Wow. They know even Amenta wasn't super tidy in its early civilization but yikes.

Their playbook is full of scenarios for aliens of various tech levels and various apparent political situations. This is a promising one, apart from a bit of a scramble to rearrange people so everyone the least bit hyper can stay aboard and a triple-check of their supplies of disposable plastic.

Then a shuttle lands on each side of the divide, in the densest available habitation of both.

The city is a bit too dense to land in without squishing something and out past its outermost defenses the land is still used densely even if mostly for farming, but if they time it right there's mostly-unused space in the middle of a nearby archery range.

That'll do. They have mountain bikes but ideally wouldn't need a horrid commute to get from where people live to their shuttle. Probes already checked the air, so they come out relatively underdressed for an alien planet, the better to look nonthreatening. The greys are armed and everybody's got light body armor on but it's nothing bronze age folks will recognize.

Armed aliens come out to meet them, not yet attacking, just very wary. One of them speaks.

Another alien runs deeper into the city shouting.

A green haired alien waves and speaks back, hopefully conveying that they lack a common language if nothing else.

The alien who already spoke to them tentatively tries pointing to objects and naming them.

The visiting aliens love this! Yes, please, name objects! They will try reproducing the sounds.

Sure, here's a sword and a belt and a tunic and a wristguard and an archery glove and a bow and arrows and some kind of native flower and - the name of the city? the word "city"? the word "wall"? something - and a boot and a bag and the sky and the ground and humans and a horse. The specific local trying to talk to them is not great at helping them produce the right sounds, and the language has phonemes not found in Tapap (there's a voicing distinction) or Anitami (it has two different liquids).

These Amentans are Tapai, but the specific people who were sent on this expedition can pronounce lots of sounds and hear lots of distinctions. They should be able to get at least most of the ones produced in such similar mouths; they were prepared to find much weirder vocal apparatus, if any, before they were zeroed in on this planet and its confusingly Amentanoid inhabitants. They write down all the words and try to elicit some verbs.

The locals are a bit confused about the attempt to solicit verbs but eventually get it. Their verb conjugations mark tense (there are... twelve tenses? it's hard to tell without actually eliciting examples of each one but they seem to follow a pattern), animacy, and person (for both subject and object - and then there's something slightly different for middle voice), and as they move into full sentences they start an awful lot of them with modal particles, and oh by the way the apparent stresslessness of the language only applies at the level of single words, sentences differ in meaning depending on which words are stressed. It's one of those languages that frontloads all the difficulty, where a learner has to have progressed pretty far to start using sentences at all.

But the locals do seem to be willing to keep teaching them verbs for a while.

Awesome. They (at least the ones with green hair) have absolutely nothing else going on that is more important than learning verbs and nailing down all these tenses and voices and so on.

After a while someone else comes by to take over trying to establish communication. This person, who gives her name as Elu, isn't armed, and starts by checking how much the visitors seem to be retaining.

The visitors pause a lot, and sometimes consult their notes, but do not seem to have completely forgotten any words they had down in the first place, somehow.

Then they're going too slowly. Elu launches into a long story at full conversational speed with lots of gesturing and mime. (It's about the founding of Sesat. The way she tells it it's mostly about wrangling people.)

This is very helpful! The visitors nod along and whisper to each other and take notes and occasionally repeat back a word that isn't clear (to a team of fifty up in the ship) from context.

Afterward she starts testing them again, now with questions like "what is the opposite of east?" and "what year was it three years after the end of that story?"

They can answer this, albeit not always in the correct declension! They seem to appreciate that she's checking up on their understanding.

Oh, are they struggling with declensions? Great, she can aggressively demonstrate all seven declensions for all three levels of animacy. (The levels of animacy are not intuitive. The language itself, for instance, is an animate nonperson.)

And how about them? Can they be enticed to demonstrate their language for her?

They seem like they'd really rather learn hers but will say a few words of theirs if she really really wants, and also all introduce themselves!

Their apparent reluctance makes her much, much more interested, unfortunately, though she can pause to let all the soldiers introduce themselves and then resume pestering the visitors about their grammar.

...how about they split up and they have one of the people with silvery hair talk in Tapap while everyone else focuses on learning Sesati?

That works. Elu gets one of the soldiers to work on learning Tapap (much, much more slowly) while she gets back to teaching them Sesati.

She starts trying to explain concepts too abstract to point to.

They appreciate this! They're making so much progress and she's so helpful! They are a little slower on the uptake with abstract concepts because they don't necessarily share all the same ones, but they are still doing impressively well.

"...Do you think we can have a conversation now about where you came from and why you're blocking the archery range, at least if you can ask questions when there's something you don't understand?"

"Do you want our house we move it? It moves!" says one of the green haired people, slowly and with frequent note consultation. "We put house where people, for talk from people."

"I am not sure where it should be moved to but someone will probably volunteer to rent you some land - perhaps even the land you're on, I don't know - go ask around," she says, turning to someone else, who leaves, " - anyway, I am very curious about why you came to talk to people today! On no previous day of my life have you done that anywhere I could see."

"We are learn how house go fast fast fast fast, short time recently! Now house go fastfast so enough to find this land place thing. Our land place thing far far far far."

Nod. "We are honored that you came so far to visit us. I would be interested to hear about your faraway land, and I am sure my king will be interested in discussing trade - but for now, is there anything we can get you to make you comfortable here?"

"All our comfortable in our house or in extra big house up high," the green-haired person assures her. "We have interesting in try small foods for check if good eating but is waitable."

She signals to the people watching from atop the walls and shouts for them to send samples of hors d'oeuvres that won't suffer much for sitting around for a while if they want to wait.

"Anyway, if this went very well for you, what might that look like?"

"We love to trading! We want lands and give things ours - maybe if food good to eating in our mouths our foods also in you! Maybe ways for making water only only water. Maybe pretty things, we are same clothes shapes."

"That sounds like something that might be agreeable to us! I for one am excited to make friends from so far away. How about you tell me about your home, and I can point it out to you when you say something in a way that isn't how I would say it?"

"Yes!"

And here they will actually turn around the shining objects they are holding for the locals to look at.

"Here is our land place thing a picture. It is far there." Point. Up at the sky. "It go circles-ish around a sun not your sun."

"Hm, do you mean it goes in circles around a star? And I'm not totally sure what I'd call that - I want to say 'world' - no, I like your calque for it, it's evocative - at any rate you'd say 'here is a picture of it' - the artist who made that picture is very good, by the way."

"It is not made by putting colors with hands! It is made like this." The green takes a selfie and displays that. "Here is a picture of me!"

" - Ah. I see. - And your grammar is fine there."

"Thank you! Do you want maybe a picture of you?"

She seems like she's getting less comfortable. "You honor me with such an offer."

"I do not need that picture. I do not know if you like to be pictures."

"I don't especially have any reason to want a picture of myself right now, thank you."

"You're welcome! I will not picture you." The picture of the green disappears and goes back to the linguistics notes.

"Something about that way of saying it doesn't strike me as how I would say it but I'm not sure how to explain why."

"We will learn more more. It is good now we can have a conversations even if it is small wrong."

"Yes. I think you mean 'slightly wrong' there. Will you tell me more about your home?"

"Yes! Our land place thing has three moons. It is less land more water than your land place thing. The plants and animals are not same. The circleish around the star is longer by four times."

"What exactly is 'circleish' supposed to mean?"

"It is not circle circle." Solar system diagram with ellipses!

"Oval. And you mean it's not really a circle - it's like a circle, it's similar to a circle."

"It is like a circle but it is not really a circle, it is an oval," nods the green.

"That's right. Why don't you tell me a bit about your customs so I can help you and our king talk to each other in ways that make sense to everyone and don't accidentally come across as disrespectful? And I can keep correcting your grammar at the same time."

"We are not the talking to king people! We are greens." They made sure to cover all the colors, since they can't expect there to be local names for the castes qua castes. She touches her hair to emphasize the point. "Kings on our land place thing are blues. When we are right with the grammar, blues - we do not do kings this year but we do blues who do king-similar things - can talk to your king. They are better at not accidentally going across as disrespectful."

"You mean you're not the people who should talk to the king, and you mean, uh, 'blues' will talk to the king when you have the grammar right... and the idiom is coming across... I don't know what 'blues' and 'greens' are supposed to mean."

