When Klymene and I reached the communications office, Sixty-One, Akamas and a Sael I didn’t know were there, all clustered around the transmission equipment. Akamas was one of the Bronze technicians whose usual job it was to communicate with incoming ships. He introduced me to the Sael. “Crocus, this is Slif. She’s here to monitor the communication and begin to learn their language.”
We wished each other joy. “The more people who know their language the better,” I said. I noticed that Slif was wearing a bronze pin. “You’ve settled here and taken oath?”
“Yes, with my whole pod,” Slif replied. “We like Plato very much. Usually we work helping to assemble solar panels, but I have some experience with languages and I was out here, so Aroo asked me to stay and help.”
“Good,” I said.
I told Sixty-One that I had come to relieve it of the burden of translation for a while. “Yes. Good. Arete was here for a while and I rested. Now I will go to the feeding station to recharge,” it said. “These space humans are strange indeed. They say the ship is called Boroda. They came from a planet called Marhaba. They know three human languages, Korean, Chinese and English. The only aliens they have met are the Amarathi.”
“The Amarathi trade extremely widely, we have encountered them everywhere we have gone, so if they have encountered any other intelligences at all, they are the most likely,” Slif said.
“Yes,” I said. I remembered our first contact with the Amarathi thirty years before, the first test of our open deception about our origins, and how difficult it had been even for Arete to communicate anything at all in a language developed by beings who had been sessile until after they invented technology.
Sixty-One left.
“What we’ve been doing,” Klymene explained, as she settled down again in one of the chairs, “is translating one exchange, discussing it, and then responding. We’re trying to keep them to our agenda.”
A voice crackled over the radio, in English. I could understand each word, but found myself translating it very awkwardly. “They say, ‘All right, Plato control, what quarantine procedures type do you say.’ That is, they say, ‘What kind of quarantine procedures are you talking about?’”
“Explain that we are worried about any new plagues or viruses that might have developed since we last had contact with humanity,” Klymene said.
I did so. “Do you have autodocs?” they asked.
We looked at each other, puzzled. “Do you know what that is?” I asked Slif.
She shook her head, slightly slower than a human would have, because Saeli have different musculature.
“Ask them for a definition,” Klymene said.
Akamas adjusted the radio to reduce the crackle, and we went on, slowly and haltingly with many pauses for translation and explanations. Autodocs seemed to be wonderful medical technology that could restore youth and health to humans for up to two hundred years, and which cured all disease. “I wonder if they would trade those to us,” Klymene said, looking down at her bony and age-spotted hand. The remaining Children were all eighty years old and fragile. The prospect of a technology that gave another hundred and twenty years of youthful life for them filled me with happiness.
After a long slow while, with many pauses for translation and discussion and incomprehension on both sides, when we had finished with the subject of quarantine and were starting to talk about how many people would come down in the initial contact, Neleus and Aroo arrived to join us.
“Wait up, Plato control, we have a shift change here,” the English voice said a few moments later, and I translated, and acknowledged to them that we would wait. I expected a pause, but they left the contact open so that we overheard them talking. “The humans only speak Latin and ancient Greek, but they’ve got a couple of old robots who can handle English translations.”
There was a laugh. “Ancient Greek, who could have believed it!”
The first voice spoke dismissively. “Their founders must have been nuts.”
The other voice answered. “Well, our founders weren’t known for their sanity either. It’s not going to get in the way of profit.”
Then the contact went dead, as they must have become aware that we could hear them.
I translated this exchange for the others as best I could.
“My interpretation is that they think our origin story is funny, but not implausible,” Neleus said.
“That’s all according to plan,” Klymene said, and yawned hugely, a slightly disgusting biological thing humans sometimes cannot avoid doing when they are tired.
“This word ‘could,’ is it a time modifier?” Aroo asked.
I tried to explain the word, with a great deal of difficulty. “Very soon you will speak English better than I do,” I said.
“We Saeli have a talent for languages,” Aroo acknowledged, her violet and brown eyelids flicking over her eyes for an instant as she spoke.
“I wish I could listen to it again,” I said. “I constantly feel I am missing nuance.”
“You should be able to,” Aroo said. “That is a Saeli console, it records and echoes.” She showed Akamas, and he pushed buttons on the console, so that the voices repeated themselves over again in the same exchange.
“Useful,” Neleus commented.
“Nuts must mean insane,” not illogical, I said. “And I think you’re right, they accept our story.”
“What does profit really mean? You said benefits?” Neleus asked.
“Yes, I think so, something like that. It’s filed under economics. Economic benefits? The weightings in my word lists say it’s a really important concept, but I learned long ago never to accept other people’s priorities except in emergencies. We should ask them about that word, when we get the chance.”
Their contact crackled back to life, and Akamas adjusted it again, wincing. “So we’ve agreed we’re going to send down three people, is that correct?”
I responded at once. “Yes. Will they all be human?”
Then I translated, and the others nodded.
“I don’t understand, Plato control. Of course they’ll be human. We told you we have no Maraths aboard.”
“No Workers?” I asked, sadly. “No robots, that is?”
“Oh, we’ll be bound to send down a few robots. Do you need numbers on them too?”
“Please wait for translation,” I said, and indicated to Akamas that he should switch off the contact. It seemed very quiet now with no hum. I translated for the others, and then clarified in case they hadn’t understood. “They don’t count Workers as people.”
“Maybe their Workers aren’t self-aware yet?” Akamas suggested.
“But that makes no sense. It’s true we didn’t know our Workers were people at first, but ours come from several hundred years in their past,” Klymene said.
“If we’ve understood that correctly, they must have had self-aware Workers for several hundred years without regarding them as people,” Neleus said. “That’s horrifying.”
“Let us hear the echo again,” I said to Akamas.
He pushed the buttons, and I heard again the casual nonchalance of “Of course they’ll be human,” and “Do you need numbers on them too?”
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that’s what they mean,” I said.
“We’ll have to give them Aristomache’s dialogue Sokrates,” Klymene said. “That’ll explain it to them properly. We’ll have to translate it. That should be a priority. Arete could do it at once.” She made a note.
“Tell them yes, we do want numbers on the Workers,” Neleus said, looking at me. “And as soon as we meet their Workers, we must tell them that they have rights here. We must pass a law in the Council that any Worker who comes here is free at once, as soon as they set foot here.”