Datsvan hasn’t mentioned the portal. He doesn’t know how to use the portal yet but he hasn’t mentioned it. He has mentioned the moon it’s on, and the planet the moon orbits, and the sparse alien life on the planet, but he can get away with pretending not to have noticed the portal if they ever bother to come here and check on it. And if he can spend long enough studying it without them coming after him, maybe he can leave.

It’s a long shot. Physics might be different on the other side in such a way that he can’t survive. Or physics might be pretty much the same but the other side of the portal might be in the middle of a star. Or, of course, he might not make it out before they want something else from him.

If he can get away, though—if he can get himself out, and Xreygh and Mri and their families—then, well, if nothing else, they’ll be out. And at best they’ll have a place to stand and can start looking for a lever to fix the mess that is the entire society of Extvri.

So he hasn’t mentioned the portal and no one should be coming to check it out.

So what is another spaceship doing so close?

It doesn’t hail him. But it isn’t even a little bit shielded against scrying. He knows this because the crystal ball that would normally be showing him something about the ship’s scry-protection is instead showing him the aliens inside. They’re not like the alien life on the planet; they’re not red algae or overgrown insects. They’re a lot like people—strikingly so, in fact. They have two hands each, and two eyes, and only two legs. But while they have different skin colors from each other, he doesn’t see them change color while he watches; and their eyes are in the the normal place for eyes, but the scleras are bright chalky white; and they have what looks like stringy vegetation growing on them, especially on their scalps.

It’s a large alien ship, and he’s not sure which part to watch, at first.

There’s an entire room full of what seems to be a sample of an alien biosphere—green vegetation, bright light, and one of the aliens reading a simple illustrated book while frowning deeply. She has writing on her cheek, in a different script than the one in the book. It’s hard to say whether her body language means the same things it would if she were a vrna but if it does then she’s listless and frustrated, alternately focused on her reading and sitting still apparently unaware of the text in her hands.

Elsewhere several aliens argue in an alien language that is at least spoken aloud, which makes him a little more hopeful that they can communicate eventually. He doesn’t have the means to give himself that language by magic right now. He does have the means to give one of them one of his.

He takes a Vrin dictionary off the shelf of paper books that are specifically for spells, all the while watching the arguing aliens. The aliens seem to be watching one of their own, a short one who keeps quiet and waits to hear everyone else out before speaking. That strikes Datsvan as odd, even without understanding any of the words or the context; on Extvri it’s considered embarrassing to give advice that isn’t taken, and so it’s a faux pas for a leader to put people in a situation where that might happen to them in public. That is very clearly not a concern for the aliens.

Datsvan sets the dictionary on the offering-plate, then tells the crystal ball to focus on the quiet alien leader. It zooms in slowly, until it’s close enough that even with no alarms or protections in place the alien twitches, frowns, and looks around suspiciously.

Datsvan strikes a match and drops it on the dictionary. The alien interrupts another alien to say something that sounds very urgent and alarmed. The argument stops.

The dictionary burns.

The leader of the aliens says something in the alien language, his voice level. Then he starts speaking Vrin.

“Who or what are you and what do you think gives you the right to change my mind?”

It’s considered polite, in situations like this, to simply allow scrying and answer aloud. But he doesn’t think the aliens know how to do that. So he does it the rude way. He gets out a scrap of enchanted paper, some disinfectant, a dip pen, a partly-empty inkwell containing a little anticoagulant, and a clean blade.

He bleeds into the inkwell, dips his pen, and starts writing, ignoring the alien demanding again to know what’s happening.

I am an explorer from Extvri, he writes, and I am a vrna. I have no violent intent toward you. What is your business in this system?

The alien has moved on to musing aloud about various features of Vrin by the time Datsvan sets the note atop the embers on the offering-plate. The note catches fire.

The alien startles and says something in his alien tongue, then answers. “We are refugees from far away along more dimensions than the three of this world, passing through on our way to find a new world where we can live alone in peace and freedom. We have no violent intent. Our journey must pass through a place on the larger moon of the second planet of this system. Then we will depart this world.”

The alien falls silent for a while, then goes back to musing on the language, as Datsvan writes another note.

Extvri seeks to be at peace with the universe, and has some interest in ensuring the ability of all people to live in an orderly and safe society, even if those people are from very far away. We would sooner not fight you, nor keep you here. We would be interested to know what you would consider adequate peace and freedom.

He burns it. The alien repeats all of it, slowly and carefully, before answering.

“We have thought long and hard about what we want from our society, and what we want is a society that guarantees certain fundamental rights—a right not to be maimed or forcibly administered addictive substances, a right not to have your mind directly controlled or changed, a right to your own memory, and a right to order your own affairs except insofar as public safety requires otherwise. Our only interest in conquest or war is to ensure our own safety, and we acknowledge that war is often negative-sum. We are tentatively optimistic about a strategy of peaceful coexistence.” The alien bites his lips and closes his eyes and Datsvan is tempted to conclude that he looks pained. “We are not, at this time, seeking to conquer the multiverse to enforce our values.”

Datsvan thinks about that for a while. They have concerningly low standards and he wishes they seemed less like they would conquer the multiverse if they could, but they’re not at all terrible in the way that Extvri is terrible. He changes the target of his scry from a picture of the inside of the ship to an analysis of its atmosphere: nitrogen, oxygen, traces of carbon dioxide and water vapor, and yet smaller traces of volatile chemicals from what are probably either perfumes or topical remedies. One area has higher humidity and a concerning amount of chlorine.

