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Description
It's the early 24th century, and it's an exciting and somewhat disturbing time for humanity. It has only been a few decades since the development of the new "overdrive", which allows ships to travel at the equivalent of thousands of times the speed of light, superseded the old Lawlor Drive with its practical limit of about thirty times light speed. Humanity is exploding in all directions out of the confines of "civilized space", a roughly ovoid blob of the galaxy some 400 light-years across (although some far-flung colonies lie as much as a hundred light years beyond) containing several thousand populated solar systems.

It is an exciting time, if a somewhat uncertain one. Humanity is at the same time spreading itself extremely thin – some new colonies have been established as much as several thousand light-years from Earth – and growing closer together. An interstellar government has never been practical with even the Earth-Centauri run taking over seven weeks and electronic communications being limited by light speed, but now with civilized space as a whole less than three weeks across, the older, more densely populated colonies can project their power far more effectively – and some fear that the densely populated home system, which still accounts for more than a third of humanity's 40 billions, may no longer be content with the vague cultural hegemony which has been the limit of its influence for nearly two centuries.

The solar system is colonized, all the way out to icy Pluto, which has an extensive underground population of miners. Jungle Venus has had a great deal of its jungle cut down, the soil sterilized by giant induced-radiation machines, and replaced by earthly vegetation and settlers: ecologically conscious these future folk are not. Mars has been more of a challenge: not so much due to the cold or the Mt. Everest-thin air as due to its extraordinarily tenacious plant life, which spread by tiny floating spores and grow with insane rapidity whenever they come in contact with water, utterly outcompeting any earth plants. Although planetary engineers have given Mars a breathable atmosphere, much of the planet remains bone-dry desert, all available water locked up in and re-circulated within the Martian ecosystem: short of irradiating the entire planet, a "final victory" against the local life forms remains elusive. Earth has close to 10 billion inhabitants, and although democratic is also bureaucratic and regulated up the whazoo. Tens of millions leave every year for other solar systems: besides being the cultural center of mankind and the largest producer of new technological developments, Earth is also the largest source of new interstellar immigrants.

Technology is highly developed. Since the star drive won't work within 5 planetary diameters of an earth-sized planet due to gravitational effects, each planet has one or more "landing grids", which use immensely powerful force beams to lift ships into position or lower them to ground. Huge square frameworks of metal beams, like a colossal skyscraper still in construction, the basic "starter" grid for new colonies is half a mile on a side and 2000 feet high: the multiple grids of a densely populated planet are usually rather larger. They are powered by turning the entire ionosphere of a planet into a sort of collector for solar particle radiation – in new colonies, they also provide power for cities and industries. (Once populations get into the hundreds of millions, it becomes necessary to supplement this with nuclear and old-style solar power). Rockets are only used for landing on new, unsettled planets or for emergencies, and many ships, especially commercial ones, don't have them. Robots exist and are abundant, but true AI remains elusive: robots remain too inflexible to make soldiers or hunters, and overly robot-dependent societies tend to have lives rather constricted by the limitations of their servants.

Artificial gravity is widely used, and every planet has its network of "logics", which function as TV/Radio/Picturephone/Internet/Home Computer/Online Computer/Library, and are bright enough to answer your questions without having to root through the equivalent of thousands of Google hits. Cryogenic freezing was perfected a while back, and was used a great deal in multi-year trips, although with the new super-fast ships it has become much less important. (For those with notions of using it to visit THE FUTURE, it should be noted there have been some important changes in the laws relating to compound interest). Synthetic fabrics have finally become superior to natural ones, and the use of cotton, linen or even silk is quite rare and on many planets almost unheard of.

Although there were some limited atomic wars back on Old Earth, interstellar society is rather peaceful, for several reasons. First, a high developed science of ethics and behavior has some pretty solid proofs that non-democratic societies are fundamentally inferior in the long run, and that peaceful, democratic societies are just "better" is something most people accept in the way most OTL Americans accept the inferiority of Communism (authoritarian personalities disagree, but they find it harder to get people to take them seriously). Secondly, between cheap and abundant energy, endless new sources of land and raw materials, an ever-open frontier and highly advanced automation, poverty is largely unknown: generally, living standards vary from moderately wealthy to ridiculously wealthy, depending on planet and local ideas on redistribution. Finally, good ol' MAD still plays its role: with the latest hyperatomic weapons, only a few dozen "devices" can largely sterilize a planet…

Other weapons include blasters, from the hand blaster to the asteroid-smasher with a range of thousands of miles, force beams and force fields: there aren't many actual warships, however, given the interstellar situation.