"On our land place thing people have colors! The colors mean what you are good at. Greens are good at thinking about things, like languages and circles and animals and going fast fast fast. Blues are good at talking to kings."

"Are you telling me that those with green hair have an aptitude for learning and those with blue hair have an aptitude for diplomacy? And, um, it looks as though not all of you have blue or green hair..."

"Yes. The greys are here in case of angry people. You have not angried! We did not know when we brought them."

"Would you mind listing all of the colors and what they're good at?"

"Blue diplomacy, green learning, yellow - organizing? Orange healing, grey fighting, purple - making. And -" A desultory shake of the hand. "Red, not good at things, do things no one wants to be for doing. There are fewer now, maybe never one here. And this is all too simple, we do not do six things only."

"Should I be comparing us to your colors, saying 'I think that person is blue' or 'I think that person is grey' even though our hair is black?"

"Maybe! It might help for knowing who to ask what questions."

"I am not sure if I am blue or yellow. Those who came to meet you at first are grey. Reds are the ones with tattoos that look like so. At least, I think those are the closest analogies, but, as you said, it must be more complicated than you've told me, so I might be entirely wrong."

"Is it safe to touch a tattoo face one?"

"Safe? Well, some of them are criminals, but there isn't a specific threat that will only materialize if you touch one and not if you're an inch away."

"Then that seems different but it is good to know, thank you!"

"I see. Do you have colors for farming or fishing?"

"Purples do both those things. Not too many of us are doing farming or fishing though. We have got more good at it so one farmer feed more people."

"Interesting! Do you think you might want to trade lessons in that for something?"

"Yes! Maybe different plants need new lessons we don't know yet but we are not happy for you to hunger."

"I am sure the king will be delighted to discuss that with you! Does that suggest a particular topic I should prioritize teaching you vocabulary about?"

"Maybe! Words for plants and for things that happen up in sky and for places?" They have a satellite photo of the area. "This is where we putted our house."

She starts talking about astronomy. Admittedly astronomy here is in its bronze age stamp-collecting phase and she knows of no words for things like nuclear fusion.

That's okay! They actually meant weather, which they clarify soon enough.

She can teach them so many words for weather phenomena. Here are five words for different kinds of wind and three for different kinds of rain and then there are fires which she apparently thinks of as part of the same category, and frost and snow and hail, and a handful of terms for different broad categories of combinations of ambient temperature and humidity and sunniness.

They diligently learn all this vocabulary and ask what kinds of weather prevail where and what they grow.

She tries to explain their crops. While she's in the middle of that the person she sent for hors d'oeuvres returns and that gives her some examples to point to.

Oh good! They will take pictures of the foods and then bring them in to the onboard lab to be investigated for toxicity and proteins of the wrong handedness and stuff. Also bits of them will be fed to weasels.

She doesn't ask about this though she seems somewhat interested. Instead she talks about the annual cycle of weather. Summers are warm and dry; winters are wet with occasional snow.

They have shorter years here than on Amenta! Do they have a distinct spring and autumn? How long do their crops tend to take to grow?

They have spring and autumn, though it's sometimes hard to distinguish winter from them, especially right along the coast. ...Elu actually doesn't know the time-to-harvest for most crops off the top of her head, they tend to sow on a rolling basis since the growing season is most of the year. Or all of the year if you're on the coast or willing to take some risks and baby your crops a bit. She can guess who would know or where to find the information.

It's the sort of thing they'd need to help with growing local crops! So far they have no reason to believe they would be harmed by eating them but they want to be sure and of course there's "not harmed" and there's "nourished".

They can totally go make a farmer answer some of these questions, there are farms all around.

Sure!

Eventually these greens will get tired. Do locals get tired? And sleep? They can send their house up to the sky and get some people to talk to them who are on a different schedule and not tired, if the locals do not have this need.

The locals do have this need! They also have people who are on different schedules for various reasons but most commonly people sleep when it's dark out and there might not be three shifts of people on hand who would be any use here. They're welcome to come back tomorrow if they'd like.

If the locals also sleep, they will just all sleep in their house here and come out again in the morning.

"Also, it's a vehicle. Like some kind of flying wagon. By the way."

"We will sleep in our vehicle!"

Elu will be available again tomorrow.

So are the greens! They have gotten quicker with the language - they still talk slightly haltingly but the sentences are fully formed much quicker at each step of the interaction.

Elu compliments them on that.

"Our friends in the bigger house in the sky help us!"

"You can talk to them from here?"

"Yes! These things," the glowing rectangles, "can talk to things in our vehicle, which talk to the things in the bigger vehicle in the sky, which talk to the these things," rectangles, "that our friends have. They all listen and help."

"I expect the king will also want to speak with you about learning to make those."

"They are complicated! It takes many different kinds of work to make all the many things that make the things. But it would be good for you to have them! Then we could talk to you more easily."

"They do seem like they'd be complicated."

"Yes. Would any of you like to meet our friends, in the bigger vehicle? You are invited but will have to wash very very very very well. We do not know if your sicknesses can come to us, like we do not know yet if your food is good for us."

"...Do you know if we can catch yours or is that also a mystery?"

"It is also a mystery but we will also wash, and the air in the vehicles goes through special places that make all the diseases in it die. If you are scared you do not have to come! But you are invited."

"I think I would like to visit. How many can come with you this time?"

"We can ask for a vehicle with bath things and space for ten, or a bigger one or more if many people want to come."

Some of the soldiers would also like to visit.

Then they will call down a suitably sized vehicle, and it will arrive about an hour later, and the greens will be equipped with very emphatic instructions on how to shower, translated redundantly to make really sure.

The soaps are pretty different from Sesati soap, though Sesati soapmaking is close enough that Elu has specific, concrete questions about the differences.

It's so much showering. Elu concludes she shouldn't ask whether the aliens showered like this before coming but one of the soldiers asks instead.

"For longer! On our land place thing we have better water tube things and can use more water. Before we got on our big vehicle we showered more than this to make so sure we brought nothing bad on the vehicle."

For some reason this seems to please the Sesatis.

Partway through the long shower ordeal Elu asks about etiquette for meeting the others.

"We have two names each. In this kind of meeting, you use the second name. We stand about this far apart," gesture between this green and the next one, "in our part of our land place thing but it is okay to stand farther. Please not shouting. Is that the thing you mean?"

"Yes, thank you."

"If you are more questions please ask! And questions about showering, also! And if it would help to watch that is also etiquette-yes."

"To watch what, conversations or showers?"

"Showers. We are all right to be watched showering if it helps."

Sure, why not.

They will demonstrate all the steps. They have humanish anatomy all the way down despite the weirdly androgynous builds.

Of course they do, the fair folk often do in stories. Not that anyone points that out to them. They shower.

Once everyone is totally clean, up they go! The view is amazing. The trip is a little nauseating but they have had longer to iterate on shuttles than on FTL so it's not that bad.

A couple of of them gawk. A lot. Most of them, including Elu, at least seem impressed.

And then they approach the big vehicle, which is frankly ludicrously huge. It's divided into a bunch of sections, radially symmetrical in three dimensions, and they slot right into the end of one. Once they're fully matched in momentum with the big ship the artificial gravity kicks in - the shuttle has some, on its own, but not a full g - and the hatch opens up and they can walk right in.

There's a constant background hum, fans and engines and pumps and all awhir, and the surfaces inside are gleamingly smooth and brightly lit, with alien writing on various bits of it and also several screens currently displaying various landscape photography. An alien with purple hair is just ahead of them in the hall, dry-mopping it in advance of their arrival, and nods to the party and speeds up a little.

"Welcome to the Venture!" says a voice, and around the corner comes - a blue! She beams at the visitors. "We're so glad to have you here!" She has a rectangle and earbuds like the greens do but appears to have practiced these two sentences enough to have them smooth. "I'm Sakasta Mashu."

"I'm Elu - our names are structured differently from yours and it's fine to call me Elu. I'm pleased to be here and to meet you."

"May I show you around the Venture?"

"We would be honored if you would."

So they can see this chunk of the ship! It has a galley and quarters and bathrooms and various technological doodads covered in blinkenlights and there's that view again and there's a cargo bay.

