The Quotidians and the Tensors created the Convention because there was no other choice. With other universes to flee into and mine for resources, there could be no decisive victory in their war. Only defeat, collapse, and endless exile. An expanding hypersphere of destruction with birth and death strewn across its surface and wreckage left in its volume. Or else, truce.
The traditional way for Quotidians to cooperate is by swapping males. For Tensors, it is to bind each other with tethers and spin, forcing opposing sides to coordinate or else fly apart. Neither method would work for a session of the Convention of Sophonts. They had to try something new.
Ambassador Li exited the embassy's omnivator and found himself at the entrance of a maze. Its walls were composed of the ubiquitous foam-coated poles, but these were black and (to a Quotidian) horribly dry. Li could easily see between the wall-poles to where his fellow delegates clambered toward the center, across more homely poles covered with green-brown slime.
This was why Li wore a full-body containment suit over his formal wear and radio headset. This wasn't his first time here.
He didn't need to be told to ignore the bowl of boiled sweets marked "eat me" and the cackling, battery-operated witch hanging from the ceiling. These had been installed by the first UN embassy, who hadn't quite grasped what the Convention administrators had asked of them.1
Beyond the symbols of feeding and fleeing, Li entered a larger tangle of poles and met his partner, the nonhuman who had been assigned to the entrance next to his.
"Greetings, sophont."
It looked to Li like a giant squid, but he was very much mistaken.
Suspecting this, Li aimed his headset's small camera at his partner. "Greetings," he said. "Honored…uh…"
"Koen, what is that thing?" Came Laura's voice over the headset. "A squid?"
"No," said Koen. "Eyes are on the bottom and tentacles at the top. And those wheel-like appendages at the base are probably mouth-parts."
"Koen!"
"Uh…" said Li again. It was getting harder to ignore the witch's cackling.
"It's another derived rotifer…let me look at my cladogram." Laptop keys clicked. "Aha! Successor. It's a Successor. On one earth, rotifers walked on their – "
"Greetings, honored Successor," said Ambassador Li, bowing.
The Successor knotted its two tentacles. "May I help you find your way?"
"I would be most grateful."
The Successor turned, shuffling on its great, ground jaws, and shoved itself forward.
The poles were closer together here, and the slime was more plentiful. "I apologize I don't know your species," said the Successor.
"Human," said Li. "The United Nations."
"That means nothing to me. Are you a junior member? Some kind of echinoderm, are you?"
"Tell him we're mammals," said Koen, still on the call. "No, chordates. Ask him if he knows what a salp is."
Li ignored his chef's voice and said, "we joined the Convention nine years ago."
"I see. I hope you are enjoying the learning experience." The Successor compressed its body to shuffle under a horizontal pylon. Li went down on hands and knees.
Li was no stranger to physical humiliation. He'd been slapped and spat on. Even on one hilarious occasion, bitten. He'd slept so often at his desk that beds felt strange. If it was his job to foster better relationships between humans and nonhumans, Li would keep at it, even if he suspected that nobody on either side actually wanted better relations.
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He was correct in this.
Li's knees were really throbbing when he emerged into the assembly hall.
"You will find your seat there," ground out the nonhuman.
"Thank you, Successor." Li pulled himself to his feet, teeth gritted to stop his groan.
The hall was roughly bowl-shaped, with rows of seats (cages, they looked like to Li) rising up and curving in under a circular roof, currently transparent. The chair of today's assembly was the Cellendian delegate,2 who farted a long and impassioned speech calling the Convention to order.
The Quotidians believed in in-person meetings. They had to.
Their histories talk of the Two Storm-Surges of False Euphoria, when the invention of writing and radio had allowed them to believe, for a time, that they were not at war.
A pair of Quotidians from two different clone-lines will hate and fear each other by default. This is the natural way of things, but the unnatural media of distance communication strip away the pheromones and eye-twitches that differentiate the Self from the Unself. With proper translation, a written or recorded message can tempt a Quotidian to treat a mere cousin as a clone-sister. They might find themselves mired in that most deceptive of relationships, friendship. Imagine what happens when these friends meet in person for the first time.
"I am appalled and disgusted!" squealed the Quotidian delegate from her mucosal nest on the upper rim of the council chamber. "Aliens scurry around me like vermin, and it takes all the power of my intellect not to activate the machinery of obliteration!"
Li politely applauded with the rest of the delegates.
"The chair thanks the Quotidian delegate." A sharp belch. "Now, we convene on the matter of the recent contact with a new sapient species."
Li looked up. Here it was. For better relations with nonhumans, the UN needed a Convention embassy on Earth. For that, they needed "any significant economic or cultural or physical exchange." The current most significant exchange was lithium borohydride3 in return for a place to store their garbage. Export of lumber and little pyramid-shaped toys had only begun recently, and had yet to turn a profit.
The UN back on Earth had decided that the quickest path forward was patronage. Humans were a very junior species, but if Li could get himself placed in the contact committee for an even more junior species, that would be a significant coup. More senior Convention members would have to take humanity more seriously. Better trade concessions might be awarded. And humans would have some place to ship their trash at least.
"… it is for these reasons that we open the fourth committee on contact with the new species, with the chartered task of assigning said species a name."
Li reached out and squeezed the tube that indicated his desire to join the committee. So did over a dozen other junior delegates, but even a fractional say in approving an official name for a species would be a start.
"The chair recognizes the delegate of the Tensor Equations Describing Relational Manifolds."
On the opposite side of the chamber from the Quotidian, a vacuum tube sparkled with laser light.
"Moving out of the direction of contingency and aiming toward good will and mutual benefit, I strongly suggest that the chairman of the new committee be the clear-sighted representative of the Pick that administers Direction.4 Consider how I target those who thrust with me in this assertion."
Delegates lit up around the council. A vote was called, and Li voted against. It was UN policy to support the Quotidians and not the Tensors, which in this case, failed. Too few delegates on the Quotidian side cared enough to block the Tensors from placing their client on the committee. The motion passed.
Li twisted around to find the seat of the Pick that administers Direction. He couldn't see anything, but somewhere above him in the chamber, a creature screeched.
"I am proud! I humbly accept the heavy honor placed around my neck. I descend now to pluck my juicy comrades and carry them off to cache them in my committee."
Ambassador Li received no indication that he'd been accepted into the committee. He was sure that the prize had gone to other cronies of the Tensors. Another chance gone, but Li couldn't help but feel relieved. There was a limit of one vote per convention session, and that meant he could soon get out of this disgusting, incomprehensible, alien place. He'd shuck himself of this suit, go back to the embassy, and stay there for another four days. He'd take a shower. He'd curl up under his desk and try to get some sleep.
Anyone watching the thought processes of Ambassador Li would have been disappointed. The Convention tested its members in many ways, and the human had failed yet again.
1 "Something tempting," they'd said. "Something frightening."
2 An inflatable species most closely related to velvet worms
3 Imagine rechargeable petroleum.
4 A kind of dinosaur.