Colonization has become a fairly standardized practice: once the Survey has assessed a planets' habitability, automatic robot systems with minimal human supervision can now build cities, lay out roads, and set up a basic grid for the first bunch of settlers. If it is deemed suitable for farming, more machines with sterilize the soil, add any needed supplements, and plant crops by the time large numbers of settlers begin to arrive. (Synthetic food has not really caught on: there remains a big interstellar trade in foodstuffs.) Terraforming is fairly developed, but generally, outside the solar system, there are enough habitable planets that it's not rational economics to try to fix up really uninhabitable planets. One common practice is the use of artificially created immense clouds of reflective dust to warm chilly planets by reflecting sunlight onto their night-sides: in some cases, clouds are maintained all around an orbit a bit further out than the planets.

Given rather cheap interstellar travel (as long as you are willing to spend time as a popsicle), there has been a great number of "cultural revival" efforts by people leaving an increasingly homogenized Earth. Kalmet III's mostly south Chinese population have shaped their landscape into a classical Song scroll of mountains and rivers, Demeter I is full of Greek Pagan revivalists and olives (they don't get along well with the inhabitants of Justinian III), Rustam IV is Persian and Central Asian and currently troubled by a doctrinal dispute about how to orient oneself to pray when Sol is directly above in the sky, Canna I is full of corn-fed space hicks, and the West Africans of hot, humid Timbuk are arguing whether they should rename their not-Sahel-like planet something more appropriate like Benin or Dahomey. Native Americans have done well on the space frontier, and on a couple planets of the Equis cluster descendants of plains tribes have created a sort of high-tech Pastoralism (with occasional disagreements with the Mongols with which they share the planets).

Colonization continues, at an accelerating pace: with great strides in medical science, human life-spans have considerably lengthened, and with greater wealth and comfort, birth rates remain well over replacement in all but the mostly regulated societies. Competition for first-rate planets, much rarer than marginal ones, had begun to get a bit heated by the time the Overdrive showed up: members of the Interstellar Diplomatic Service were rather relieved.

With travel times of years and no real central authority, the progress of human civilization was aided by large, loose voluntary organizations funded by the wealthier solar systems as well as by their own patents and for services rendered, such as the Interstellar Diplomatic Service or the Interplanetary Labor Exchange. Two of the most important were, and remain, the Colonial Survey, which scouts out new worlds, tracks down dangers and problems that might render them unfit for colonists, and solves unexpected dangers to settlers as they come up: and the Med Service, which fights disease across the galaxy (no joke: some colonies have been wiped out by alien diseases). The Med Service mascot is the Tormal, a small, furry, playful and friendly creature with a skill for imitation and a love of coffee and sweets: they would make great pets, except that their incredibly powerful immune systems make them such a valuable resource for vaccine creation that they are pretty much all "employed" by the Med Service. Both the Med Service and the Colonial Survey fear a loss of independence in this new era of easy interstellar travel.

Aside from Tormals, another new friend to man is the gene-engineered grizzly bear: smarter and tougher than their wild ancestors, the modified bear is also as friendly to humans as are dogs, and provide effective guardians and protectors to humans on planets where the local ecosystems would chew up and spit out Canis Domesticus.

Although the future of humanity seems bright, there are some shadows. Hurried colonial "scrambles" often lead to disaster when some unexpected quirk of the local environment reveals itself, and the Colonial Survey does not always arrive in time to save the day. Although authoritarianism is passé, authoritarian types continue to attempt to manipulate things behind the scenes to their benefit. Petty planetary nationalisms grow tumorous. Secret bioweapons programs are carried out here and there. And all of human society has been shaken to the core by the latest news from Earth, where a scientific expedition to the Crab nebula has just returned in a ship not built by men.

*********************************************

Their name for themselves might be translated as "men" or "humans": it certainly cannot be spelled, since it consists of a wave-train of short-wave radio. The aliens do not communicate verbally, but through natural radio organs, and although they can pick up sound vibration through some fluid-filled pockets in their torsos (reminiscent of a shark's lateral line organs) they cannot distinguish pitch or tone. They are roughly humanoid, if shorter and stockier, with pallid, blue-white skins, great dark eyes, and no body hair whatsoever. Their noses are small, and rather than ears they have pallid gill-pouches in horizontally slitted rows to the sides of their heads. Their blood is blue from the copper that they use instead of iron. Their visual spectrum starts in red and extends far into the infra-red: the insides of their spaceships are almost pitch-black by human standards.

