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.