Laura had lived in many places and never fit in. Feeling alienated from people, not showing the same assumptions, not being on the same page. A disharmony.

Now, what she wanted more than anything else was to feel safe. So far, security had come attached to one powerful man or another. If Li was a great and venomous jelly, Laura was the little fish that swam inside its bell. But how safe was she really, cowering in the embassy along with eight other humans, alone in a vast and baffling sea of aliens? She should go home. Settle down. Let herself be with Koen.

This plan did not come to her in words. If it had, Laura would have realized it didn't make sense. She would have fought it. But her forebrain was given no questions to answer, no data to analyze. Her conscious thoughts simply molded themselves around new feelings. Increased anxiety around nonhumans. A numbed sense of accomplishment from keeping the embassy running. A pull toward Koen.

"There's this study. 'What's it like to be a bat?'"1 Mark spooned hachee into his mouth. "It turns out that you can't imagine it. Like, echolocating?"

"I've imagined echolocating," said Koen.

Of course you have, thought Mark with some annoyance.

"And anyway people do echolocate. We all subconsciously know what sort of a space we're in based on the echos.2 And then there are blind people who echolocate in a much more sophisticated way—"

Mark stopped this with a wave of his now-clean spoon. "That's not the point. What I mean is that you can imagine what it would be like for you to be small and furry and flap around echolocating, but you can't know that's how a bat feels."

This is less literally true of the Loxodromes, who evolved from ship-building desmodontine bats on an earth where South America drifted west more quickly. These explorers and traders set forth aboard their great timber rafts, following the warm, salt currents in search of new altruism to reciprocate and blood to drink.

But Laura was in no mood for digressions.

"Mark means that we can't know how other people feel about colors, sounds, pain, and so on." She tapped the table with a finger. A candle flickered. "In English, this color is 'brown,' but in Chinese it's 'zōngsè.' How can we be sure that 'zōngsè' and 'brown' mean the same thing?"

Koen raised an eyebrow and tapped his own quadrant of table. "We both see the same object."

"Do we?" asked Mark, eyebrow even further elevated. "Maybe what I see and what you see are totally different. How could we know? And don't tell me about neurons or brain scans or whatever. However you cut up the atoms and molecules, you never find consciousness. What it feels like."

So maybe consciousness isn't real, thought Koen.3 But that depressed him. It made him remember the things he'd wondered about after his father's death. What had happened to the man? Was it like present becoming past, clouds becoming rain? A sand castle washed away by the tide?

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Something would happen to Koen, in his time. How much time? And what was the point of living through it until it ended?

Koen's brain had evolved many structures and behaviors that postponed death. Given their habit of living in interdependent communities and the decades they spend educating their altricial young,4 humans require instincts that drive them hard away from death. This isn't the case for all sophonts. Quotidians easily die for their clone-sisters, and Metruians5 die after reproducing. Like all sophonts, however, Koen knew what was in store for him.

He did now what he'd done ten years ago: put aside the morbid philosophizing and solve the problem in front of him. "How is any of this related to dealing with nonhumans?"

"Mark means we can't understand them," said Laura. "They don't see the same things as we do, or feel the same feelings."

Koen wondered how Laura could claim to know what Mark meant. A moment ago, she had laid out the argument for Chinese people not seeing or feeling the same ways as Dutch and American people. Koen didn't point that out, though. Whatever logical arguments Koen's forebrain might construct, the rest of him knew that he was one of nine humans on the planet, that here was his best bet as a potential mate, that outside lurked strange and frightening beasts, and Laura's approval was a very important thing to seek.

"Maybe you're right," he said, and the other two humans relaxed. They could see, hear, and smell that he wasn't lying, that he agreed with them. Subtle tells of expression, reaction, and pheromone signaled that Koen was on their side.

And he really was. In order to make the act convincing, Koen had to believe, at least for the moment, that he agreed with Mark and Laura. Nonhumans were impossible.

"You've been dealing with nonhumans longer than me," Koen elaborated.

"But you're better at it than us," said Mark. "That's why we need you help."

"Do you mean with your performance?" asked Laura.

"Or Koen's work as Graa's dog-whisperer?" asked Mark bitterly. "We do a good enough job and maybe they'll hire us again as clowns and servants." He was looking for excuses that would mean he could call off his performance. His brain, amygdala active and on the lookout for ways to avoid danger, calculated that it was better to not try at all than risk failure.

Laura had long ago trained her own brain to associate failure with danger, and therefor said. "It doesn't matter what we do. What matters is we do it well. We have to impress the nonhumans."

They were few and the nonhumans were many. The thought went unsaid, but they all shared it.

Like other sophonts, humans are a persuadable species. Those without social instincts have tended not to breed, and these instincts include adopting the beliefs of the tribe. If there is no tribe, make one. To make a tribe, first define the non-tribe.

The humans leaned closer to each other across the table, faces bright in the candlelight.

1 Nagel, Thomas (1974) "What is it Like to Be a Bat?"

2 Schwitzgebel et al. (2000) "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation."

3 See Hacker, P. (2002). Is There Anything it is Like to be a Bat? Philosophy, 77(2), 157-174. doi:10.1017/S0031819102000220

4 Hawkes, Kristen 2020. Cognitive consequences of our grandmothering life history: cultural learning begins in infancy.' Phil. Trans. R. Soc. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0501

5 A kind of octopus.