Still, they are not that alien. They are warm-blooded, with two sexes like humans (although the larger, more mutually aggressive females rarely leave their worlds), breathe oxygen (although they prefer it a bit thinner and more oxygen-rich than humans do), and have a dry and somewhat ironic sense of humor (although their laughter is by radio too, and invisible to a human observer unless it reaches the falling-down-and-rolling-on-the-floor stage). They also have a fine appreciation for the carefully crafted dirty joke.

They come from a world circling close to a red dwarf star, and have established a large colonial domain of their own – they have had a high-speed FTL drive longer than mankind, but have not spread as far as humans might, having for cultural reasons less of a need for "open frontiers" than humanity has. Their population is only about 1/10 that of our species, spread thinly over tens of thousands of worlds: planets in the habitable area of a red dwarf's environment, narrow and close to the sun, tend to be a bit marginal, tidally locked or suffering from terrible solar tides, the one only habitable along the twilight zone, the others only in the highest elevations. Sometimes there are twin planets, orbiting around each other as they orbit around the primary.

They are a careful, conservative species, evolved on one of the tidally locked worlds, creatures of a narrow and marginal environment, cultivators and preservers, fiercely protective of their carefully cultivated little niche (especially the females). Their home world is bathed in deep red light, their vegetation black or very dark blue or violet to human eyes, as it absorbs the red end of the spectrum. Winds from the dark side blow always to the hot pole. They are comfortable in darkness, and have a layer of blubber which provides insulation against the cold: mines and caves and tunnels underground have far less terrors for them than they do for humans, and their cities extend downwards as much as up. Their technology has followed some different paths than humanity: given the feeble nature of their suns, they do not use their planetary magnetospheres as a source of power – instead, their society is powered by an understanding of the atom and how to liberate its energies far superior to humanity. Their night-black ships are usually rather bulkier, due to a different approach to FTL which requires far more massive engines. Their ability to directly perceive radio signals has meant a very different approach to electronics. And so on.

They have not been as badly shaken by the discovery of another intelligence as humans were: they had already discovered another species, although the 3-foot tall rock-eaters they discovered on a distant, airless moon were harmless enough stone-age folk. However, whether or not to travel the 9,000 light years to the Nebula for a second meeting is a matter of fierce debate on all their worlds: although they could not live where humans do (the light of a hot yellow sun would destroy their eyes, not to mention the ultraviolet doing a number on their skins), humans might well adapt to their gloomy worlds with a little artificial lighting. There has already been much criticism of the captain for swapping his ship with that of the humans: although its weapons and long-range detection equipment had been removed, who knows what they might learn from close examination? Although inspection of the silvery ship they received in turn has already given them a more compact star-drive and some interesting innovations in energy field manipulation, most strategists argue that the humans had received the better end of the deal with the superior energy sources, better computers, and more advanced material science of the lost ship.

*************************************************

Back in human space, human leaders have of course accused their own captain of getting the worst of the deal.

Generally speaking, humanity is freaking out worse: given thousands of planets with nothing brighter than a wide-awake baboon, the notion that human intelligence was an extremely unlikely evolutionary development was a very popular theory, and people have not reacted well to yet another failure of the Universe Revolves Around Us model. Furthermore, being a frankly more paranoid race than our red-dwarf counterparts, there has been rather more in the way of in-fighting and squabbling among the human worlds: there is much furor about Old Earth having first dibs on the alien technology, and full access has not been given quickly enough to avoid some rather heated remarks. There are those who claim Earth hopes to use the Alien Menace plus alien technology to create the first interstellar empire, and of course those who go further and claim the whole "aliens" thing is a fraud. There are calls for a massive effort to search the galaxy for the aliens, and calls for a stop to all new colonization to minimize the chance of another encounter, calls for a new all-humanity military force and calls for the dispersal of the human population over as much of the galaxy as possible. Millenarian cults are springing up on the more religious planets, and after two centuries of abeyance, the "flying saucer" phenomena is seeing a brisk revival as people nervously scan the skies. The notion of a fresh meeting at the Crab Nebula is deeply controversial.

