Centuries later, after their sudden, enigmatic departure, I read an obscure xenologist’s brief, in- formal account of “Superlove” – what she and her contemporaries called the crucial core of the Xunirics’ emotional constitution.

To make our relations more comfortable, the Xunirics have taken human form, a relatively facile transformation in appearance for them to undertake, a triffling inconvenience to remedy all the attention we’d ineluctably lavish upon them in their natural form. But of course, this change in outward presentation doesn’t distract us from the fact that the Xunirics have an emotional force intensely outshining any of our own. It’s like love but all the more so. Someone began calling it Superlove, and the name stuck. Naturally, the Xunirics have specific ways to refer to this emotion and its intricacies with their highly sophisticated optoaural language, most of which are (as with many of their experiences and concepts) a struggle to even approximate with our human forms of communication.

Superlove has a potency and ferocity that are by all measurements and estimations far in excess of our variety of love. The depth of this love in its myriad emotional manifestations is stunningly more profound. My initial reaction to reports of this was like that of most of my peers; “What?” my intuition immediately balked. “More profound than love? ” But of course, the vastness of the universe is a landscape that can nurture even tenuous possibilities into hearty realities, so why not more magnificent, utterly stupendous forms of love? And though the existence of extraterrestrial love is heartening, many people can’t help but somehow despair over our sudden confrontation with this wondrous emotional juggernaut, concluding that we are somehow rendered inferior by our “weaker” love.

But I seldom if ever become even tinged by such disparaging sentiments. The Xunirics are clearly far more advanced than we are. From what I understand, they’ve had the benefit of many more eons of biological evolution, numerous generations of emotional sages and all the technological development that grew out of their scientific pursuits. They also got lucky and hit the evolutionary jackpot, getting Superlove from the course of circumstances on their planet while we got our comparatively less formidable love. And, well, at least we can still call it love. Superlove is not so far surpassing our own puerile emotional states in complexity and intensity so as to appear as some other phenomenon entirely. And in many simple cases, Superlove is roughly analogous to love.

The most evident manifestation of Superlove is that the Xunirics’ compassion and empathy are much greater than our own. But then there’s far more. The very way they experience love is radically different. Their psychology is incredulously divergent from our own, so their expressions and sensations of Superlove are undoubtedly rich and complex beyond what we can comprehend intuitively. Apparently, they can simultaneously experience multiple forms of love in a kind of hugely multi-dimensional space of emotion, the fundamental structure of which deeply incorporates the properties of Superlove, so they are never without an awareness of love. It would be something like if we were to exist simultaneously in several places at once, all our incarnations suffused with a keen cognizance of physical space – of spatial relations – with different, dynamic flavors at every moment. This expanded love allows them to understand each other and the world in ways that reconfigure the perception of what we all too often consider to be physical constraints.