The Spacepeople

The spacepeople, for all their New Age accomplishment, could not chop wood or draw water from a well, nor did they have words for such chores, bounded as they were inside the brilliant theoretical language of cosmic binaries that had evolved along with their alien bodies.
But they were fascinated by flames, something they had never witnessed but only feared, having been cooped up in a firetrap of a starship for two hundred million chilly years as it scuttled across an emptiness that now seemed no more an expanse to them than the space you make when you blow into cupped hands. He would have them over to his cabin for hot coffee on occasion and they would hunch before his roaring fireplace like humankind’s earliest ancestors—but egg-pated, birdboned, as veiny and proverbially pale green as the underside of a tree leaf—carrying on interminable interrogations of the hissing, popping,
slick-talking logs.