There are more scans to do to be sure but first he writes another note: have you ever considered taking alien immigrants?

----------------------------------------

This is only sort of the first time they’ve been asked this. At the moment, there’s a girl sitting in the ship’s garden, learning to read their language, who until recently lived on another planet in another solar system in another galaxy in another universe. Her name is Kara, and several of her native planet’s months ago she was a citizen in good standing of the Great Utari Empire, mostly because the Great Utari Empire wasn’t functional enough to change that any sooner than it did.

In theory, it changed when she got caught stealing a goat, as part of a plan to frame someone else and keep some fugitives fed. In practice, it didn’t change until a week later, at the fair.

The day she lost everything didn’t seem like it was off to a bad start, at first. She’d gone into town the day before and scammed enough people to cover a month’s rent. It didn’t cost much—it was secret, so it was tax-free (she could hardly have stayed anywhere openly given she was wanted for trying to steal the goat), and the friend whose basement she was staying in wanted her to keep being a thorn in the empire’s side as much as she did, and anyway this was a friend. She hadn’t been caught at it, she was sure, and now if she wanted to play it safe she could just lay low for a while. It wasn’t as if there was nothing to be done hiding inside; she spent the morning cutting up radishes and green onions for a gelatin salad for her friend to pretend to have made, cleaning the counters, doing the laundry—not that the laundry was hard, doing it in a household with its very own ensuite washing machine—and just generally making herself useful.

She could have done a dozen more things. She could have cleaned the bathroom and made another easily refrigerated dinner component, and when it came time for dinner she could have hidden in the basement in utter silence until the guests left. She could have found ways to make life easier and smoother for her friend so he had more time and more energy to spend on carrying on their mission. She could have helped draft pamphlets, maybe, if that seemed like a smart thing to do.

The smart thing to do would probably have been to either stay hidden or leave the area, and in no case would the smart thing to do have been to see the fair she’d been looking forward to for two years—last year it had been canceled by the health department because apparently they weren’t satisfied with the usual bribes anymore, or something like that. It might not come again next year. She might not be safe living nearby next year. Or she might be dead by then; she didn’t really expect to live a very long life. And, well, she had promised herself she wasn’t going to let all this keep her from having fun.

So once she had the laundry in the dryer and the gelatin salad in the refrigerator, she got together some spending money for the fair, mostly from what she’d stolen from her parents when she went on the run. Enough for some rides and some fair food and enough on top of that to bribe a reasonable number of people not to let anyone know they recognized her. She did her hair and makeup in a style she never wore at home, put on clothes she thought were ugly and old-fashioned, and snuck out the back door and behind some bushes and eventually came out into view a long way away from the house.

And immediately, immediately, she ran into the worst person she could possibly have run into. She ran into a man who owned a goat.

Oh, not the goat. No, this was worse than that. The goat she’d tried to steal was a gorgeous dairy doe named Buck, who was favored to win first prize at the fair. And everyone knew that if there were no bribery involved, second place, or maybe first, would go to a goat called Barleycorn who belonged to an honest farmer named Tvali. Tvali was the only person who did not seem to be aware that there would be bribery involved. His goats kept losing to objectively worse goats despite him having the best damn herd of goats in the tri-county area. He’d been heard to mutter this year about how he wanted to “do something about all this” but he had not yet been observed to have figured out what, exactly, he might do about it. He was just stupid enough that he might think he just needed to take out the competition, and just clever enough to know other people knew he might think that. He was earnest about his support for the empire and petty and spiteful in his personal life and absolutely no friend of Kara’s, and he knew she hated him and he hated her right back.

It was Tvali she met. She immediately broke into a run, but it did her no good.

So to make a long story short, they had her for theft, not for distributing the wrong pamphlets or helping to hide people who might otherwise be taken away to work camps to distort the labor market by providing the government with a free source of slave labor. That might have been the only mercy but it was a significant one. So she got herself sentenced to a few years; it could’ve been longer. So she got “goat thief” tattooed on her cheek; it could’ve been “traitor”. So her parents didn’t love her enough to bribe the judge not to order her sterilized; they could’ve… well… she couldn’t tell herself a story where that part wasn’t so bad, actually. Still, though.

So when the UFOs started appearing she didn’t hear it on the radio. There was gossip, and someone who actually sometimes got letters heard about it and mentioned it, but—was it true there were aliens from another star? Was it true they were parked on the smaller moon and the government was testing whether they could pick up radio broadcasts? Was it true they were coming to join the Great Utari Empire because its fame had already spread beyond the solar system? She had no way to check any of the rumors until the day a spaceship landed in the work camp and nobody was quite sure how to politely ask the aliens not to start excavating there.

----------------------------------------

The aliens had landed there for a reason, and that reason was that underground beneath that spot was a buried portal to another world. They’d spent weeks studying the planet without landing, and eventually decided that rather than take their entire ship and their entire population down through the atmosphere they would send one shuttle on ahead to scout the next universe, find the next portal, and eventually come back if it turned out to be safe. They figured that, in an emergency, the people left behind on the main ship in orbit could try landing and asking for asylum and they’d have at least a fifty percent chance of survival; this was the safest place they’d been since they left the place they previously called home, and it was demonstrably friendly to human life. Why there was human life there for it to be friendly to was a question for the people left in orbit.