Elu chooses her compliments... oddly. What lovely color coordination in their quarters. What a simple yet elegant shape that technological thing is. Isn't that a lovely view, they have such good taste.

That is sort of strange! Perhaps while they are walking around they can probe for an explanation of their etiquette, in case she is willing to decode this at a bit of a remove where she won't explain directly.

Elu has a lot to say about etiquette. For example the use of status-marking pronouns and these five different honorifics and personal space under different circumstances and fundamental human rights like the right to have as weird a sleep schedule as you want.

It does not seem to be clear to her exactly why they're asking this now but she doesn't ask about it, just looks obviously bemused.

Well, none of that is about compliments but it's good to know anyway!

They brought up their hors d'oeuvres samples and can show the locals the lab they will use to look at them. The shuttle science equipment is way less comprehensive.

Elu would really, really like to see that. That sounds fascinating. She has lots of questions but, unlike soap, this isn't really something where Sesat's state of the art is such that her questions can be very specific. Just lots of variations on "how does that work?" and "why do you do that?"

One of the soldiers is also really obviously interested, but letting Elu ask the questions for now.

The greens are happy to explain, though the translation is not really up to most of the details. It's good for vocab elicitation, anyway.

It is! Though sometimes Sesati doesn't even have the vocabulary they want.

Understandable! They can make up compound words or loan some Tapap, whatever. The Sesati are not going to exhaust the enthusiasm of greens explaining science to aliens.

Well, in that case, Elu starts angling for information Sesat can immediately use or at least start laying the groundwork to be able to use soon.

Do they have germ theory? That's useful on an arbitrary tech basis!

They already had idea that something to do with uncleanness has something to do with the spread of illness but not the specific insight that the causative agents can multiply in the absence of further contamination.

Well, it's useful to know! On Amenta it has been discovered that microbes can infect people via water, open wounds, inhalation, mucous membranes, etc....

It's close to impossible to absorb an entire intro-to-epidemiology course at once with no particular scientific background and without having brought notetaking materials but Elu does not know enough to realize this and does know enough to realize how useful it would be to do it so she is going to try.

Nobody here is planning to stop her. Other people can move off to look at other stuff if they want.

Their unwillingness to split up outlasts her determination to learn infeasible amounts of new information, though one of the soldiers takes the opportunity to ask someone who isn't immediately in the process of explaining epidemiology what they do for fun.

This is a purple bringing the scientists lunch! "Oh - um -" He fiddles with his device for a while and very slowly reads out the translation it gives him. "I like to... watch... stories, and do a kicking balls game."

"Oh, like theater? Theater's when people pretend to be in a story and you watch."

"Yes, but theater saved for later watching."

"Huh! Like an illusion of a memory of a theater?"

"Like -" The purple frowns at the translation and then instead navigates to a video player app and shows a clip from a drama. Someone with goldenrod hair is saying something very emphatically to someone with lavender hair.

"Huh... an illusion that you can just tell is an illusion, you're not even trying to make it convincing..." But it could be convincing if they wanted it to be, he's pretty sure.

"It isn't to be convincing, it is to be stories."

"Yes. I can tell. Um, what kind of stories do you watch this way?"

"This one is about this person -" He switches away from the translation interface for a moment to point out the paused face of the purple in the drama - "and her life. She has romances and jobs and babies and things."

"I guess most people do."

"Yeah. There are a lot of stories, I just like this one. Probably everyone here watches different ones."

It is determined after some conferring that the greens who happen to be in this room at the moment are actually all caught up on something called The Epafka Laboratory but otherwise they mostly don't have shows in common.

"Maybe later you can watch Sesati theater. I don't have any on a magic thing like that to show you, but people do it."

"Maybe! The translation would need fastering."

"...You mean speeding up?"

"I guess," says the purple, looking helplessly at his translation app.

Before the locals are likely to get hungry - since they don't know about eating each other's food yet - they will be ushered back into the shuttle, and this time the blue will accompany them.

On the way down Elu takes the opportunity to talk about Sesati and Tapai etiquette with the blue.

The blue is eager to learn! She explains that it's not polite to talk about anything gross in polite company if it's not an absolute practical necessity; it would be rude to attend any gathering sick unless it is very definitely not infectious; if someone touches their hair like so that means they don't have the correct educational background to opine confidently about the topic at hand and might want to be asked for a referral to someone else; it's okay to give gifts pretty arbitrarily to impersonal groups, like "the Amentans", but giving gifts to individuals should probably wait till they have more fluent translation to explain the details of how that ought to work; you don't touch people you don't know on a personal level (so, sometime after you would normally start using their given name).

Elu is not terribly clear on when you'd change which name you call someone, when exactly do you do that?

Elu definitely has more to say about Sesati etiquette - ways you can greet different sorts of people, how titles work with the Star-of-Stars and when you can dispense with that, and rude gestures that might mean something else on Amenta. She mentions that it's very forward to ask about people's families. She's willing to start listing virtues Sesat considers important (and therefore considers it confrontational to suggest someone lacks). She can explain the concept of oaths if they happen to be unfamiliar though she disclaims that she has no expectation that they are and is just trying to be very thorough to the point of explaining things that probably don't actually need to be explained. She mentions that gender roles exist but she's not sure she can explain them quickly so maybe the visitors should just avoid going into anyone's bedroom until they've had more time to figure that out.

Usually you start calling someone by their first name when you start socializing them outside of work-related situations, though you might continue calling someone their job name while actually at work with them indefinitely.

It's really useful to have a catalogue of greetings and titles. That one gesture is an Amentan sign language's word for a beverage but that seems unlikely to come up for the foreseeable future. They can avoid asking about people's families if that's rude, do they just fall back on talking about the weather, is it weird to volunteer information about one's family or can the Amentans show off baby pictures and stuff? Amenta has promises, and very serious promises, but not really a specific oath category insofar as they are translating the explanation correctly, what is important about the difference between a promise and an oath? Gender... roles... huh, what a way to be, but it makes good evopsych sense in some ways. They will send out a bulletin about not hooking up with locals for the time being (or merely entering their bedrooms, if that's also a thing specifically).

Amenta also values many different virtues, though which ones exactly depend on the caste. It is unfriendly to suggest someone lacks a relevant virtue, but in most situations it just leads to the person avoiding you. If they start calling random Amentans stupid or criminal or something then they will more likely be asked if they'd like to talk to someone else than start a serious fight.

It's not very weird to volunteer information, especially if the babies in question are now adults on another planet.

Elu meant the bedroom thing completely literally and actually expects hooking up to be less than maximally fraught though perhaps they should also avoid that until they know more.

What things start serious fights in Sesat of course depends on the gender of the people involved but Elu can talk about that in detail.

(Speaking of baby pictures, lookit this green baby! Isn't he cuuuuuuute?) And are they guessing correctly that the people with discernible breasts and higher voices are the women and the ones with facial hair and kind of a lotta muscles are the men?

Elu and several soldiers agree that's a very cute baby! Two of the soldiers show no interest at all.

"Yes, that's mostly correct. Women who are fairly lean might not have discernible breasts, voice ranges overlap a little, and facial hair is complicated - men shave it off if they're soldiers, but not if they're farmers; sometimes women grow a little and they'll shave it if they have time and it's patchy and looks uneven, but not if they don't have time or if it's easy to keep it looking nice. If you're at a loss, men are more likely to carry swords or bows or be wearing or carrying archery wristguards or gloves."

"Okay! Do we ask if we aren't sure?"

"I suppose, since you're aliens, if you remind people that you're aliens, that might work straightforwardly."

"Okay. We don't care if people can tell which ones of us are girls and boys as long as we aren't hooking up with humans anyway so you don't have to worry about that."

"Well, you're aliens, it doesn't have to matter to you, though perhaps you could explain how to tell which people are apt to get into duels and which aren't expected to get involved in violence."

"We don't have duels but the greys are designated for violence if it comes up unavoidably."

"You don't have duels? What do you do instead?"

"In - what situations? There have been historical societies with dueling but I don't know what you use it for."

"They still duel in Ereith."

"Really? Well, they're all grey, that would kind of impair developing a nonviolent culture."

"What do you do when mortally insulted?"

"What does it mean to be mortally as opposed to not mortally insulted?"

