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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/opencarryrpg7 on 2025-04-07 15:10:02+00:00.

This is very much a two-parter. I wouldn’t call this one of the best things I’ve ever written, but it was screaming in my head to get let out somehow ‐-------------------- Marie Alexandra Matthis stands in awe of the alien library’s architecture around her. Or rather, the lack of it.

The shelves in front of her were all holographic, of course, or at least something like Hollywood-esque holographic- even if the Hollywood of old only existed in an academic sense. She could certainly walk among and through the shelves, and upon laying her hands on a book a title and summary appeared, ethereally, in front of her. And instead of going through the minor-yet-universal humiliation of having to wedge a book out of the squeeze of its shelf then pull it by the exposed portion she could just hook a finger on the spine of its ghost and pull, according to her chaperone.

“I hope you’ll forgive us for the simulated space,” said the grey. “I argued furiously that you, at least, should be able to visit one of the homeworld’s libraries, but, alas…”

The greys- formally known as the Korshanth, a moniker that absolutely no human being used in casual conversation- had not invited any of humanity’s heads of state. After all, to invite one would be to snub the rest. And Marie had qualifications that fit what she knew would be called in grey society a “Librarian General”, and their homeworld’s Librarian General was eager to meet her. Marie was the only one spared the honor… nobody else owned a planet as a sovereign, after all, and anybody else who did was not likely to devote it to science.

The diplomatic vessel did a great job of making, what she knew was a room not much bigger than a small warehouse, seem vast and expansive. The shelves seemed to stretch for miles and miles, to a blurry horizon, where “windows” sent refracting pillars of “sunlight” shining down on the endless shelves. One didn’t need to do all that walking, thank goodness- simply swipe on the shelf’s spine and choose from a catalog what sort of books one would like to browse.

The greys used a system a lot like the Dewey decimal system.

Those windows, holographic as they were, gave the appearance that they could be hundreds of feet tall, and they animated in stained glass fashion events in Korshanth history as unimpeded shafts of colored “sunlight” from each window shone down on the endless shelves. Those animations alone, she could study for days. She felt about to burst with curious questions as to how they affected the total ambience, not just visual, of the large space- how, in a space only as big as a small warehouse, she could feel the light of an alien sun, and feel the eddies of wind reach down from the broad, open ceiling and tickle at her hairs. Was that birdsong? What did birds look like, on the grey homeworld?

But she was here as a diplomat, not a tourist- the greys had denied humanity tourism of their worlds- and they wanted to show off something that, apparently, only they and few of the herbivore species shared with humanity: making grand spaces where one could appreciate and study under the collective knowledge of their kind. And as a born academic, Marie was painfully appreciative of what she could access in this space: many more millenia than human civilization’s meager few’s worth of an alien civilization’s literary achievement, not so far from the palm of her hand. The feeling was heady, and it was all she could do not to tear up at the majesty of it. This was humanity’s potential; better, even. Not in conquest, not in counts of stars or planets or parsecs, but in the ability to fill a library as vast.

Marie shook her head, anchoring herself back to the here and now. She was a fellow academic, and she was in an alien library as a guest of the highest honor. Composure was paramount. The greys were obviously pleased as punch to have another predator-borne species in the galactic community, but it was important to present as respectable and independent, even in the face of such humbling.

“Can you believe most herbivores don’t believe in libraries? To most beings in the galaxy, finding a book is not an endeavor to be done like picking berries out of bushes. They find out which books they need and buy them directly from wherever their nearest retailer is.” The grey looked meaningfully toward the virtual horizon. “Some might say it’s more rational that way, that the dedication and work put towards making a place where one can simply browse books is a waste, but…” Nisren shrugged. “Corpse-eaters. They think in such strange ways, don’t they?”