The shuttle was still big enough to keep its crew alive for a long while, but small enough that it could land, and it did. Had there been a city above the portal, they might have hesitated to land right on it, but what was there looked like a place where people tortured each other, so Vethani gave the order to ignore deaths and property damage they might accidentally cause.

Then they went underground, everyone suited up just in case something went wrong, waiting and watching as the ship burrowed its way to the portal. One of the mysterious humans from the alien planet was clearly trying to follow them into the tunnel, but there wasn’t much she could do to them unarmed.

The portal wasn’t that far down. They reached it very quickly. Vethani started the process of activating it, and then there was just a second or two left to wait when Var, watching one of the cameras, cursed suddenly.

“Look, look,” she said, and the portal was closing behind them by the time Vethani noticed that the girl who’d been sneaking after them had grabbed the shuttle and was now exposed to hard vacuum in interstellar space.

For a moment, all he was aware of about his own reaction was that he’d gone cold all over; but somehow without his noticing he’d sealed his helmet and was unbuckling his seatbelt. The airlock wasn’t far; it wasn’t a big enough shuttle for it to have been very far even if it hadn’t connected directly to the cockpit.

He clipped a tether to his suit, opened the outer door, and looked for their would-be stowaway. She’d grabbed the shuttle at one point but she seemed to have let go and to be floating untethered in the interstellar vacuum near the ship. She looked awful. He wasn’t sure she was still alive—and if she was, he wasn’t sure she wanted to stay that way. But it wasn’t hard to get hold of her and pull them both back in. He shut the airlock door and… then as the air came in he didn’t move.

She looked less swollen and more human surrounded by air. It seemed like she might survive. And if she did, she had come from an alien planet where humans had been living in total isolation from the population Vethani’s people came from since before Udhail existed, and possibly since before recorded history. Thousands or tens of thousands of years of bacterial and viral evolution virtually guaranteed that she carried diseases they didn’t. Possibly the other way around, too, for all that Udhail didn’t tolerate people getting sick. They could try to keep her quarantined, maybe, for the time it would take to develop vaccines against all of the unfamiliar microorganisms she’d brought along, but the shuttle wasn’t that big even if you had the run of it. The obvious thing to do would be to keep his suit on, order them to go back, and drop her off on her own home planet—or at least that would have been the obvious thing to do if she hadn’t come from someplace where people were being tortured, and if she hadn’t looked injured even before the vacuum got to her.

He was inclined to go ahead and risk exposing them all to each other and count on their ability to treat anything that happened, but—technically, diseases could cause permanent injuries. Scars, blindness, deafness, paralysis. And he had made a promise to his people that he would not do that. Not without asking. Not without permission.

That probably ought to apply to the stowaway, too, but she didn’t seem capable of talking at the moment. So first things first, he had to talk with his crew.

----------------------------------------

When Kara came to she tried not to be obvious about it. Her face felt oddly cold. Breathing hurt and her mouth tasted like vomit and in general she felt even worse than she had before she’d started following the aliens.

After a while of nothing happening that she could eavesdrop on she got bored of pretending not to be conscious and tried opening her eyes but nothing came into focus so she gave up on that for the time being. But that seemed to be enough to get people to pay attention to her. There was a voice that sounded hesitant and awkward as if the speaker weren’t very familiar with Sueli.

“Hello,” someone said. “Are you intact? I don’t speak Sueli but my mathematical machinist sort of does, so I will sort of understand you.”

She had no idea how to respond to that, but she made another attempt to look around for the speaker, then gave up.

“You’re in our shuttle. You followed us. We can keep you here but we came from far away and you might get sick. We think sometimes that happens when people meet strangers from very far away. We could take you back instead.”

She wanted to beg them not to take her back but what if this was some kind of trap? What if they were just waiting for her to say that, so they could count it as another escape attempt and punish her for that, too? It didn’t seem very likely but…

She tried to answer and found herself hoarse enough she had an excuse not to talk.

“Would you like some water?” the same mysterious stranger asked.

She shrugged.

There were sounds that she felt she should be paying attention to (but couldn’t, quite) and then he was telling her to sit up. She did, and he pressed a cup into her hand. She drank it all and didn’t quite care if it was just water. Then she took several deep breaths. She seemed to be okay at the moment—sure, she was hurt, and sure, she couldn’t really go home anymore, and sure, they’d, well, done things to her, and now she’d never have children who might take after her and who she could teach to dream of something brighter than the world she’d been born into, but. But. But she was fine now. She was fine, inside, where it mattered. Even if her face did say “goat thief” and her back was scarred from a whipping or several, that wasn’t her; that was just skin deep.

Mostly.

She was fine.

And part of being fine was daring to dream of freedom, and not just meekly trying to avoid even worse punishment.

“I won’t go back,” she said. Unaccountably, she found herself halfway crying at that—dry wracking sobs that didn’t seem to produce tears, although her eyes stung and her throat felt tight. “I don’t—I—no.”

A hand touched her shoulder and she flinched as if struck.

“…That was wrong of me,” the stranger said. “I wanted to comfort you. You may stay. We’ll take you somewhere. But I told you before that we’re from far away.”

She nodded vaguely and thought back to what he’d said earlier. “I don’t care,” she said. “I can’t exactly be precious about dirty foreigners, now, can I.”

“Then I’ll give you the tour.”

