I tucked the paper inside my kiton with the other, and then, with no warning or sense of transition, we were abruptly back in Hilfa’s sitting room.

17. Crocus

17

CROCUS

I. On First Contacts

I did not usually spend much time at the spaceport. It had been designed and built by Sixty-One, with the help of some of the other Workers, who were then only partway to self-awareness. Shuttles landed there from Amarathi and Saeli starships in orbit, and there were both automated and worker-operated facilities for loading and unloading. There were warehouses for storage, a station for the rail-link for passengers and supplies to the city, and a large observation and waiting space, with a curved glass window looking out over the field. There was also a communications, control, and administrative building. All these had been built on a suitable scale for Workers. It was a pleasant thing to have more buildings we could comfortably fit inside. The whole spaceport was set inside an old caldera, for sound deadening, and additional sound-deadening baffles had been erected around the rim. The rock of the mountains and the runways was black basalt, and Sixty-One had chosen to make the buildings out of the same material, except for the pillars and pediments and baffles, which were red scoria, fluted ionically. It gave the place a unified, distinctive feel. The frescoes in the admin building were all on space subjects—nebulas, galaxies, ringed planets; but the mosaic in the entrance hall was of Apollo in his sun-chariot.

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.”