A handful of people left. Everyone else sat down, higgledy-piggledy where they were, like stories of the earliest days of the Council eighty years ago when Sokrates had been here and regularly violated procedure. Some of the benches had been replaced since then, but many of them were the same. I found that both comforting and intimidating. Crocus rolled over and settled himself in the section where benches had been removed to make a space for Workers, and humans in wheelchairs.

“Who has the details of what has happened?” I asked.

Klymene, one of the Children, and the oldest person still serving on the Council, stood up. She was bony and wrinkled, and looked as if she were made of old tanned leather. Her hair was no more than a straggle of thin white strands stretched over her scalp. She had the log of our communication with the ship, and summarized it for us in her thin elderly voice. “They don’t speak Greek or Latin. We started off using Amarathi, and were at the point of asking Arete to help when Sixty-One worked out that they were speaking a variant of English, which it could mostly understand. So after a brief delay we were able to communicate with them that way. They are humans, not from Earth but from a planet called—” she squinted at the printout, holding it farther away from her eyes, “Marhaba, but they have been to Earth. They asked permission to land and wanted to know who we were. According to the plan, we told them the name of the planet and that our cities were founded seventy years ago. They have also been in communication with the Saeli ship in orbit.”

“Where’s Aroo?” I asked, realizing for the first time as I looked for her that none of our Saeli senators or councillors were present.

“Not here. But the meeting isn’t due to begin for an hour and a half. We all came here now because we heard the news. The Saeli don’t think that way,” Dad said.

“It would be good to make some decisions quickly, and we need information. Can somebody find Aroo and bring her back here?” I asked. I looked around for people who Aroo was likely to pay attention to, and noticed Parmenion sitting near Crocus. “Parmenion?” He had been consul three years ago, a quiet man in his forties, an excellent lyre-player and composer.

He nodded, accepting the errand, and rolled his chair out.

“Meanwhile,” I said, looking out over the room, at my friends and allies and political rivals, “we have a plan for this situation. It’s been in place since Maia and Klio were consuls. Unless there’s some really good reason not to follow it, that’s what we ought to be doing, not running around in circles trying to make new decisions in advance of information.”