But the aliens and humanity do really need to work together. It's a big galaxy out there, and the red-dwarf people and humanity are not the only inhabitants. There are the plant-people, with their weird biotechnology and their endless lust for animal flesh: the Formless Ones, who see lesser races as mere animals to be exploited at will: living planets, reality-warpers, and even stranger things. Much depends on whether or not the hand of friendship is accepted or not…

Description
It's the early 24th century, and it's an exciting and somewhat disturbing time for humanity. It has only been a few decades since the development of the new "overdrive", which allows ships to travel at the equivalent of thousands of times the speed of light, superseded the old Lawlor Drive with its practical limit of about thirty times light speed. Humanity is exploding in all directions out of the confines of "civilized space", a roughly ovoid blob of the galaxy some 400 light-years across (although some far-flung colonies lie as much as a hundred light years beyond) containing several thousand populated solar systems.

It is an exciting time, if a somewhat uncertain one. Humanity is at the same time spreading itself extremely thin – some new colonies have been established as much as several thousand light-years from Earth – and growing closer together. An interstellar government has never been practical with even the Earth-Centauri run taking over seven weeks and electronic communications being limited by light speed, but now with civilized space as a whole less than three weeks across, the older, more densely populated colonies can project their power far more effectively – and some fear that the densely populated home system, which still accounts for more than a third of humanity's 40 billions, may no longer be content with the vague cultural hegemony which has been the limit of its influence for nearly two centuries.

The solar system is colonized, all the way out to icy Pluto, which has an extensive underground population of miners. Jungle Venus has had a great deal of its jungle cut down, the soil sterilized by giant induced-radiation machines, and replaced by earthly vegetation and settlers: ecologically conscious these future folk are not. Mars has been more of a challenge: not so much due to the cold or the Mt. Everest-thin air as due to its extraordinarily tenacious plant life, which spread by tiny floating spores and grow with insane rapidity whenever they come in contact with water, utterly outcompeting any earth plants. Although planetary engineers have given Mars a breathable atmosphere, much of the planet remains bone-dry desert, all available water locked up in and re-circulated within the Martian ecosystem: short of irradiating the entire planet, a "final victory" against the local life forms remains elusive. Earth has close to 10 billion inhabitants, and although democratic is also bureaucratic and regulated up the whazoo. Tens of millions leave every year for other solar systems: besides being the cultural center of mankind and the largest producer of new technological developments, Earth is also the largest source of new interstellar immigrants.

Technology is highly developed. Since the star drive won't work within 5 planetary diameters of an earth-sized planet due to gravitational effects, each planet has one or more "landing grids", which use immensely powerful force beams to lift ships into position or lower them to ground. Huge square frameworks of metal beams, like a colossal skyscraper still in construction, the basic "starter" grid for new colonies is half a mile on a side and 2000 feet high: the multiple grids of a densely populated planet are usually rather larger. They are powered by turning the entire ionosphere of a planet into a sort of collector for solar particle radiation – in new colonies, they also provide power for cities and industries. (Once populations get into the hundreds of millions, it becomes necessary to supplement this with nuclear and old-style solar power). Rockets are only used for landing on new, unsettled planets or for emergencies, and many ships, especially commercial ones, don't have them. Robots exist and are abundant, but true AI remains elusive: robots remain too inflexible to make soldiers or hunters, and overly robot-dependent societies tend to have lives rather constricted by the limitations of their servants.

Artificial gravity is widely used, and every planet has its network of "logics", which function as TV/Radio/Picturephone/Internet/Home Computer/Online Computer/Library, and are bright enough to answer your questions without having to root through the equivalent of thousands of Google hits. Cryogenic freezing was perfected a while back, and was used a great deal in multi-year trips, although with the new super-fast ships it has become much less important. (For those with notions of using it to visit THE FUTURE, it should be noted there have been some important changes in the laws relating to compound interest). Synthetic fabrics have finally become superior to natural ones, and the use of cotton, linen or even silk is quite rare and on many planets almost unheard of.

Although there were some limited atomic wars back on Old Earth, interstellar society is rather peaceful, for several reasons. First, a high developed science of ethics and behavior has some pretty solid proofs that non-democratic societies are fundamentally inferior in the long run, and that peaceful, democratic societies are just "better" is something most people accept in the way most OTL Americans accept the inferiority of Communism (authoritarian personalities disagree, but they find it harder to get people to take them seriously). Secondly, between cheap and abundant energy, endless new sources of land and raw materials, an ever-open frontier and highly advanced automation, poverty is largely unknown: generally, living standards vary from moderately wealthy to ridiculously wealthy, depending on planet and local ideas on redistribution. Finally, good ol' MAD still plays its role: with the latest hyperatomic weapons, only a few dozen "devices" can largely sterilize a planet…

Other weapons include blasters, from the hand blaster to the asteroid-smasher with a range of thousands of miles, force beams and force fields: there aren't many actual warships, however, given the interstellar situation.