She attempts to explain what sorts of insults draw what sorts of responses from what sorts of people - like if you suggest some soldier ought to be a slave, that's the sort of thing that might get a violent response, and if that soldier has a sister that you say it to she might arrange for a man to do something about it or, for instance, if someone said that to Elu, then that person would likely never get an audience with the Star-of-Stars and might never be able to find anywhere to stay in the capital. But, for example, saying someone is just ugly isn't nearly that serious.

Huh. Sometimes people are sued for slander, if it's actually a serious and public enough insult that it might affect anything about your life that you couldn't solve by not hanging out with whoever insulted you.

Elu is interested to hear more about how that works.

Sure, they can talk about civil court.

Elu is trying to learn so much it feels like she's running out of room to remember more new things today but this is very important.

They did not bring a civil court along on the ship, to be clear, here they are mostly trusting everyone's professionalism and would probably fall back on asking Sakasta Mashu or one of the other blues on the ship to adjudicate if something blew up really badly. Or a personnel yellow if it was threatening to blow up and someone needed to be reassigned or something, before anyone had actually started issuing really dire slander.

Well. In that case maybe it won't be too terrible if she comes back to the topic of civil court some other time.

Yup. Are there standard polite circumlocutions if you think someone doesn't have enough of some virtue for some purpose and want someone else to handle a task to which that purpose is relevant?

"You mean like 'yes, his majesty is interested in a new advisor, but candidates must present nonnegligible progress toward a solution to the Riddle of Tena's Ford to be considered' or like 'actually, I don't think you'll do' or are you picturing a different sort of situation?"

"If those are polite ways to express those things then they certainly answer my question! Thank you."

"They won't start a fight, anyway."

"What is the Riddle of Tena's Ford?"

Elu explains the riddle. (The answer is probably an entire trigonometry textbook.)

A green is nerdsniped and sets about figuring it out on her everything.

She has a proof in ten minutes!

Elu would like to read her proof although perhaps it is in the wrong language for that.

It is totally in the wrong language for that but they can spend the next while talking math symbols and terminology so it can be translated.

They can!

...Either Elu isn't actually a mathematician or Sesat doesn't have notation for some of these things. (In fact it's both.)

Well, the nice thing about math notation is you can always break it down into smaller pieces! This green is happy to talk about math as long as Elu has patience for!

She starts running out of interest but it's not demanding of her ability to cram more things into her memory and it's plausibly an important step toward being able to understand other advances, besides which this riddle has practical implications in itself, so she doesn't ask to stop until they're done. But she's noticeably less enthusiastic after a couple of minutes.

The green will simplify so as to get through the whole explanation in a way that may not maximize comprehension but should at least be clear on there being well-described moving parts all the way down.

And when they feel they've learned enough Sesati the king will see them.

Sakasta Mashu, armed with reasonably decent machine translation, a yellow at one elbow and a green at the other to supplement, and her Sesati etiquette lesson, greets the Star of Stars in the fashion of a foreign diplomat.

"Sesat is pleased to welcome visitors from the stars. We would be delighted to hear what has brought you so far to meet us."

"Amentans have longed for generations to meet other kinds of people! It is one of our fondest ambitions to meet our neighbors and learn from one another! And most planets have not only no people, but no life at all, no water, no air - this one is so much like ours that it would even be possible for us to live alongside you! We chose this part of the planet because it is, so far as we could tell from the sky, the cleanest on the planet, which is a very worthy target of a people's attention and suggests a sympathy between us."

"We are interested in trading lore with our friends." There sure is an implication in there that they might specifically want to live here. He wonders why. "I have heard that your people have achieved such cleanliness, in fact, as surpasses even Sesat, and certainly that is a wonderful thing. I find myself wondering if your people have thus eliminated disease."

"Not all disease. Diseases that are eliminated - and we have done this for some - leave opportunities for any that are hardier and more complicated to arise. But our disease burden is lighter every generation, and while you are not just like us, many of the things we have learned will transfer to you."

"Impressive. How has that changed your society?"

"It is much safer! A baby born on Amenta today will probably live to be a hundred and fifty of your years or more."

He does some quick mental math to check his guess about what's going on here - that's a very high life expectancy but it doesn't mean more children per woman but it's, what, four times as many living grandparents? No, a baby born, if that's literal, if it's more than half of births - if it's more than half of births then... the replacement birth rate might be so low there's no need for any incentive beyond people's own desires. Definitely a good thing, if it's true, but a thing to be handled with care.

"It must be much easier to maintain your population under such circumstances."

"Is that a problem you have here?"

...He'll take that as confirmation.

"Sesat is well able to solve such problems."

"I would be so curious to hear how you do it! If there are spheres of work or commerce where your population is not balanced ideally, we would love to know so we can send the best visitors possible for you."

"Not only are those who have performed certain valuable services for Sesat and its king rewarded but so are any children they choose to claim. And of course there are other relevant policies. I am sure that whatever balance we might previously have preferred, it will change swiftly as we come to know you and learn your wisdom. Tell me, though: do you wish only to send us visitors to stay for a time and leave?"

"We would be absolutely delighted to buy some land so that some of us could live here indefinitely!"

"That may be possible to arrange. I expect land prices will be unstable in the near future until we have learned the lore your people spoke of to Elu and have begun to farm more efficiently; perhaps we should discuss that first."

"Certainly! I do not know how much will apply to the plants here, as ours differ, and may benefit from different fertilizers, but we would be more than happy to help you with installing plumbing suitable for, among other things, irrigating your crops."

"That is of interest to me; I have heard praise for your plumbing, and I imagine it would make other things easier as well."

"One thing that plumbing requires is metal. It is expensive to transport things from our landplacething, but it should be possible to find deposits here, if you would give us your leave to mine for what we will need and set up manufacturing for the empty-cylinders and other things needful."

"Perhaps. Do you need different metals than those we already mine, or simply more?"

"Both. The geologists can talk about specific ones and where they will find them," Mashu says. "Mines can be dangerous, so it will be necessary to make sure people do not wander into them."

"Such things are often handled with fences but I can also make sure those of our people who work there with you keep an eye out for anyone seeming lost."

"We usually have fences, security greys, and also signs; how many of your people read?"

"Depends on exactly what you count as being able to read but the skill required to recognize a sign that says 'danger' is more common than not."

"Excellent. Eventually we'll need to work out some details about rights to the land - a mine isn't useful for much else, so I'm not sure whether the owners of the sites the greens track down will be interested in selling and not worrying about that, or prefer to lease for some of the metal extracted and plan on hiring remediators to cover it over again when it's played out..."

"I have no better guess than you until you identify the sites you want. What exactly do remediators do and how long do you expect the mines to remain useful?"

"Mines can last for different lengths of time depending on the size of the deposit, but a remediator would clean up any unpleasant substances in the area and fill in the mine so the ground would be stable and then put a layer of sod or something like that on top."

"Do you expect to be adding a lot of unpleasant substances or merely uncovering them?"

"I'm not a mining expert -" She looks at her accompanying green.

"It's the refining more than the extraction that adds substances, and we have managing that pretty well understood, but uncovering them can be enough to make an area a little iffy for people to live on for a while without proper cleanup," the green says.

"I see. We should return to this topic when your people have assessed sites. In the mean time - are there other techniques of your people which, if we were to adopt them, would help put you at ease while you're here?"

Why yes, there are. Do locals sneeze? Cough? Throw up? Here are best practices on dealing with that which aren't strictly plumbing-dependent. Mashu talks delicately around these things, picking through her translation-prompted words with slightly discomfited diction, but brazens through it anyway. What are their interment practices, cremation is the gold standard but if they're doing burials or something they'll want to account for that. Would they like to accommodate a bunch of doctors and scientists to study how they work biologically and figure out their disease situation as it differs from those of Amentans? Illness is a terrible burden they wouldn't wish on anyone, and at this point in Amentan history it was especially hard on cute tiny babies!

They do sneeze, cough, throw up, and get the runs.

They do bury their dead.

They would be delighted for their guests to teach them about disease and biology and how to figure out how to save more of their children. The Star-of-Stars can assign some doctors to learn from the Amentans.

Awesome, they are really eager to make sure everyone is up to the state of the art on avoiding contamination from all those things.

