son, I would get the car."

"Oh, so the human division of labor is based in part on who is doing what at any given time?" I asked, I was instantly intrigued and little pieces of information from the video replays started to click into place.

"Yes. If I'm bathing Michael, William will be making dinner, if I sweep, he will mop. We're a team and we work in pairs to lighten both each other's burdens and make each other's lives easier. When Michael gets older, he'll start getting chores too." Rebecca explained it as patiently as if I were her student, and in a way, I was. I clearly had much to learn about human social dynamics, and by the time the car, a rectangular black thing with four black rubber wheels on it, rolled out in front of us, I was already thinking of just how much I still had ahead of me to understand.

But I had to ask. "So, does that mean I'll get chores?"

"Well..." She looked me up and down, "I mean no offense but... I suspect you shed, and I'd appreciate it if you at least took care of that."

It was a year before I knew why I heard William laughing inside the car.