One way to travel across the vast universe is to sleep out most of the journey. It's called being in stasis. Most high school teachers will recognize a similar state in many of their students.

Waking from stasis was always a strange experience. It was like waking from sleep and yet not. There was the same feeling of slowly arriving to a conscious state but the eventual feeling of readiness for the time ahead after a good rest was replaced by a horrible sense of lethargy. It was like a double physics class after lunch

Chuk'lan normally wouldn't have worried about this but something was hammering on his senses. The emergency klaxon grated every two seconds in a dirge as rough as nails. He didn't hear it exactly as he was for all intents and purposes what a human reader would recognise as a giant ant. It was accompanied by a flashing red light. Well, it would have been but after millions of years in stasis the bulb had gone. Chuk'lan's flight or fight instinct railed against the grogginess clouding his mind.

The stasis pod door had opened automatically. He staggered out of the pod on his insect legs. Their pointed tips tapped out a barely audible metallic pitter-patter sound under the screaming klaxon. He was tall for a mandibulan and his antenna began to taste the ceiling of the low ceiling of their ship the Phesmarius. It tasted like sucking a copper coin.

Clukcluk the ship's science officer was in the corridor. She had woken up faster. Her large avian eyes blinked. She opened her beak to speak, her head jerking in that odd down up motion her species the stufied-chicins did as they spoke. The universal translator converted her clucks into the smells Chul'lan needed to understand her. "Captain! Let's get to the bridge!"

They ran down the corridors arriving at the same time as the other crew members. They quickly took their posts. Krizan a large reptilian creature spoke. "Captain some space debris is on a direct collision course with usss" he said in his rasping hiss voice. "Why didn't the nav computer alter course? " Chuk'lan asked. Krizan talon tipped hands tapped urgently on his control station.

"It's metal in composssition and emitting a primitive sssignal," he replied.

"Another ship?" Chuk'lan asked his antenna twitching in excitement.

Their mission was to explore unchartered space. Life!

"Scansss indicate no life formsss. It may be a misssile of ssssome ssssort. Shall I prime the weapons," he asked his forked tongue quivering in excitement.

"No! Alter course and slow our speed. We will retrieve it!" he said wondering how the lizards had been accepted into the star league. As far as he could discern they only wanted to destroy things or eat things. Also, sometimes he could swear Krizan looked at him as if he were a snack.

"Clukcluk, what is the object transmitting? A message?" Chuk'lan asked hopefully. The science officer touched her headset closer to her head moving her head to one side then the other like a pigeon examining a crumb of bread. "No, captain it seems to be music."

"Music? Put it on the speakers," he commanded.

The strange sounds filled the bridge. Krizan bobbed his head in time to the music. "War music." He said. It didn't sound like much to Chuk'lan. But then, Chuk'lan was a giant ant. He didn't have ears. The universal translator couldn't understand a new language and translate it into smells for him (with hindsight the universal claim was a bit of an exaggeration). Although songs and poetry didn't really work in his species language they just smelt like flowers and sometimes banana which he didn't quite understand. He felt the vibrations of the sound and could feel the beat. Perhaps Krizan was right and it was a war song.

"Clukcluk, what is your opinion of the song?" He asked.

"Somewhat infantile and simple in composition, a children's song perhaps?" She scrapped a clawed foot against the floor twice as she spoke.

"Glug! Shall I initiate retrieval procedures captain?" asked Bob the navigation officer who also happened to be a giant fish in a suit filled with water.

"Yes, and then Clukcluk I want you to analyze the ship. I shall be in my ready room. Alert me when everything is..."

"Ready?" finished Krizan who looked at his captain with hunger in his eyes and saliva dripping from the edges of his mouth.

"Yes," said Chuk'lan and hurried to his ready room.

The lost tribe! Could it be? In the common faith of the Star League, it was believed that the Gods had scattered the different tribes that made up the League across the universe and that the monkey tribe had been lost by the Gods to punish them for their arrogance.

A call at the door interrupted his thoughts.

"Come in," He didn't realize it but the universal translator gave him a whiney high pitched nasal voice that did not lend itself well to authority.

Bob entered his ready room.

"Glug! Captain, I need to talk to you. We have a problem,"

"Brief me on the situation," Chuk'lan said under the illusion that words like brief and situation made him sound more in command.

"Captain it appears as though the computer didn't wake us from stasis when we reached the end of Star league space charts. Glug!"

"Navigation officer Bob. What are you saying? You don't mean?" the captain tippy-toed around the obvious.

"Glug! We're lost," Bob looked worried but then again Posideans always looked a bit worried. Giant fish in suits filled with water generally do.

"Of course we knew this was a possibility. It's what happens when you go out searching through the unknown. You get lost." the captain said trying to put a brave spin on things, aware that his crew would look to him for strength in this moment of crisis. Then it hit him. 

"The spaceship! It may have charts! Bob when we have finished recovering it I want you to help Clukcluk find any information which could indicate our current location."

