Diplomatic dinners are always a little tricky because you want to keep from offending anyone, which is not so easy when you have people from three different cultures sitting down to eat together. This is true even on Earth, so you can imagine what it was like for us to have representatives from not three countries, but three planets.

“Look, this is going to be a delicate situation,” said Dad. “The Kwarkissians want to have you around tonight. They were quite insistent on it, in fact; they’re very fond of you, you know. But Nnnnnn and his group don’t like children—partly because in their culture childhood barely exists.”

“What do you mean, ‘Childhood barely exists’?”

Dad frowned. “On Nnnnnn’s planet, children are hatched. They come out of the egg looking much like two-year-olds do on Earth, and mature very rapidly thereafter. Even with that, they’re pretty much kept out of sight by their nurses and teachers until they’re ready to join adult society. On Nnnnnn’s world someone who looks as old as you do might well have gained adult status, which is a thing they take very seriously. They are going to consider you not as a child, but as an equal—so for heaven’s sake be careful.”

He handed me a computer printout on their culture and told me to read it. “There’s a lot here you should know,” he said. “Study it. The main thing to remember is, whatever else you do, don’t compliment them on anything they show you.”

He got up to leave the room. Stopping at the door, he added, “You’d better keep Ralph locked up for the night too.”

Then he told me how he wanted me to dress and hurried off to tend to some details for the dinner.

I don’t know about you, but when someone hands me something and tells me to read it, my mind immediately starts thinking of other things I need to do instead. It’s not that I didn’t want to leam about the new aliens; it’s just that my brain rebels at being told what to do. So I put the printout aside and started to do something else.

A few minutes later my message receptor beeped. I pushed the receive button, and a holographic image of Fifka, about four inches tall, appeared in the center of my desk. Ralph skittled away in surprise—he still hadn’t gotten used to the Kwarkissian version of a phone call. I pushed the send button, so that Fifka could see me as well.