"Do your people have other knowledge that might further allow us to make you more welcome? For instance, your vessel seems to be made very differently from any homes or ships we make, and if it is more to your comfort then we should perhaps learn to construct things like it."

"The vessel is not exactly like our home! But yes, you should have glassworks as well as metal refineries, and factories for nails and screws. We would be happy to hire many local workers for such things when we have gotten them built."

"Sesat will learn. It would of course be unfair for the entire burden of creating such things to fall on your shoulders, since we all shall benefit."

"We will all benefit! We are so glad to meet you!"

"As are we! Is there anything else we should discuss before we hear back from your surveyors and so on?"

"I would like to offer you some gifts!" She has a little case full of objects, including a battery powered lamp, some jewelry with big honkin' artificial rocks in it, and a potted Amentan plant with pretty flowers.

"They look beautiful," he says with the air of one trying to show polite respect for his inferiors' best attempts at gifts. "I will have someone put in charge of looking after the plant, though they will need to know more of the needs and growth habits of Amentan plants to do a good job of it."

"It will need about this much water once a day and to be put in a window," Mashu says, gesturing a volume of water. "Nothing else."

"Thank you!" He gives orders that the plant's caretaker should be selected from outside the capital to further spread the news of the aliens and their beneficence, someone worthy of honor but perhaps not someone already busy with the duties of high office such as would leave them distracted, someone already skilled with plants, someone who will especially appreciate the beauty of alien flowers. - And then it occurs to him to ask what the alien custom is when the flowers are spent, whether they're deadheaded or just left to fall, whether this sort of plant is ever used for anything or always allowed to grow as it pleases...

"Oh, we can make the flowers into a tea, but you shouldn't do that, we still don't know if we're able to eat each other's food. The greens are working on figuring that out. In that size pot it will stay small on its own without any pruning, letting the flowers fall is fine."

"Thank you, we'll make sure that information is passed along. Out of curiosity, what sort of tea?"

"It can help us sleep? Even if it's safe for you it might do something totally different or nothing at all for humans, though. This is true among animals on our own planet."

"Of course! But the details of your world interest me in themselves." He sounds as sincerely enthusiastic as he can manage without compromising on dignity, which is very.

"Among Amentans who use that kind of flower in their tea they usually have it at bedtime with something sweet added."

"That makes sense. What sorts of sweets do you have?"

"I don't think we have words for them in your language yet! Would you like to see pictures?"

"I would."

So she will pull up pictures of Amentan sugars and syrups and the things they are made from.

He's looking for background evidence of their material culture and the secrets of their technology, that they might not have thought to redact from pictures of foods (or that they don't actually mind him finding out, either way), but not going to comment on that regardless.

"Those of your people who love sweets must be very happy."

"Yes! We have a lot of variety of food. Everyone is hoping that we will be able to share it with you. The greens think they will be ready to have a human taste something in a few days if all their investigations go well, though I don't know who will want to be first."

That is a very surprising thing for them to say and he needs to chase down all the implications of it later.

"I'm sure there will be people who are excited. How are they investigating?"

"They're figuring out what the food here is made of, and what animals here are made of. I think it might help them to have a sample from a human too, a vial of blood or something like that, but they can make very good guesses without."

Oh, dear, that sounds terribly ominous.

"I don't know if anyone will feel comfortable with that, but I'm very curious as to how you would be able to tell from a blood sample!"

The green in the party speaks up at this. "Blood does a lot of things in the body - it carries everything important from what you eat to where it needs to go to keep you alive. So if we look at some of it, we can tell what things in your food are important, and see if they're the same as the things that are in our food, and in our blood when we eat our food."

"I'm not disagreeing, only confused, but it doesn't seem as though it does that; for instance, animals that eat different things have very similar-tasting blood."

"Yes, that's true on our planet too," says the green. "Most of what makes blood taste a particular way is what makes it be blood in the first place, rather than blood from a drunk person or a hungry person or a cow or a bird. But we aren't tasting blood samples, we're using special equipment to tell more detail than that."

"Oh! How does that work?"

"The team on the ship told your people about some of it! One that is relatively easy to explain is a device that makes it possible to see things that are much too small to make out with the eye alone, so we can just look at things up close and tell the difference between them that way."

"Like a magnifying glass?"

"Yes, like a very very strong magnifying glass."

"Delightful! What a marvel."

"Eventually we will want ways to build all such tools here, because shipping them is so costly! And you can all see how they are made," says Mashu.

"'All'? All tools such as what, exactly?"

"All of the things we use. Microscopes, pocket everythings, vehicles that go faster than horses, even spaceships themselves."

"It would of course be our pleasure to learn how such things are built."

"Great! Is this a good time to talk about where we can put factories for things like that?"

"Yes. What are they like? Do they produce waste or noise? How big are they?"

She can pull up pictures of factories! "Factories produce some waste, so we will need to account for space to set it aside safely where it will not get into the water or soil or air. Some are noisy, but if there are neighbors who want them very quiet, we can make thick walls that prevent most noise from getting out. Different kinds are different sizes. We could use almost any amount of land, as long as we know about how much so we can plan for it, but parcels that are only the size of a house will not be very useful for factories specifically."

He has detailed questions about the types of waste and how they're sequestered and how if at all they can be composted or similar, and how those correspond to different types of factory, and what types of factory there are in the first place...

Some factory refuse can compost no problem, other kinds are not great to have out in the open and you put them in sealed barrels or something and warehouse or bury or sink them. Would he like to watch a whole compilation video of factory machines doing specific-ass things? Or this timelapse of a starship being built to soaring background music?

Yes, he'd love those things.

They have lots of those; they took a copy of all the most popular websites including the big video repositories before they set out.

In that case, after a while (a longish while) he'll assign the soldier who was learning Tapap to watch more videos so he can focus on politics. His obvious wistfulness about the videos is mostly sincere.

Mashu hands off the video-showing task to an underling likewise. Oh, here's something that might be useful, would he like to see a satellite image of the region and help them identify where all the borders are?

He can help with that, and even point out where some countries are mistaken about where the borders are. (Sesat has a disputed northeastern border with Iral and firmly defined borders with Azan and Niazon, the latter along a river.)

Good to know! Is there anyone who can teach them/their computers those languages, here?

Azani and Irali are mutually comprehensible with Sesati to the point that he can probably get them nearly fluent by listing specific differences (in some cases large structurally integral differences like Azani having dropped middle voice and being ergative-absolutive); whether the language they're speaking now is called Sesati or Niazoni is one of not that many regional variations and actually the dialects have been moving closer together recently rather than farther apart like Azani, and at any rate Niazon will take being spoken to in a centrally Sesati dialect better than Iral or Azan. But there are a couple of people from Iral around that they could talk to for practice, and a larger number of people from Niazon or who've spent a lot of time in Niazon.

"Really you'll only need to start from scratch on language-learning if you go much further inland than that - northeast of here you'll need to learn Neza and Roiti, at least, but Sesat doesn't border anyone we can't talk to."

"That's so convenient!" And now Mashu wants to look at the map some more, do they have internal political divisions, what are the towns called, who owns all this land, do they worry much about poaching/trespassing/water rights/etc. etc.?

There's some independence at the municipal level and they have this treaty with Niazon about the river and this other treaty with Niazon and Iral and Azan and Sonas and Lia about the ocean...

This is all really helpful for getting to know their way around the local politics! How do they usually get along with their neighbors?

"I don't really know enough about your experiences to usefully compare! We have treaties, we have wars, we have peace, we have tension and cooperation, and I couldn't yet say if we have more or less of those things than you're used to."

She will talk about the history of Amenta! They have less land area, practically everywhere is on the one continent or an island economically dependent on same, so this one Empire was able to conquer much of the known world; they didn't get Tapa specifically, where these Amentans are from, but it was a big historical event when it rose and fell. Since that time they have had little dustups and sometimes have had to make threatening postures about international treaties having to do with things like particularly destructive weapons, preventing spikes in grey population and the use of non-greys in combat jobs, making sure everyone is letting inspectors in to verify that they're obeying these treaties, etcetera, but nothing big.