Later when they had recovered the ship, Captain Chuk'lan went to visit Clukcluk to get a progress report. He wasn't quite prepared for what he saw. His science office held a cuddly stuffed chicken toy. The white children's companion had lost none of its colors, the sterile journey through space had preserved it immaculately, and its white fluffiness contrasted with its bright red sweater. Clukcluk turned it in her feathered hand. As she did so the toy animal's head flopped from one side to the other. Clukcluk in turn tilted her own head from one side to another as her species tended to do.

"Perhaps they worshipped it as a god?" Chuk'lan interrupted her thoughts

"I don't think so" she answered with her free hand she brought up an image of a human family around a stuffed roast chicken dinner. The father proudly carving succulent slices for the hungry family.

"The lost Monkey tribe?" he asked

"Religious Mumbo jumbo," Clukcluk replied.

"They are primates."

"The universe is full of coincidences" Clukcluk replied in a tone that implied that there was no possibility of a spiritual interpretation of the time capsule they had found.

"Just because they eat... your species doesn't mean they don't worship them. Krizan's people believe that eating the remains of dying members of their clan brings them into the afterlife faster." Chuk'lan brought things back to the cute miniature replica she still held in her hand, her attention jerking from him to it as though she didn't know what to make of her discovery.

"The lizards eat everything. I sometimes wonder why we let them into the star league at all." Clukcluk put her mini self on her workstation and began to continue to sift through the database of information that the people of Earth had loaded into a probe and launch into the depths of space eons ago based on the possibility of just such a coincidental meeting like this.

"What about the song?" the captain asked, hoping to change the subject.

"It is one of the millions broadcast by the probe. Music from different cultures, in different languages. The computer is slowly translating them."

Clukcluk brought up the video.

"But it seems to be some sort of primitive mating call done by young males of this region of the planet." She said with the authority all experts had when they were talking about something they hadn't the foggiest clue about.

"The title of the song is in a different language: dope. As far as we can tell it means idiot."

"Apart from the..." what should he call it? "Religious bird totem, what else was there?"

"As much information as their primitive data drives could allow, although the..."Again her head flicked in the direction of the stuffed toy chicken. It seemed to be staring back.

"...toy is the only physical object to be found. The rest is stored information. It will take us a long time to decipher and classify it all before we can even start to understand it."

"Very well, keep me informed," the captain told her.

"Oh, there is one more thing. The most common way to refer to their planet seems to be the word they use for dirt," She explained.

"Oh! Perhaps their culture is ecological. Maybe they worship nature," The captain speculated.

"Maybe they are a very unimaginative species, we don't know yet," The Captain often noticed how his science officer loved to tell him about what she didn't know.

He bumped into Bob on his way out of the science labs. "Glug!"

"Just the person I was looking for. Any idea where we are?" the captain asked.

"Glug! Yes, captain. In fact, if the star charts on the alien probe are to be believed I think we could set a course for their planet. Glug!"

"The planet dirt!" Chul'lan exclaimed.

"Sir? Glug!" Bob asked perplexed by his captain's outburst

"Never mind Bob, call an officer's meeting in my ready room immediately."

Clukcluk, Krizan, and Bob met in the captain's ready room.

"We face a crisis that up to now I have kept from the rest of the crew including everyone here bar Bob. Due to an error in programming the computer didn't wake us up from stasis on passing the last known charted star systems," Chul'lan paused to let everything sink in.

"You mean we're lost," said Clukcluk.

"Yes and no. Luckily star charts found on the monkey tribe probe show us the way to their planet. We could change course and stop there" again Chul'lan paused.

"Glug! What if the natives are hostile? We already know that they eat species quite similar to our own" Asked Bob who was still rattled after seeing images of dolphins in tuna nets.

"They haven't developed deep ssspace travel, even counting for the time that's passed; they would have technology inferior to us. I sssee no threat to usss from the native population" said Krizan.

"Do we have a choice? Either we float through space for eons trying to get back home or make connections with this alien species," said Clukcluk.

So it was that the crew decided to make contact with the lost monkey tribe. As they approached the planet Krizan scanned the surface. "Captain the Co2 in the planet's atmosphere isss off the ssscale."

"Glug! And the ocean's acidity level is dangerously high," Bob said his dreams of exploring the water outside of his suit and on his ship tank suddenly dashed.

"Prepare a shuttle, let's investigate this ourselves."

The shuttle landed and the hatch popped open the officers couldn't believe what they saw. Instead of the lush green and blue planet that the probe's images had shown the crew saw a desolate wasteland. Despite naming their planet after dirt the monkeys weren't ecologists. They had as the Star league legends suggested been arrogant and burned through their world's resources, polluting their atmosphere. All that was left were the ruins of once-proud cities and almost lifeless deserts and seas. A mound of stuffed chicken toys (a strange fashion towards the end of the civilizations death throws) rotting in a landfill.