Now, being properly Platonic, which we do try to be most of the time here in the Original City, that ought to mean everyone who works on a fishing boat is Silver. And most of the time that’s true. But for fishing, you need a minimum of two people, and three or four is better. And at that time I had two crazy crew members who weren’t Silvers at all. Hilfa is Saeli, which wouldn’t stop him being a citizen and having a metal; plenty of Saeli have taken their oaths. But Hilfa was young, not that I had any idea what that meant for a Saeli. And at that time, he wasn’t yet part of a pod the way most grown Saeli are. He had only been here for two years. He told me he was still studying—though whether he was studying us or fish or what, I didn’t know. And I say “he” but that’s not clear at all either. The Saeli need three genders to reproduce, but most of the time they don’t take any notice of gender at all, and while they have a bunch of pronouns for different things, gender isn’t one of them. Hilfa said “he” feels most comfortable for him in Greek, so that’s what I used. What he has between his legs seemed to be a sort of scrunched-up green walnut shell. I saw it often enough, because on the boat he mostly wore a red webbing vest and nothing else, being as Saeli are pretty much comfortable naked in temperatures that make humans want to huddle up. Dion says in Greece we were comfortable naked, and what that says to me is that we should have stayed there and let the Saeli have Plato. Not that they’re native here either; far from it. They showed up in a spaceship about twenty years ago, meaning twenty years after our Relocation. They first came here when I was ten. And weren’t we pleased to see them after trying to deal with the weird Amarathi! Before we met the Saeli, dealing with the Amarathi was almost a full-time job for Arete, being as their language is so odd that she was the only one who could speak to them at all and have any hope of getting through.