Just inside the Ocean Dining Hall, Orro slumped in a big chair at a round table, an exhausted heap of dark quills. The taller of his assistants had curled up on the floor, the other crawled into a chair and passed out. Droplet had pushed two chairs together, climbed onto them, and wrapped her fluffy tail like a blanket around herself. None of them noticed me quietly reshaping the chairs and the floor under them into comfortable loungers so they could stretch out. The food on their table remained mostly untouched.

It had been a long day. All remaining delegations decided to discuss Kyporo’s expulsion, and all of them wanted to do it over dinner in their individual quarters at different times. The kitchen staff was exhausted.

I was exhausted too. After we dealt with Odikas and the Kyporo delegation, Kosandion went on a date with the Donkamin candidate. The candidate had requested a “plain room with nothing in it,” which was exactly what I provided. Kosandion and the Donkamin stood for an hour inside the empty room, discussing scientific advancement. It was intellectually boring and visually disturbing.

On the way back, the Donkamin candidate nearly collapsed in the hallway. I caught him before he fell to the floor. Apparently, Donkamins didn’t do well when they were separated from their group, and they also found us grotesque and incredibly disgusting. Once I delivered the candidate to his rooms, they asked me for a purifying pool so they could wash my molecules off the candidate’s body. The purifying liquid was complicated and took forever to make.

The ocean shimmered. Amber lights in front of us, warm yellow glow behind. Sean and I sat in the narrow strip of shadow and watched the waters under an endless sky, studded with alien stars and so deep that looking at it for too long filled you with vague unease.

My earpiece chirped steadily, delivering a successive assortment of the Dominion’s news broadcasts into my ear. The fall of Tair Odikas was the talk of the nine star systems.

Olasard padded out of the dining hall on his fluffy paws and hopped into my lap. I put my tea on the small side table between my and Sean’s chair and stroked the cat’s back.

According to the newscasts, the saga of Tair Odikas stretched back many years, long before Kosandion was born. Four centuries ago, Kyporo faced a crisis. The planet’s population had outpaced its natural resources while its space technology was in its infancy. Kyporo joined the Dominion to save itself.

Before the unification, Kyporo had a rigid, striated society with sharply defined social castes, while the Dominion adhered to the belief that every citizen had the same rights. The integration of Kyporo was slow, difficult, and took centuries. Officially the castes had been abolished, but the citizens of Kyporo had good memories.