So Simple by Jennifer R. Povey
They landed in the middle of the night.
They came in their ships and they held out their open hands. Well, what they had instead of hands, lovely flower-like tentacles.
Nobody wanted to shake their hands. Which was fine, they were just showing their hands, their lack of weapons.
Humanity understood that.
Aliens understood that.
They thought they were on the same page. They came at night and they wanted to do everything at night because the sun was too bright for them.
Humanity just found diplomats who didn’t mind staying up late. It wasn’t that hard.
They negotiated and they wanted trade and knowledge and to understand another race.
But they were not us, and that eventually came out.
“They…they…”
It was horror, it was utter shock and disgust.
The aliens ate their own eggs.
And nobody human could understand that. True, humans don’t lay eggs, but humanity felt that if they did lay eggs they would nurture them until they hatched.
Not eat them.
Certainly not consider them a delicacy, a seasonal delicacy that everyone enjoyed.
The Catholic Church condemned them, the American Evangelicals blamed them for every single natural disaster and hint of bad weather. Rabbis argued the matter and then went to the aliens to argue it some more.
Which made them unique, because they actually asked what was going on, actually went to the aliens and said “Hey, what gives.”
Babies were valuable.
Eggs were valuable.
Morality said you didn’t harm babies, although even that wasn’t a universal the way some people wanted it to be.
But you didn’t eat them.
“What else do we do with them?”
The rabbi frowned. “Well…”
“Your women produce one child at a time, sometimes more. Of course they are your most valued and precious things. I laid 3,000 eggs last cycle.”
And because they had asked, the rabbi understood. “And kept how many?”
The alien held up two tentacle-fingers.
And the rabbi understood. “For us, it is teef. For you…”
Thousands of eggs that had once fought a gamut of predators for the right to become people. Without the predators, what else did one do with them, indeed?
And the rabbi tried to explain this to the Catholics and the American Evangelicals and the horrified housewives.
But most would not listen.
Most could not think past their own biology.
The aliens withdrew to enclaves, and limited their interactions to trade and some of them left.
The rabbi, of course, went with them. He would come back after he had answered the question this put into his head.
What is universal morality?
He suspected he would find that the answer was that there is none, that rather like Jews and theology, there were more moralities than species.
But trying to answer a question that can’t be answered?
That’s a worthwhile thing to dedicate part of your life to.
So he flew to the stars and met the people who thought it disrespectful not to kill their elders, and the people who thought it less cruel to eat animals, who died right away, than plants, who still lived when on your plate.
And moralities no human could imagine.
And when he came back, he had an answer.
There was a universal morality and it was very simple:
Respect others.
So simple that he knew nobody would do it.
But he had to try.
—
Born in Nottingham, England, Jennifer R. Povey now lives in Northern Virginia, where she writes everything from heroic fantasy to stories for Analog. She has written a number of novels across multiple sub genres. Additionally, she is a writer, editor, and designer of tabletop RPG supplements for a number of companies. Her interests include horseback riding, Doctor Who and attempting to out-weird her various friends and professional colleagues.