"We have treaties about very different things than that, and do not normally cooperate with attempts to... learn how many of a year's infants were born to soldiers? I confess to being confused about your greys. Your international treaty inspectors are not quite analogous to anything we have. Territory does change hands and empires do rise and fall, though Sesat and its immediate neighbors have been fairly stable recently."

"Greys are one of our castes. Have you noticed here that people are often good at the same things that distinguished their parents?"

"Yes. Our soldiers are often the children of soldiers who themselves are often the children of soldiers. But I don't see that I have any cause for complaint that Azan does it differently. It only means their soldiers are less trained and have less experience working together."

"So, when Amentans noticed that people were often good at the same things that distinguished their parents, we started specializing education to take advantage of that, and requiring people to go into fields that draw on the same or similar skills as the ones they are likely to have inherited. By now all the castes have a most common hair color, though some people have to use dye. It's especially important with greys, because we don't want to have the kind of war where every person is part of the fighting. The harvest still needs to come in, the medics should be understood to be off-limits as military targets, as much of life as possible would ideally continue without interruption by all the adults picking up weapons and going to join the war. You don't want your scientists and your accountants to waste any time learning to shoot or to run wearing armor. So we have a rule that only greys can take combat jobs. If everyone cooperates on that, wars don't have to spread beyond the caste that's suited for it. If someone breaks that rule by having, say, purples fight, they're putting everyone's purples in danger, because they're making the war bigger, and all their neighbors will cooperate to make them stop. And this means that we can tell if some country is thinking about being more aggressive, if they have more greys than they should."

"In general that's incompatible with how wars are conducted here - if I invaded Iral, I might be interested in Iral remaining prosperous and its serfs remaining alive and productive and its food stores unburned, but Iral would not be. We could agree not to deny each other the fruits of conquest, but it would be good for one party and bad for the other in equal measure, and conquest would seem more rewarding and thus be attempted more frequently. - In addition to that, I think our neighbor Azan would never consider ancestry-based limits on not only soldiers but any class of people - Azan he claims descent from slaves, openly and with pride. And it would hardly be reasonable to enter into any such agreement while any of our neighbors refused. I am... not entirely sure this is responsive to what you're trying to convey here, and suspect there are things I yet do not understand."

"Well, you don't have castes the way we do, so of course this isn't a system you're using! But we do, and you seemed curious about why, so I meant to explain it. Certainly it wouldn't make sense to adhere to a treaty like this without everyone else also agreeing, but once that was accomplished it was a matter of no one wanting to be the one to destabilize the standards keeping their purples and so on safe at home."

" - No, I think I don't understand something else. There are not so many farmers who learn to fight that society would be radically different were it illegal for them to do so, at least not in the short term. Why does no one want to be the one to destabilize the standards keeping their purples and so on safe at home?"

"Hm. Imagine Tapa were fighting with another Amentan country, let's say Cene though we have no issues with Cene. And imagine it was going poorly for us, and there were Cenemi troops in Tapa, and we were running out of greys, and so we decided to give a lot of purples weapons and have them fight the Cenemi greys.

"This probably wouldn't work very well, for one thing, because purples aren't good at or trained for war, but it would at least be surprising, so we can suppose it worked well enough to win us the war.

"But that would be just one war. The next time someone was in conflict with Tapa, they'd know that we broke the rules of war. They'd be able to get lots of other countries to join them in allying against us, because none of those countries know for sure if they'll be squaring up with us in another five years and would rather we not have more time to train purples to shoot. If they landed troops in Tapa, they might kill everyone they saw - any caste, any age in case we'd trained toddlers or retirees to make suicide attacks. They'd move in their people and take our land and we'd all be dead.

"And nobody in Tapa wants that. So they won't support a blue who doesn't make it clear that they're against breaking the rules of war we have agreed to."

He frowns as though he's been presented with a koan. "You would prefer that Cene conquer Tapa and enslave your purples and enjoy all your infrastructure, than that you all die?"

"- Cene doesn't practice slavery."

"...What would happen to Tapa's purples if Tapa were conquered? Would they simply pay their taxes to Cene instead?"

"Yes. They'd obey Cenemi law and any state interactions they had to do would go through Cene."

"And you prefer this to their deaths because, what, because no one wants to have to rebuild their infrastructure repeatedly, or because it's hard to keep enough purples around, or out of sheer mercy or generosity toward your purples?"

"- because if we didn't prefer this to their deaths, they wouldn't vote for us."

"Vote for you?"

"Amentan countries today are almost all democracies, not monarchies. Instead of having kings, the people of the country all say who they want to run it, and whoever gets the most of those people to choose them runs it. With some details that vary from place to place, but that's the general idea."

"That sounds very interesting." They're all going to have to learn a whole new set of heuristics for who has power and who would have power if things changed. Maybe it'll be fun.

After some further negotiation and refinement of the translation programs and other minutiae, the Amentans take possession of a played-out copper mine they expect to be able to extract more copper from. The mine will probably operate at a loss, construed solely in the value of the copper, but they don't have to tell anyone that, and it's enormously valuable as a foothold.

They're building a mine, but you can't just build a mine. You need places for your workers to sleep - they build three dorms on the site, one for purples and one for locals and one for non-purple Amentans living on the site. The Amentans are planning to bring their families over. There's plans for a company store and a little mixed-caste school and an onsite copper refinery.

The first batch of Amentan workers appear, ready to teach locals to do the heavy lifting - Amentans appear to be physically weaker than human men - and break ground on the various infrastructure required. There are shuttles bringing arcane equipment of various kinds down on a regular basis when some yellows set up for job interviews.

Several people express tentative interest in working for them, and the person they buy the site from suggests that some of their serfs might be interested and capable.

After they learn about how local serfdom works, that sounds really convenient! They will need to teach all the locals rules like "you are utterly forbidden from coming to work sick" and "showers! use them!", and they would like everyone to pick up Tapap in the long term and attend classes about that. Will serfs accept pay in room, board, and company store scrip?

This one guy's serfs in particular will do that because he's willing to try accepting the scrip as payment. At least for now. Others will need to be sure they can meet or pay other people to meet their obligations back home.

There is some confusion about how they're going to attend classes in Tapap and also work.

Well, they won't be working every waking hour, they need time to like, eat and wash themselves and sleep. They will just also be spending some of that time on learning Tapap. Also the instructions for the use of various Amentan equipment will come with Tapap loanwords rather than making up compounds in Sesati.

Their lord wants it understood that he isn't to be held liable for their failure to learn Tapap in a timely way if they fail, and also that he won't agree to this if they'll be punished in any way that makes them less able to get back to work if they don't succeed.

Oh, they aren't planning to damage the serfs or retaliate against the lord if they don't work out, they'll just dismiss them if it's not coming along as they hope.

That's fine then.

Cool. Welcome to your new jobs, serfs! Watch these purples as they set up all their equipment and build everything they didn't import and help them out as you come to understand what they're up to! Please do not bring or wear babies into hard hat areas. SERIOUSLY, SHOWER. EVERY DAY. MAYBE TWICE. They build the plumbing facilities before anything else; they appear to prefer to sleep in tents than have inadequate water supplies. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are for the moment packaged Amentan stuff supplemented with local staples for bulk that they're buying with imported Amentan fabric and silver and such, but later they're planning to have a buffet style setup; cook purples will show up when the kitchen is built and then some serfs can be reassigned to that. Sign up for the new jobs that will open up over there and try to get your supe to recommend you if you'd rather bake bread than dig up copper. They should live in their preexisting homes for now till the tents are replaced with the dorms, let's get building!

It transpires that the serfs were expecting to work a lot harder than this and with the several extra hours each day that they weren't expecting to have free they start organizing board game groups and wrestling matches.

Some of them are pretty incompetent at Tapap. Most of them are pretty incompetent at taking sick days; they can tell if they're coughing or feverish but the average level of skill at distinguishing feeling under the weather from feeling sad or sleepy or just the normal misery of existence leaves something to be desired.

If they show up droopy or greenish or whatever to work they will be SENT HOME.

They can import some Tapai board games and use them for extra language practice!

Once they have a classroom set up and some oranges imported the serfs are welcome to send their kids to the school with the Amentan kids, though they will mostly be in separate classes till they catch up on the language.

They will not complain about being sent home unless it gets in the way of earning enough.

