Excerpt: Taurian Cigarettes

The Taurians were never much to look at in the first fuzzy vids beamed back by the news teams. Humanoid frames, elegant and atavistic, with peach-colored skin spotted like an old man’s. Long necks, narrow jaws, wide and drooping cheek-bones, and watery eyes without any trace of white. They had no noses, just an open nostril, and had three long, skinny fingers and two triple-jointed thumbs.

Nobody on Earth took much notice of the discovery of sentient life on Tarsus. We’d all seen extra-terrestrial life before in zoos, and these Taurians weren’t much different just because they lived in tribes and wore ragged clothes. Only four-years-old then, I thought them animals, not so much rustic natives as bestial barbarians with a trite, outdated culture.

They made music, too, a strange lilting sound. The scientists in sealed polymer suits played Beethoven's ninth over a speaker on their four-wheeled rover. Some of the aboriginals brought out little flutes and box-shaped drums and some kind of instrument that looked like a sandwich. They hummed and buzzed and thumped along as if they knew every theme, climbing up the crescendos and bursting with noise in the climax. It all sounded very New Age and very human.

The video got billions of hits the first week and a record deal the next for the aliens to cover classical hits like Tchaikovsky and “Hey Jude.” That set off accusations of corporate exploitation and desecration of purity. Talks of colonization only worsened it.

Rights groups threw a fit. They tossed around the Melian dialogue, Joseph Conrad, and old Christian vocabulary like “soul” in front of stunned Senators used to twiddling their thumbs while the empire prospered under their unnecessary guidance. It became a crusade for sentient alien rights, and everyone got wrapped up in it. Tarsus went off-limits to all but a family of ambassadorial scientists. No colonization.

Two decades passed and in the sweeping way of galactic politics everyone forgot about the righteous victory. Exodus Corporation quietly had the ban repealed and sent the first colony ships to Tarsus twenty-one years after its discovery. That’s where I came in.