“Mm. In a minute.”

----------------------------------------

Once her vision cleared and she’d caught her breath and had some more water she agreed to the tour. It wasn’t a long tour. There’s not much on the ship. Five closet-sized bedrooms you couldn’t even stand up in, all of them already claimed; a cockpit and a lab where she wasn’t supposed to go without someone to babysit her; and a small indoor garden with direct access to the washroom and the mysterious futuristic dispenser of mysterious futuristic nourishment. Not having had enough to eat since she was caught with that damn goat, she tested the mysterious futuristic dispenser of foodlike substances immediately. It gave her a small bowl full of some sort of mysterious thick substance that tasted bitter and sweet and chalky and savory all at once. She tried to savor it, decided it wasn’t at all worth savoring, and ate it quickly.

“How often am I allowed to have more?” she asked the man giving her the tour, who had said his name was Vethani.

He read the automatic translation off his mysterious device and then frowned at her in confusion.

“…I mean, I don’t know if I’m allowed to have any more than that before we get where we’re going…?”

He typed something—she watched over his shoulder and noticed that the device kept offering suggestions for longer words he might mean—and then the device gave him what was presumably a translation of it, not in the Sueli alphabet but not in the alphabet he was typing in, either. He read it off. “We will be traveling for an amount of time. I don’t know how much time. You may eat if you’re hungry.”

She touched her cheek nervously. “Of course. Thank you.” She stared at the machine for a while. “If you don’t know how long it’ll be how do you know you have enough food?”

“Recycling,” he said.

“…Ah,” she said, “no wonder it tastes like shit.”

----------------------------------------

So they had a stowaway. And it would have been hard to avoid her. Lyrail went ahead and met her once Vethani had showed her around and gotten her a clean change of clothes.

She found the stowaway sitting under the tree (they had managed to put one small tree in the shuttle garden, a fairly short one), eating what passed for food here. The mothership had a better selection—the mothership had chickens and apricots and grapes—but this wasn’t the mothership and all they had here were a few herbs and some of this synthetic paste that ostensibly came in three flavors all of which managed to taste like claustrophobia. The stowaway caught sight of Lyrail, smiled and waved and stopped hunching over her food and sat up straight. She started talking, fast, and Lyrail checked the machine translated subtitles her computer had to offer.

“It’s good to meet you,” the girl was saying. “I’m Kara. Vethani didn’t mention your name.”

“Lyrail.” That didn’t take any fiddly translation to figure out how to say.

“Lirail?”

“Lyrail.”

“Hm. Lyrael?”

Lyrail had a suspicion she was doing that on purpose. “Lyrail,” she said again, mildly annoyed.

“So there’s a difference between ‘ae’ and ‘ai’ in—I didn’t get the name of your language…”

“Krydhav.”

“…Now that’s a hard one. Krydav. Krydhav. Krydhav? Can I say it ‘Krydhav’ and ‘Krydhav’ too?”

Lyrail fiddled with the computer until it told her how to say that the last four attempts were all fine. She read the transliteration of the translation in Krydhav’s alphabet, not in the IPA like Vethani whom Kara was really starting to remind her of.

“What about ‘Krydhov’? What about ‘Kredhav’?”

“No,” she said in Krydhav.

“No,” Kara echoed. “So do I get one of those things to teach me how to say everything in Krydhav?”

They hadn’t brought enough and the answer was probably no. She poked her computer and answered, “Ask Vethani.”

“Mm. Fine.”

Lyrail found a spot to sit down in the garden near Kara. She didn’t like her; Kara was too much like Vethani, although admittedly she was mostly like him in being very interested in foreign languages—and something about her body language was oddly similar, too—and didn’t especially seem to share his sense that he was or ought to be just another Udhail.

Regardless, she was new and interesting and Lyrail had to figure out how to live with her at some point. So she figured she’d try to make conversation.

“That’s a nice tattoo you have,” she said.

Kara looked startled and touched it as if she’d forgotten it was there. Or maybe not forgotten, but something. Then she laughed. She was cute when she laughed. “Thank you. I’m very proud of it.”

Kara kept smiling to herself and it gave Lyrail the sense that she had a private joke she didn’t want to explain.

“What.”

“…There’s just a story behind it. Want to hear it?”

“Yes.”

“So back home everything sucks. In theory there are a bunch of different countries but in practice the Great Utari Empire rules the world and all the other countries—officially they give us gifts as a gesture of gratitude for how we help protect them from civil unrest and from, you know, fighting with each other. And if some people say a little unrest is better than a lot of tyranny, then those people are dangerous and then they disappear. And. I wanted to make things better. I found things out and I helped spread information and I helped hide people and feed them and keep them safe from the things that happen to people who are caught going against the empire. No one ever found out. See, if they did, when they caught me, they’d have tattooed it on me. This is the worst thing they knew about. So, you see, they tattooed right on my face that they never knew what I did.”

Kara smirked. The expression made her look disconcertingly similar to Vethani, and that made Vethani seem more tolerable, if he was also just making up stories where he could feel pride instead of despair.

Lyrail considered what to say for a while before getting a translation. She could tell Kara was starting to get impatient for an answer but that didn’t make her more sure what to say.

“I would like to be able to tell you that we’re going to build a place that is better than that.”

“You’d like, huh?”

“Vethani is confident.”

“Hm. You think he’s wrong to be?”

She shrugged.

“So, like, what… is your deal, anyway?”