Some of the kids are young enough they aren't too useful to send to school, sure.

Some people are excited about imported board games! What are they like?

- you get full pay on sick days, it's just if you start looking like you're unfixably chronically ill or deliberately faking they'll fire you. They should go to the oranges when they're sick, they don't know that much about treating humans yet but this is a fine way to investigate more.

Little human kids get THOROUGHLY BATHED and then turned loose to play and learn Tapap with little purples under the supervision of oranges.

Tapai board games popular among this crowd include:

- a city building game with blocks that nest and snap together, with points awarded for cromulent placements; various complexity levels are possible and you can even score some people according to the small child rules and some according to the more sophisticated rules in the same game as a handicap
- space chess
- a deck building game where you are trying to accumulate animals for your zoo, particularly in breeding pairs, and also zoo amenities that make them more likely to live and reproduce when the die rolls come around
- a storytelling game where you are prompted to imagine the next event in a story based on the questions on cards, locations on the board you have navigated to, and challenge constraints you have been issued by your fellow players

One of those games is vaguely similar to a game they have in Sesat and would be happy to introduce some Amentans to, and the storytelling game is interesting too. The flavor for the city and zoo games is pretty unfamiliar and the mechanics are also alien.

The oranges will get to observe three colds, a hangover, a broken heart, a toothache, a stomachache, an epidemic of lice, and the aftermath of a fight.

Hangovers and broken hearts aren't contagious at all, but colds are, toothaches can make people drool, LICE ARE SUPER YIKES, and fights can result in infections that should be treated straightaway! They don't have any prescriptions more than "rest" and "clean bandages" and "maybe yank the tooth" and "STAY IN THE BATH WITH A SNORKEL TILL THE LICE DROWN" that they're sure of with humans - can you safely yank a tooth from a human? - but they will apply these.

The first person they suggest this lice remedy to looks as though he's just been ordered to choose between moving to Calado and dying childless.

"My lord of course has great wisdom from the stars but I have never heard of such a thing before and I wonder if perhaps it reflects a way in which things are different in Tapa."

"If you don't want to stay in the bath that long I can tell them that you're volunteering to try antiparasitic sprays. Or you could shave off all your hair, that would probably also do it. I'm sure the oranges can think of more exotic options too. But you can't mix with the other workers while you have lice."

"I can shave. I'll shave. It's fine." He doesn't quite sound as though it's actually fine.

"You don't want to have lice, do you??"

"What? No, I - I understand that my lord is from far away and is not making rash assumptions about us, even good ones, and that is very wise of my lord but no, of course not - normally we comb them out, it just takes a long time. It's only that, um, normally you don't, you know, shave... people. Just slaves."

"...well, you can also comb them out, if that will get them all. Just stop having lice, I really don't care how."

"Do you want me back when I'm done for the day or after I don't find any?"

"When you can't find any lice or nits report to medical and they'll double-check you and clear you to go back to work."

He seems skeptical of that but he can do it, anyway. It transpires that he doesn't have a comb fine enough to reliably catch nits, though he at least briefly also doesn't have any adult lice.

Medical has spray options or shaving him or 3D printing a finer comb, what's his pick?

A finer comb would be great, will it cost him anything?

No?? The idea is that if he doesn't have lice he won't spread them.

Then he'd love a finer comb!

They print one and give it to him.

He's very pleased with it!

And anyone who doesn't think to ask and find out that they're free can live in fear of bargaining with the fair folk and borrow it off him.

It's not actually a secret among the fair folk so anyone who shows up with lice will be promptly issued one now that they know that this is the solution that goes over well culturally.

Their combs get pretty popular. Some people who do not currently have lice would like them too, actually.

Combing works... some. Someone eventually offers to try the sprays if the Amentans will agree that if it kills or cripples him the rest of Sesat will be warned and the rest of the workers here will get a bonus to compensate for their bereavement.

Yes, absolutely, though they think it's really unlikely to kill him, he might get a rash or have his hair fall out or something but it'd be really unlikely to actually kill him on contact. Spritz spritz!

He is pleasantly surprised to discover that he isn't dissolving or anything. He informs everyone that he isn't dead. Yet.

Hopefully they can now spray more people and stop constantly fretting about lice on everyone and get back to work??

Some of the people are willing to be sprayed and then get back to work.

Oh good.

Dorms! Dining hall! Offices! Company store! A playground for the kids! And the mine itself, and processing facilities!

No catastrophes happen immediately.

Some locals ask a couple of the purples they've managed to interest in board games if they'd like to attend a party for Sky's Night.

What's Sky's Night and how is it celebrated?

In a few weeks - with the exact timing subject to change with the weather but the weather is almost never a problem - they'll go sit around outside having a potluck and stargazing and talking about what they're glad of, in the past year, and what they hope to achieve next.

Oh, that sounds like fun! The purples would love to attend.

Excellent! There are half a dozen of their Sesati coworkers at the party, and four Sesati women who might or might not in some combination be the mothers of the eight children present, and an old man with a pronounced limp. Several of them have cooperated in bringing a big pot of lentil soup and someone's brought some bread and cheese and someone else has brought figs and several people have brought wine or beer or both.

One purple brought a big custard trifle and the other brought a rack of lamb. They feel the culinary equivalent of overdressed but hopefully the locals appreciate it??

They do! Those are very popular! Someone makes sure the children and elderly get some of each. Several people compliment the lamb. (They might feel less overdressed when they try the soup. It’s creamy and thick and seasoned with cinnamon and cumin and nutmeg, though it sure does look boring.)

One of their coworkers is happy about his language-learning progress. The old man did something cool and innovative with his pottery this year. One of the kids learned to swim on his back! People seem to be congratulating them and offering toasts.

The Amentans are happy about having discovered aliens, and one of them got engaged last week and the other recently got her engineering certification!

There are toasts to all these things. One of the women and several of the kids chime in that meeting aliens is great. One of their coworkers asks excited questions about the engineering certification. One of the women cautiously ventures that if they want to talk about their engagement they're welcome to, though of course only if they want to.

"I passed the test just in time to get my application in to work here! I was fifteenth out of a hundred people sitting the exam, and now I'm on another planet, how cool is that?"

"My fiancée is one of the cooks here! We met on the trip over, it was a few days with nothing to do, and she and I like all the same music and wound up dancing around the cafeteria and it's gone from there. She asked me to marry her just five days ago!" says the other purple. "We're planning to have the wedding in eight months when we have enough vacation days saved up to go back to Amenta for it so more of our families can come, it's a long expensive trip."

The consensus is that this is very cool. Some of the kids want to know all about engineering.

One of the Sesatis is curious about Amentan weddings.

Amentan weddings vary but the specific kind this couple is planning involves all the guests who are related to the principals putting a gift for their future children in a basket and explaining what they hope they will inherit from their side of the family - it's often baby clothes and toys but sometimes it's things intended for when the kids are older like tools, the fiancée has a nice cast iron pan she came by this way - and the unrelated guests, friends of the couple, will write letters to one or both halves of the couple, sealed up with things like 'when you're fighting' or 'when he's away for weeks' or 'when you're both sick in quarantine together', to open under the relevant circumstances.

Some of them find the basket thing really intriguing! The letters thing just seems strange. (Most of these people are illiterate.)

It didn't happen this year but one of their coworkers ventures that he also got married and is very happy about how that worked out because his wife is clever and thrifty and very quiet. But they didn't have a basket. They just gave each other their oaths in front of her family and told their lord once there was a baby.

Is that so the lord can give them baby themed presents or something?

The presents are not that baby-themed but yes! Whenever you have a baby you take the baby to the lord and the lord writes down who the baby's parents are and gives them a pound of dry lentils or rice and - work arrangements aren't the same way in Sesat, exactly, but in practice they can think of it as a couple of weeks of paid time off. Since having children is good for Sesat and should be rewarded, and tends to leave the new parents badly in need of rest, and since it's bad for babies if the mother is hungry.

...a pound of lentils or rice won't feed them for weeks, will it?

No, they keep farming their own food. But they can take a break from also working for their lord. And separately from that also get the lentils. Actually this guy is totally going to explain how feudalism works in Sesat in as much detail as won't make their eyes glaze over.

What a weird org chart, but these purples certainly don't know how they did it at this tech level.