Colonization has become a fairly standardized practice: once the Survey has assessed a planets' habitability, automatic robot systems with minimal human supervision can now build cities, lay out roads, and set up a basic grid for the first bunch of settlers. If it is deemed suitable for farming, more machines with sterilize the soil, add any needed supplements, and plant crops by the time large numbers of settlers begin to arrive. (Synthetic food has not really caught on: there remains a big interstellar trade in foodstuffs.) Terraforming is fairly developed, but generally, outside the solar system, there are enough habitable planets that it's not rational economics to try to fix up really uninhabitable planets. One common practice is the use of artificially created immense clouds of reflective dust to warm chilly planets by reflecting sunlight onto their night-sides: in some cases, clouds are maintained all around an orbit a bit further out than the planets.

Given rather cheap interstellar travel (as long as you are willing to spend time as a popsicle), there has been a great number of "cultural revival" efforts by people leaving an increasingly homogenized Earth. Kalmet III's mostly south Chinese population have shaped their landscape into a classical Song scroll of mountains and rivers, Demeter I is full of Greek Pagan revivalists and olives (they don't get along well with the inhabitants of Justinian III), Rustam IV is Persian and Central Asian and currently troubled by a doctrinal dispute about how to orient oneself to pray when Sol is directly above in the sky, Canna I is full of corn-fed space hicks, and the West Africans of hot, humid Timbuk are arguing whether they should rename their not-Sahel-like planet something more appropriate like Benin or Dahomey. Native Americans have done well on the space frontier, and on a couple planets of the Equis cluster descendants of plains tribes have created a sort of high-tech Pastoralism (with occasional disagreements with the Mongols with which they share the planets).

Colonization continues, at an accelerating pace: with great strides in medical science, human life-spans have considerably lengthened, and with greater wealth and comfort, birth rates remain well over replacement in all but the mostly regulated societies. Competition for first-rate planets, much rarer than marginal ones, had begun to get a bit heated by the time the Overdrive showed up: members of the Interstellar Diplomatic Service were rather relieved.

With travel times of years and no real central authority, the progress of human civilization was aided by large, loose voluntary organizations funded by the wealthier solar systems as well as by their own patents and for services rendered, such as the Interstellar Diplomatic Service or the Interplanetary Labor Exchange. Two of the most important were, and remain, the Colonial Survey, which scouts out new worlds, tracks down dangers and problems that might render them unfit for colonists, and solves unexpected dangers to settlers as they come up: and the Med Service, which fights disease across the galaxy (no joke: some colonies have been wiped out by alien diseases). The Med Service mascot is the Tormal, a small, furry, playful and friendly creature with a skill for imitation and a love of coffee and sweets: they would make great pets, except that their incredibly powerful immune systems make them such a valuable resource for vaccine creation that they are pretty much all "employed" by the Med Service. Both the Med Service and the Colonial Survey fear a loss of independence in this new era of easy interstellar travel.

Aside from Tormals, another new friend to man is the gene-engineered grizzly bear: smarter and tougher than their wild ancestors, the modified bear is also as friendly to humans as are dogs, and provide effective guardians and protectors to humans on planets where the local ecosystems would chew up and spit out Canis Domesticus.

Although the future of humanity seems bright, there are some shadows. Hurried colonial "scrambles" often lead to disaster when some unexpected quirk of the local environment reveals itself, and the Colonial Survey does not always arrive in time to save the day. Although authoritarianism is passé, authoritarian types continue to attempt to manipulate things behind the scenes to their benefit. Petty planetary nationalisms grow tumorous. Secret bioweapons programs are carried out here and there. And all of human society has been shaken to the core by the latest news from Earth, where a scientific expedition to the Crab nebula has just returned in a ship not built by men.

*********************************************

Their name for themselves might be translated as "men" or "humans": it certainly cannot be spelled, since it consists of a wave-train of short-wave radio. The aliens do not communicate verbally, but through natural radio organs, and although they can pick up sound vibration through some fluid-filled pockets in their torsos (reminiscent of a shark's lateral line organs) they cannot distinguish pitch or tone. They are roughly humanoid, if shorter and stockier, with pallid, blue-white skins, great dark eyes, and no body hair whatsoever. Their noses are small, and rather than ears they have pallid gill-pouches in horizontally slitted rows to the sides of their heads. Their blood is blue from the copper that they use instead of iron. Their visual spectrum starts in red and extends far into the infra-red: the insides of their spaceships are almost pitch-black by human standards.