“We don’t have a formal agreement.”

Kara giggled. Then she stopped and thought, frowning. Then she laughed loudly. “How’d your machine learn Sueli?”

“Radio.”

“Aha. So, wait, is it a radio?”

Lyrail made a vague so-so gesture.

“Anyway, what I meant was, what are you people doing?”

Oh, boy. That was Lyrail’s least favorite question. She started working on on her answer.

Meanwhile Kara got up to take a very short walk around the garden, occasionally jumping up to touch the ceiling. After a little while of that, she frowned and stopped. “You know, I have a hell of a spring in my step since I got here, and I don’t think it’s all the hope.”

“Your planet has higher gravity.”

“Huh. …Oh, that makes sense.”

Kara sat down and eyed the dispenser of foodlike substances hungrily but didn’t get herself seconds.

Eventually Lyrail had her answer. “We lived in a faraway place that we didn’t like. We left. We’re trying to make a new country on a new planet with new rules. No one should maim anyone. No one should steal another person’s diary or records. Vethani says he thinks it’s enough. He says humans can be happy. He says we’ll be safe after we get there.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I think it will be better. I think if I hate it he’ll let me die.”

“Where you’re from before stopped you?”

She sighed and considered what to say for a long time, even though it wasn’t very complicated and wasn’t hard to get a translation for.

“I didn’t try,” she said, finally. “Vethani did.”

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The next time Vethani stopped to talk with Kara she asked him for a computer.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Look,” she said, “I can try to teach it to speak better Sueli—I know words they’re not even allowed to say on the radio, okay? And I can answer questions. And I bet knowing how to use one of those is a really useful skill and you want me to have useful skills if you’re not going to kick me out. And I—”

By the time she’d gotten that far he’d finished setting up another user profile, restricting it to relatively less harmful apps, and logging out of his account. The interface was already in Sueli, of course, the better to practice with. He handed it over.

“I want that back soon,” he said.

“Huh. You’re learning.”

“Yes. I am learning slowly.”

“Slowly? I haven’t been here a day and you’re complaining to me in Sueli about how slowly you’re learning it? ’Slow’ my nonexistent ballsack.”

“What?”

“I have been here for a few hours. You are having a conversation with me. Saying ‘something my balls’ means ‘I don’t believe that.’ You can also say ‘something my ass’ but that’s less common and it makes you sound like you’re from Vetsi.”

He nodded. “I was near your planet for weeks. I didn’t know you but I wanted to learn.”

“Still pretty fast.”

“Udhail was faster.”

“Who the fuck’s Udhail?”

“‘The fuck’?”

“It marks emotional state but it doesn’t mean anything. Who’s Udhail?”

Vethani sighed. “I don’t speak Sueli.”

She offered him his computer back and he looked like he’d bitten a lemon, but he took it. He sat with the screen where she could see it while he typed. While most of the app names and menu items had names in the right script, the translation was still not, so she had to wait for him to read it out loud. He spent a while typing, erasing, retyping, and thinking, before he was done.

“Udhail is our god,” he said. “Long ago, some humans made a servant. They made her very smart. She wanted what they told her to want. She did what they told her to do. She was our friend. She was our god. She gave us food and shelter. She loved us. We are tremendously blessed that she let us leave.”

“If she did everything you wanted why do you all hate her so much?”

“No. She didn’t. She wanted everything her creators told her to want.”

“And not what you told her to want?”

“She wanted what they told her to want. She didn’t want what they wanted her to want.”

“Ohhh. That’s not a god. That’s a wish spirit. They give you whatever you ask for—I mean, in old stories. They’re not real. Except I guess they are after all.”

He nodded solemnly. “This is a wish spirit,” he said, pointing to his computer. “It can’t understand complicated wishes. Udhail understands complicated wishes. You could tell Udhail ‘I wish I could communicate with Kara’ and Udhail would learn what your language is and then learn your language and then translate. You can tell this wish spirit ‘I want to say this sentence in Sueli’ and it will give you that. Do you understand?”

“It’s safer if you have to come up with all the steps yourself. It’s probably still not really safe.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s safe to lend it to me?”

“Not really safe. But you can’t ask it to do very many things.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Udhail’s creators were careful. Be better than that.” He handed the computer back to her and left her to it.

----------------------------------------

She was careful, not just with the computer but with everything. She wanted to find out what happened if she told the alien food machine to give her more food than it had inside it; she wanted to dig down to see exactly how deep the dirt went in the garden and what the floor looked like under it; she wanted to annoy all the people until she knew exactly where all their buttons were. But she didn’t.

Vethani was right; some of them did manage to catch something from her. Vethani, for his part, didn’t seem to care at all, though it was obvious looking at him that he’d caught a fever and a worrying rash that you usually only saw on the very sick, the very young, or the immunocompromised. Lyrail seemed less sick but spent hours in bed during what was probably her day anyway. No one else seemed to think much of that, though, so Kara wasn’t sure it was new.

For her part, Kara couldn’t have said if she caught anything from them; she was sort of under the weather, like she had been for most of the last few months, and it was hard to say whether it was from the crew or from the camp or if it was even infectious and not just hunger and exhaustion. Really, she felt better than she had in a while. She spent an entire day just lying on the grass and getting up only to eat, drink or use the restroom any time she wanted.

And then after a time that felt like forever and seemed to pass in the blink of an eye, she was tired of that and asking for things to do.