A quirk of sapient evolution, it seemed, was that the art of cooking meat seemed to be essential to the growth of large brains. But where species that hunted cooked the meat of their prey, species that were hunted cooked their dead to deny their planets’ predators. Taming fire for one purpose was, apparently, no more miraculous than the other. Except, until humanity joined the galactic fold, the greys were not only the only obligate bipedals known but the only known sapients borne from predators… which, according to theory, was a fluke. Allegedly, deathworlds made sapient predators more likely, and though the greys had a lively homeworld, a deathworld it was far from being. So far, the only known deathworld of sapients was Earth.

Marie was weeks past these considerations. Choosing not to comment on her hosts’ prejudices, she cleared her throat, and drew with her finger a line, slowly, across the shelf. Different titles jumped at her: “Learn to Read and Write Tsutkian in [One Month]!”, “How Music Theory Shapes Language”, “Holographic Linguistics: How Diverging Cultures Shaped the Korshanth Linguistic Diaspora”… it was clear the last person- that wasn’t incorrect when talking about greys, was it?- to browse this shelf was scratching a linguistics itch. Her own curiosity at how they approached something so abstract was beginning to itch, too, but she knew that to be just because it was what was in front of her. She couldn’t decide what to be curious for. Instead…

“Nisren, would you happen to have anything, ah… curated for special visitors?”

“As a matter of fact, I do!” beamed the grey. “Go ahead and set the shelf in front of you to x99.001. Your alphabet is already in the database,” added they, either unaware or uncaring to betray a longer history studying human cultures than any humans knew of the greys’. Marie mirrored the gesture she was shown earlier: make a knife-hand, plunge it into the heart of the shelf, and slide quickly to her side until her arm pointed directly away from her. As expected, a holographic interface appeared, annoyingly populated with her familiar English letters and numbers superimposed over the grey alphabet present. How and when?.. thought Marie. Would it look like this to Nisren? Is it tailored to the observer? She was skimming the titles that now appeared before her- various sports, geographical, and civil histories- and simultaneously considering which questions she should ask when something caught her eye.

For the sake of diplomacy, Marie had familiarized herself with the alphabet of the grey lingua franca- what they called “Quortanis”. She knew little in the way of vocabulary, but could- at a rate of several letters a second- parrot words as she read them. In the lower front quarter of the shelf, however, a title jumped at her that she scarcely needed more than a moment to read. By ludicrous coincidence, human history had a book of the exact same name. But what of the contents…?

“Nisren, is this…?

The grey paled when he realized which book had caught Marie’s attention. “Oh dear!” He put a hand to his cheek, seemingly embarrassed. “Ah, well, I’m sure you must be surprised, just as much so as when our own xenanthropologists discovered your species’ cultures had an identical work.”

Her hands almost moved faster than her mind could follow. She hooked her finger in the book’s holographic spine, and looked up in time to see the book descend like an angelic gift from the holographic skies above. She could not tell when it had actually physically entered the room, but it slowed to a stop just in front of her. She grabbed the book and had it open even before the two halves of its metal cradle had ascended out of the room into their holographic portal.

No way, she thought. The greys also have a Kama Sutra.

“I could’ve sworn that one was supposed to be one of the ones restricted from you. Perhaps an intern thought it would be funny, but how that intern knew that your species had one as well…”

Its contents were unmistakable- pages of little grey men and women, in various coital positions. Accompanied with little bodies of text, tantalizingly untranslated.

“You know what the funny part is?” spilled Nisren. “The herbivores don’t have one. Not a single one. No sapient of any other species has seen it necessary to, ah, codify various means to accomplish intercourse in their literature. We might share the concept of libraries with a couple of corpse-eaters, but the ancient idea to make a rudimentary sex bible is…”

Marie only half-listened: she couldn’t tear her eyes from the pages. She gorged on the images, and swept the text with intensity as if hoping to burn the letters into her retinas. Maybe, just maybe, if she read hard enough the meanings would jump into her brain. Her fingers turned the pages eagerly, yet reverently.

“Yes, I have no doubt that book is very …

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