Still, they are not that alien. They are warm-blooded, with two sexes like humans (although the larger, more mutually aggressive females rarely leave their worlds), breathe oxygen (although they prefer it a bit thinner and more oxygen-rich than humans do), and have a dry and somewhat ironic sense of humor (although their laughter is by radio too, and invisible to a human observer unless it reaches the falling-down-and-rolling-on-the-floor stage). They also have a fine appreciation for the carefully crafted dirty joke.

They come from a world circling close to a red dwarf star, and have established a large colonial domain of their own – they have had a high-speed FTL drive longer than mankind, but have not spread as far as humans might, having for cultural reasons less of a need for "open frontiers" than humanity has. Their population is only about 1/10 that of our species, spread thinly over tens of thousands of worlds: planets in the habitable area of a red dwarf's environment, narrow and close to the sun, tend to be a bit marginal, tidally locked or suffering from terrible solar tides, the one only habitable along the twilight zone, the others only in the highest elevations. Sometimes there are twin planets, orbiting around each other as they orbit around the primary.

They are a careful, conservative species, evolved on one of the tidally locked worlds, creatures of a narrow and marginal environment, cultivators and preservers, fiercely protective of their carefully cultivated little niche (especially the females). Their home world is bathed in deep red light, their vegetation black or very dark blue or violet to human eyes, as it absorbs the red end of the spectrum. Winds from the dark side blow always to the hot pole. They are comfortable in darkness, and have a layer of blubber which provides insulation against the cold: mines and caves and tunnels underground have far less terrors for them than they do for humans, and their cities extend downwards as much as up. Their technology has followed some different paths than humanity: given the feeble nature of their suns, they do not use their planetary magnetospheres as a source of power – instead, their society is powered by an understanding of the atom and how to liberate its energies far superior to humanity. Their night-black ships are usually rather bulkier, due to a different approach to FTL which requires far more massive engines. Their ability to directly perceive radio signals has meant a very different approach to electronics. And so on.

They have not been as badly shaken by the discovery of another intelligence as humans were: they had already discovered another species, although the 3-foot tall rock-eaters they discovered on a distant, airless moon were harmless enough stone-age folk. However, whether or not to travel the 9,000 light years to the Nebula for a second meeting is a matter of fierce debate on all their worlds: although they could not live where humans do (the light of a hot yellow sun would destroy their eyes, not to mention the ultraviolet doing a number on their skins), humans might well adapt to their gloomy worlds with a little artificial lighting. There has already been much criticism of the captain for swapping his ship with that of the humans: although its weapons and long-range detection equipment had been removed, who knows what they might learn from close examination? Although inspection of the silvery ship they received in turn has already given them a more compact star-drive and some interesting innovations in energy field manipulation, most strategists argue that the humans had received the better end of the deal with the superior energy sources, better computers, and more advanced material science of the lost ship.

*************************************************

Back in human space, human leaders have of course accused their own captain of getting the worst of the deal.

Generally speaking, humanity is freaking out worse: given thousands of planets with nothing brighter than a wide-awake baboon, the notion that human intelligence was an extremely unlikely evolutionary development was a very popular theory, and people have not reacted well to yet another failure of the Universe Revolves Around Us model. Furthermore, being a frankly more paranoid race than our red-dwarf counterparts, there has been rather more in the way of in-fighting and squabbling among the human worlds: there is much furor about Old Earth having first dibs on the alien technology, and full access has not been given quickly enough to avoid some rather heated remarks. There are those who claim Earth hopes to use the Alien Menace plus alien technology to create the first interstellar empire, and of course those who go further and claim the whole "aliens" thing is a fraud. There are calls for a massive effort to search the galaxy for the aliens, and calls for a stop to all new colonization to minimize the chance of another encounter, calls for a new all-humanity military force and calls for the dispersal of the human population over as much of the galaxy as possible. Millenarian cults are springing up on the more religious planets, and after two centuries of abeyance, the "flying saucer" phenomena is seeing a brisk revival as people nervously scan the skies. The notion of a fresh meeting at the Crab Nebula is deeply controversial.

But the aliens and humanity do really need to work together. It's a big galaxy out there, and the red-dwarf people and humanity are not the only inhabitants. There are the plant-people, with their weird biotechnology and their endless lust for animal flesh: the Formless Ones, who see lesser races as mere animals to be exploited at will: living planets, reality-warpers, and even stranger things. Much depends on whether or not the hand of friendship is accepted or not…