“Well,” said Vethani, “you could tell me about your planet. I’m very curious.”

“Sure. What do you want to know?”

He sat down and turned on the app that basically turned his computer into a phonograph. She felt her heartbeat speed up but there wasn’t anything wrong; it was normal for people to ask each other questions, out of curiosity, not backed by the threat of violence. She would do the same thing in his place. She had, in fact, been asking him questions. Nothing was wrong.

“Well, to start with, we weren’t able to identify your color words from the radio.”

She laughed and started pointing to things. “Green,” she said of the grass. “Black,” she said of his hair. She pointed to his shirt and his pants. “Purple, dark brown. Black is the night sky between the stars and white is a full moon. Blue and yellow are green. Blue and red are purple. Red and yellow are orange. Silver is the color of steel and sardines. Light blue is the color of a noontime sky without clouds.”

“Thank you. The radio signals seemed to pronounce some words differently—”

“Radio’s its own dialect. Also I have a lisp. It’s rude to talk about it. Don’t copy the way I pronounce things.”

“Ah, I see. Thank you. We have some reasonable guesses at your words for body parts but we weren’t sure where some of them started and ended, exactly.” He started pointing to various parts of his own body. “Is this a leg?”

“Yep.”

“And this?”

“No, that’s a hip.”

“Is this an arm?”

“That’s a hand.”

“Is this a hand?”

“No, that’s a forearm.”

“Forearm. I think that’s a new word. Is this my scalp?”

“That’s the nape of your neck.”

“Is this my scalp?”

“That’s your eyebrow. This is my scalp.”

“Just that?”

“Yep.”

“What’s a kiss?”

“I’m not showing you.”

“What’s the word for the location where water mixed with feces and dirt is made pure?”

“Water treatment plant. Why do you need to know this?”

“Translating potential settlement plans into Sueli. What is cleaning and housework like?”

“It’s… I mean.” She had to stop and think about that one, which was about when Lyrail finally showed her face and came to sit nearby and listen. “So if you have a bathroom it has to be cleaned really thoroughly. And if you have a kitchen you have to clean that too. And the carpets have to get taken out and beaten. If you have carpets. Unless you’re rich. Rich people have machines that suck up the dirt. And then there’s laundry. Laundry’s awful. You’re lucky you have a machine for that.”

“Hm. What would you eat on a normal day?”

“What, me? Now? Shit and sadness.”

“…They starve you, don’t they. Of course they do. What about someone who wasn’t a prisoner?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know… sandwiches. Eggs and toast. We always had fruits and vegetables fresh but I think in the cities they get them canned. If it’s a special occasion you’d have a nice salad, like—right before they caught me I made a friend one with radishes in orange gelatin. And when you could you’d have some meat. Usually chicken or goat or mutton. Sometimes ham or bacon.”

“What’s goat?”

“The cute animals with beards that make good milk are goats.”

“Hmm.” He pulled up a picture on his computer. “These?”

“Those are sheep.”

“This?”

“Yeah, that’s a goat.”

“What was a normal day like?”

“You mean before? I worked, I went grocery shopping, I gave some of the food to some people who were hiding, I listened to the radio or played jacks or read stuff. I helped with the laundry sometimes. Sometimes I’d pay a neighbor to do some cleaning or cooking. I lived with my parents and I tried not to spend much time around them, so I didn’t hang around in the house much except in my room with the door locked.”

Vethani looked like he was about to ask another question but Lyrail interrupted. “What did you read?”

“News. Books. Old poetry, sometimes. Science. Some of the sciences aren’t very political, and then you can trust the books.”

“Yeah,” Lyrail said quietly. “It was the opposite for us. Some of the politics wasn’t scientific enough to be censored.”

Kara made a face, and made steadily more of a face the more she thought about that. “I hate that,” she said eventually. “That seems even worse.”

“It was terrible,” said Vethani.

“At some point if you have some poetry memorized that they didn’t read over the radio, maybe after I’m better at Sueli, you could tell it to us,” said Lyrail.

Kara shrugged. “Maybe I could. I don’t have much, though.”

“So,” Vethani said hesitantly, “what can you tell us about the place where they had you?”

She examined the plants in the garden. The ground cover was unusually resilient to being stepped on.

She shrugged.

“It’s for people who break certain laws, especially if the judge hates them. It’s… just work. There’s just a lot of work to be done and obviously they need to have worse punishments they can use if you won’t do it, since they can’t exactly throw you in prison about it.”

“I guess that makes economic sense if labor is very valuable,” he said.

“It isn’t for you?”

“We have more machines. So if they needed you to work why did they starve you?”

“It’s supposed to suck. You know, as a deterrent. And then it’s supposed to fuck you up so if you ever get out everyone who meets you knows how much they really don’t want that to happen to them. So then they won’t break the same laws you did.”

“Well, you do look horrifying and it does make me want to avoid whatever happened to you.”

“Wow, is that any way to talk to a lady? I never! Horrifying? Me? How dare you!”

“What? What did I say wrong?”

But Lyrail was laughing. She said something to Vethani in Krydhav and “sorry, we don’t know how to translate that” in Sueli.

“No, I can translate that,” said Vethani. “It’s a vulgar idiom that means you’re acting strange to see if you can goad me into doing something you can laugh at, or literally, that we’re having sex.”