"What's weird about it?" this same guy whose name happens to be Dira asks.

Meanwhile another Sesati is telling some of the other people present that he plans to learn how to go to space and then do that.

It just seems really complicated. Probably theirs would seem really complicated to someone who wasn't used to it too though.

"You don't have to learn much if you just want to travel," volunteers Recently Engaged Purple. "It's just piloting that's complicated and one pilot can move thousands of people."

"What does it cost?"

"I don't know, right now no humans are going anywhere! For us it's mostly covered under our employment contracts how often they'll comp us travel."

Sigh. "And I'd need to figure out how to travel anyway. But I want to. I will."

"Do you know," someone else says, "looking at the stars is supposed to be a metaphor for how there's nothing keeping us down. We always said we'd reach all the way up there. Meant it as - like - just - something you say that means you can do anything."

"We had sayings like that too! They sound kinda different now... Our sun is that one over there, the bottom one in that triangle."

"Oh, part of the goat. - Do you collect the stars into pictures like that?"

"Yeah but they look different from Amenta so we don't have any for here."

Well, the Sesatis can point out the constellations - there's the goat, and the field of barley, and the waterfall which only arguably counts as a constellation, and the ladle, and the hunter, and the lovers. And you can find the cardinal directions by looking at them.

Some of them would like to know what constellation Sesat's sun is in as seen from Amenta.

One can get a starmap loaded up on her everything. "It's over here, see? In the Cradle - like inside the cradle, not making it up - below the Jar."

That gets almost everyone crowding around to look. Someone wants to know which stars all the other stars in the picture are.

Some of them have names and some of them just have long number designations. The app lets them look up what's been found surveying them - deposits of this and that, pretty pictures of gas giants, but nothing else alive.

One of the kids wants to know if the gas giants are as soft and pettable as they look.

"I don't think so, they're like clouds that way. - clouds aren't soft and pettable either, they're just like, fog, only high up."

Shortly the Sesatis mostly want to resume bragging. Five of the kids instead want to put together a thumb war tournament, and then get into an argument about whether they should invite the aliens to join in.

The aliens do not know what a thumb war is.

This kid is very excited to explain! And then they can celebrate learning! A thumb war is just a thing where two people hold hands with their thumbs sticking up and try to force each other's thumbs down and pin them, like in wrestling.

Huh, like a tiny armwrestling contest. Sure, the purples will participate, though they don't expect to do very well against human men.

The adults aren't really interested so they'll probably do fine.

People get a bit quiet as one of the women wants to perform a song she wrote this year.

Ooh, they will be happy to listen to this and look attentively at their everythings for subtitles.

It's a narrative ballad about a woman whose fiancé goes off to war. She learns that he's being held as a prisoner of war (not as a slave) and sneaks into enemy territory alone (there are three verses of people trying to discourage her from this life choice on the grounds that she'll just get captured, that he won't want to marry her afterward anyway, that there's nothing she can do, and that she's desperately needed at home). She spends three verses on a scheme to poison the king, which fails; then she spends three verses on a scheme to disrupt the army's supply lines, which also fails; then she spends three verses on a scheme to sneak her fiancé out of his tower prison, which fails so badly she gets caught. The enemy king is enamored of her cleverness and courage and determination and decides to marry her. She contemplates three more clever schemes to escape, but in the end she doesn't try any of them. She uses her new position as leverage to get her fiancé out, and then lives her life as a queen, terribly sad but still proud and relieved to know the man she loves is safe.

Wow, that's a really compelling storyline. Why wouldn't her fiancé have wanted to marry her if she'd successfully rescued him without marrying the king instead?

"...Because she was, you know, off by herself. In enemy territory. Anything could've happened. And she's - she'd do it again, you can tell she would. The king's insane for wanting to marry her, really," says one of their coworkers. "But, well, rich folks. Soldier types. They don't just want to settle down with a decent wife. - They did back in the olden days when it's set, though. I think."

"...but surely it's very heroic and speaks to her devotion that she'd try to rescue him, if my fiancée did that for me I'd definitely still want to get married..."

"Well, see, heroism and devotion are great for soldiers and their kind but they don't keep the kids fed."

"That's the point," Dira says. "She wants a man who wants a quiet wife but the way she saves him she winds up more the kind of woman that should be a mad king's wife instead. Now, I think he would've married her after and called himself lucky."

"I don't suppose the song has more verses that say how he felt about her at the end?"

The singer gets a speculative look and then announces a new ambition for the coming year.

What a nice holiday. The engaged one wants to have a BABY in the next year and the engineer wants to get all the Amentan buildings on the planet fully up to electrical code.

The Sesatis have questions about the electrical code and about alien babies, and ambitions of their own, and are for the most part glad to know the Amentans like their holiday.

The party winds down into stargazing and eventually one of their coworkers offers to walk them home and encourages them to take some of the leftover figs.

They can see pictures of alien babies if they would like!

They will each take a fig and the escort back to the dorms.

And - things are fine. Modern technology is very popular. Nothing gets Sesat and Azan to leave each other alone like both planning to defend themselves against the fair folk. Azan has to limit the amount of immigrants it will accept, for the first time ever, because of the sheer physical impossibility of taking in as many people as want to leave Amenta. The alien flower they gave to Sesat is prospering.

There's a murder in Sesat, and a kidnapping, and a slave trying to stow away on an Amentan ship with the dead man's son.

The purple who finds the slave in the cargo hold yells for greys and they come by to drag her out.

She shoves the boy at them. He startles awake. "I don't care if you kill me, just take him with you."

"- we're not going to kill you but neither of you are on the manifest so you don't go on the ship."

"What do you want, you have to want something, I have a necklace?" She stole it off a dead body for bribery purposes just today.

"No, you cannot buy a seat on the ship with a necklace."

"Dye his hair purple and say he's yours. Or take him to Azan. Or let me work for you."

"You can go to the employment office at the mining complex if you want to but a record of trying to stow away isn't going to help you there."

"If we're still in Sesat when they catch up to us they'll take him away and kill me slowly, I can't stay at a mine unless you're going to hide me."

"...okay, do you want me to shoot you in the head for stowing away, then?" asks one of the greys.

"I can kill myself just fine, thanks, I need - someone who isn't evil - I don't fucking care if you give him to some Azani, or take him home with you - "

"Look, he's really cute, but I can't actually just adopt a baby you tried to smuggle on the ship."

"Help me sneak him over the border, then."

"Uh, no."

"Will you be in a lot of trouble if I steal your gun?"

"I'm not gonna let you do that."

"Why don't you people just conquer Sesat, it'd make everything better. I'd help."

"It's not my call."

"Does whoever's call it is want gossip, because I know a bunch of gossip. About people that work for the government. I can sell it to you."

"I have no idea, I'm a security guard."

"Can you ask them?"

"...no, because security guards don't take stowaways' advice on whether to talk to the blues about conquering places, that's not a thing."

She shifts the kid so she has one hand free to try to punch this asshole.

That's going to get her clocked on the non-baby side of the face with the end of the rifle.

She runs. Maybe she can still make it to Azan.

He's not actually going to stop her from running, yeah.

Not long after she leaves, someone lets the Amentans know there's a child missing, possibly in the company of a slave, in case they happen to see anything.

They can give a description of the attempted stowaways, was that them?

Sure was!

They can come see the execution later if they want. Or however much of it fits into their schedules, it’s not like it’ll be brief.

"Man, I offered to shoot her in the head when she mentioned that. I was being sarcastic but she should've taken me up on it," says the security grey, shaking his head. "Kid's going to be all right?"

Snort. "Yes, he'll be fine. - It’s not really a 'her', people don’t have tattoos like that."

"Tell it to the people who design the translation app but why do you have so many inflections. We need to get you guys playing video games to see what you do about the NPCs."

Shrug. "We probably have the right amount of inflections," says this non-linguist who doesn't even know what that means.

"If you say so."

Eventually a Sesati serf tries to steal from work.

Wow, what did he value more than a steady job?

A stapler and paperclips, apparently.

Seriously?? Wow. He's super fired and they will tell his human boss that he's a thief but they're not even going to sweat the merchandise, whoever spent their cargo allowance on objects for handling paper can go paperless like everyone else till they have more allowance to spend.