“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.”