Kara laughed, loud and harsh. “What, even though I’m horrifying? Guess I wouldn’t be with the lights out, huh?”

“I have enough people right now, actually.”

“Huh. Somehow I had the idea you were single. Never mind, though.”

“…Anyway. You were telling me they torture people to show other people what not to do. Why don’t they do literally anything else?”

“Uh. What else would they do?”

“Well, I’m planning to keep chickens when I have my own society on the new planet. If someone steals a chicken, I will ask if they’re hungry.”

“…What if they’re not hungry and they just did it because they hate you?”

“Then I’ll fine them. If they refuse to pay, I’ll have their wages garnished.”

“What if they do that, and then they quit their job so they don’t have any wages, and then they are hungry…”

“I will distribute food to everyone for free.”

“I think maybe stealing livestock is a bad comparison because you’re just too much richer. What if someone commits rape?”

“The translator doesn’t know that one.”

“…What if someone kills someone else?”

“Is that a definition or another question?”

“It’s another question. So what’s the answer?”

“I might fine them enough to cover having the body preserved while we work on resurrection.”

“What if they kept doing it?”

“I suppose then I might imprison them. But not like that. Just because there’s a compelling reason to limit someone’s freedom of movement doesn’t eliminate all their other rights.”

“What would be different, then?”

“No one would injure them or force them to work. I would try very hard, if it was at all feasible, to make sure they had enough space to stand up and lie down at all times.”

“…Okay, I admit Utari prisons don’t exactly clear that bar, but I really can’t say I’m impressed.”

“What would you do to be kinder to them?”

She shrugged. “I mean, I wouldn’t. I don’t really have anything against what we do to people. I just think it should only happen to people who do really awful things like rape or fake vaccination scams, and not to people who say the prime minister is so ugly it’s amazing she won’t repeal the mask law.”

“What?”

“Well, you can’t go around hiding your face in public, because then you might do things and no one would know who to go after. And that should be repealed because it makes it hard to keep from spreading diseases so we need other laws about not gathering without permission and not going anywhere without showing your vaccine certificate—which has your name on it, of course, so they know where you are—and those are terrible. But one look at the prime minister’s face is at least as good an argument.”

She smirked. They would understand; they wouldn’t hurt her. She was safe. She could say whatever she wanted.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself not to cry.

“Well,” said Vethani, “I think we can track people without seeing their faces, I already know I’m not very attractive, and I don’t see how arresting people for making bad arguments would improve political discourse no matter how momentarily tempting it might seem.”

Kara found herself losing track of the latter part of that. So he thought he didn’t need to see people’s faces. So he thought he could be more intrusive and know more of other people’s private business.

“Are you okay?” asked Lyrail.

“Fine, yeah. Where were we.”

“Can you help us match some place names to pictures?” Vethani asked. He brought up a picture of their planet, a moving one that seemed to rotate slowly, and offered his computer to Kara.

“Uh… here’s the Great Utari Empire…” She pointed out a few of the other technically independent countries, too. “Can I make it bigger?”

He reached over and showed her how to do that. She pointed out a couple of cities, her old house, the famous museum in the capital, and a few other things. She was kind of impressed by how smoothly it could handle zooming in so far. While she had it she looked at some other places she’d never been before, and then handed it back.

“That helps a lot,” said Vethani. “So is an empire something different from a country?”

“It has more international influence and more diverse people. Used to be it only counted if you conquered other countries or something. It’s not a word that’s changed very much since we spoke Old Sueli. You’re starting to seem like someone who’d appreciate knowing about etymology.”

“I do! I have a faint hope we’ll be able to tell when either your people or mine traveled several universes to settle a new planet by comparing our languages.”

“It was ours and it was a little under two thousand one hundred of our years ago. Fossil record doesn’t show any ancestors of humans, goats, sheep, chickens or pigs. We think some of our plants aren’t domesticated from any species that have wild versions we’ve ever seen. Meanwhile there is a fossil record for dragons, sea serpents, unicorns and—obviously I can’t list all the species that are native to our planet. It’s a lot. And people say there’s evidence some things went extinct right when we showed up. And our recorded history says we came from somewhere else.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“Doesn’t mean we came from your planet.”

“I know. But—it’s important. To know you’re family. To know that whatever was lost in our world wasn’t all of human civilization and that we’ve had cousins living in—I guess not freedom, but something close to freedom—all this time.”

“Hey. It’s okay. Hug?” Kara opened her arms so her meaning would be clear even if the radio hadn’t taught him that word.

He hugged her. He spent quite a while just hugging her. They both let go at the same moment.

“Doesn’t actually mean humans didn’t just kind of happen independently, you know,” she said.

“I know but that’s slightly absurd.”

“I guess. More so than the rest of this?”

“I think so. It’s odd if something that similar happens by coincidence.”

“Is it? Is convergent evolution not real then?”

“I think this goes beyond convergent evolution. Anyway, can you match some pictures of your world’s fashions to words for me? It was hard to figure some of them out from the radio.”

“Yeah, sure. Show me the pictures?”

He showed her.

“That’s a tunic and those are leggings and that’s a stola and that’s a toga and that’s a sandal and that’s a boot and that’s a technicolor abomination pretending to be a toga—who is this person and why does she have such horrible fashion sense? She probably thinks it’s daring and new or something but you can tell it’s sewn together so she’s obviously poor—if it’s sewn up like that you can just slip it on and not worry about it falling off and that means she has to wear it on busy days and that means she doesn’t own anything she can’t wear when she’s pressed for time and has to work. You can get away with a toga that’s got a pattern like that on it or you can get away with a sewn one or a pinned one but not both at once like that.”

