“The creature was stretched out on a laboratory table. The scale besides it showed that it was small, 1.24 meters from top of head to what was thought to be shoes, then we decided they were feet. There were no toes, although a ridge of what might have been horn covered the forward edges.
The rest was a scrambled nightmare. There were to slender right arms ending in delicate hands, four fingers and two opposite thumbs on each. On the left side was a single massive arm, virtually a club of flesh, easily bigger than both right arms combined. Its hand was there, thick fingers that closed like a vice. Cripple? Mutation? The creature was symmetrical below where its waist would have been; from the waist up, it was different.
The torso was lumpy. The maculation was more complex than that of men. The arms-well, they made a weird kind of sense. The elbows of the right arms fitted too well, like nested plastic cups. Evolution had done that. The creature was not a cripple.
The head was the worst. There was no neck. The massive muscles of the left shoulder sloped smoothly up to the top of alien’s head. The left side of the skull blended in the left shoulder and was much larger than the right. There was no left ear and no room for one. A great membranous goblin’s ear decorated the right side, above a narrow shoulder that would have been almost human, except that there was a similar shoulder below and slightly behind the first.
The face was like nothing you had ever seen. On such a head it should not even been a face. But there were two symmetrical slanted eyes, very human and somehow oriental. There was a mouth, expressionless, with the lips slightly parted to show points of teeth.”
The Mote in God’s Eye, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
