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something that’s been puzzling me, how on earth did you say what you did?”
    “What did I say?”
    “That stuff about travelling in time. I think he took you seriously.”
    “Yes,” John Wayne sounded very pleased with himself. “It was a lie. I’ve always wanted to tell a lie and of course we can’t do it in the ordinary way. I mean you need a barely intelligent alien to tell it to; one of those low bandwidth ones, if you can call them intelligent at all. So there he was, and there I was, and I thought, this is my big chance, and I might not get another anytime soon. So I did it. I lied like a human.” He gave the Dililly equivalent of a beam of pride. “It’s not even particularly difficult. But I hope we meet up with some more aliens soon, because I think I could get to quite enjoy telling lies. We’ll have to make one of those spaceship things so we can go looking for them.”
    Coco thought about it. “That’s an interesting idea. It will take a few hundred years, of course. No time at all by our standards, but the human beings and tiger folk will have done new things by then. And it will have to be quite big. Lots bigger than the ones which just left.”
    “Oh, there’s no hurry. It will be an interesting problem. We couldn’t extrude a whole spaceship, but we could do it in bits. The lifting and carrying and sticking things together will have to be done by avatars. But if the kzinti and human beings can figure it out, it can’t be too hard.”
    The wind blew, and the wind blew, and the wind blew, as it always did. And the bushes and the trees with their crystalline leaves moved in the wind and tinkled like a billion tiny bells. The leaves flashed and glittered. Just for a moment, one of the bigger trees had some of the leaves flash what looked remarkably like a picture of a spaceship balanced on a tower of flame. And the tinkling sound was a little bit like laughter.

Two Types of Teeth

    Jane Lindskold

    Jenni Anixter was one of the happiest people in the universe. Born at a time when aliens had been little more than a matter of speculation and rumor, she had seen them become a reality in her lifetime.
    Her happiness showed in the lines lightly etched into her round face, in the way she moved her plump body as if dancing, in the bounce of short, untidy mahogany curls. That happiness might keep someone from noticing the thoughtful expression of her dark grey eyes. Certainly, this aura of happiness meant that despite her numerous academic degrees, Jenni was often dismissed as just a wee bit frivolous.
    Now, Jenni herself was among the first to admit that the kzinti hadn’t proven to be a very nice reality. They might be real live aliens, but they were also warlike, focused on conquering and enslaving any sentient race they encountered. Non-sentient species gathered in along the way were a bonus, like sprinkles on an ice-cream sundae.
    But nice or not, the kzinti were a reality. Due to them, Jenni Anixter, who had studied medicine because there simply weren’t scholarships and grants for those who wanted to specialize in hypothetical alien biology, found herself in much demand.
    She was courted by a branch of ARM that very carefully didn’t name itself but had “Intelligence” (itself a euphemism for other, less genteel-seeming activities) written all over it. The members of this agency who came to speak to Jenni in her cramped little lab had clearly read all her papers. Jenni was flattered. Not many people bothered to read speculations on alternate biologies and the psychologies that would evolve along with them.
    But these agents had done so. Moreover, they wanted to give Jenni a very big, very fancy new lab. Along with the lab would come lots of resources, an extensive budget, and even a few assistants.
    There were, of course, conditions that went along with this largesse. Jenni would need to relocate to a very isolated Intelligence station, a base with an address so secret even Jenni couldn’t