“Huh. Your clothing means more than ours.”

“You’ll get there.”

“Your tunic has writing on it but the symbols aren’t any of your letters, so far as I can tell.”

“They’re numerals.”

“Why do you have them?”

Kara opened her mouth, then closed it again. She took a deep breath, sighed, and then started talking. “Once when I was little we got to ride on a train. We came to this quaint little ski resort town up north. It wasn’t ski season, though. It was bright all day and most of the night. The insects were everywhere and they were huge—it was so easy to see them. I stood around watching and I let the biting ones bite me so I could look at them, until my father insisted I had to stop rolling my sleeves up or wear insect repellent. And then I just let them keep biting me because the repellent didn’t work. Did you know insects are a paraphyletic group? Entomologists think some of them come from wherever we came from and some of them don’t. Anyway, it was so shady and green. It’s never that green at home. And it rained so hard half the days we were there. We met some friends of my parents and we had to bring some people a lot of gifts but there was still enough for me to go look in a souvenir store and buy something. It was such a hard choice. I didn’t want something I’d have to worry someone else would steal. But I didn’t want to get some candy that I’d eat and forget about. Eventually, I ended up leaving the store without anything, hiding the money and saying I’d gotten some candy. Then my parents’ friends got permission for a party and I wasn’t supposed to go—I’d be one person too many—but they brought me anyway and kept it a secret and I got to hang out and read one of their books and listen to one of them play the piano and then I got to eat the fancy stuff they served for dinner at the party. There was baked ham with pineapple and baked beans with lots of bacon and really flaky biscuits they got in a can if you can believe that—and I guess you can totally believe that—and stuffed mushrooms and green beans with almonds. I had some of everything. It was great. Then we went home and I watched the scenery the whole way back.”

“…Is that an answer to my question?”

“Nope.”

“It’s how you want to remember Utari,” said Lyrail. “Right?”

“And I don’t want to make you think it was all bad. I could have just kept my damn head down and stuck to doing my job and cheating little old ladies and I’d’ve been fine. But I didn’t want that. And it wasn’t because of how bad it was.”

Vethani nodded slowly. “I… I don’t understand that, really. Not that I’m confused, but—I left.”

“You’d rather have died than stayed there,” said Kara. “Lyrail told me. You weren’t going to fix it.”

“That’s true as far as it goes,” he said. “But now that we’re out I won’t die as long as my people need me.”

Kara drew her knees up to her chest and hunched over. “I had people like that before.”

“You came to us and you’re on our mission. I’m not going to take you back to Utari. So if you want to be one of my people…”

“Maybe. I think… I don’t know. But I don’t want to go back there.”

“There’ll be more choices someday.”

“Will there?”

“I’ll make sure of it. But for now, welcome.”

----------------------------------------

The worst distance between two portals in a single world they’d had to cross so far was more than the span of one galaxy but fortunately that world’s laws of physics had allowed them to make the trip in something resembling a reasonable amount of time. This time, they got lucky and found the next portal on a moon in orbit around a planet in orbit around the closest star. It took them only months to get to this point, enough time to start teaching Kara to speak Krydhav and catch everything she had and start working on vaccines for whenever they get back to the others. Enough time to get very heartily sick of the shuttle.

One more portal and they might be done. Vethani would give almost anything to be done. To be there. To have brought everyone and everything they freed from Udhail to a new home and to stop traveling.

But first they have to deal with the alien. Have they ever considered taking alien immigrants? They have. They have considered it a lot.

Vethani translates for everyone, of course.

“Well, why not?” says Var. “I mean, once we’re there, we can figure out quarantine if we have to, but at worst I don’t see why we can’t have neighbors on a space station who don’t breathe the same air we do and just send us email sometimes.”

“I think,” says Lilan, “we need to know what’s going on here. And we need to assume Vethani is compromised. And what we really need to do is get out of this universe, where these aliens can do magic, and get into the other universe, where physics will be on our side and they’re not likely to be more familiar with the area than we are. Assuming the other end of the portal isn’t in a star. Which I just want to remind everyone it could be.”

“We should find out more about the aliens,” says Neth, “and I guess… people have a right to order their own affairs except for public safety reasons, right? Well, then, the only reason to tell this alien it can’t come live on our planet is if it’s a danger to us. But Lilan’s right, it might be, and we’re obviously not safe from it here. We should get out of here and then come back for it when we have anywhere for it to immigrate to. Which we don’t. We barely have room for Kara.”

Lyrail says nothing, but watches Lilan.

“No reason to think the alien isn’t another Udhail,” says Lilan. “We need to get out now.”

Vethani sighs and shakes his head. “If the alien is like Udhail and it can directly alter our minds from this distance, we’ve already lost. And we already checked that it would be very difficult for an AI like that to run under the local physics. And… I think the important thing here is that if it’s not acting in good faith we’ve lost. Also, it might know how to get into the other universe and have friends waiting for us there anyway.”

“Then the answer is ‘yes, but we can’t help,’” says Neth.

“It could be acting in good faith and still hurt us,” says Lilan. “And it might be gearing up to do something worse. Maybe this is less effortful somehow than just directly enslaving us all, or maybe it’s faster.”

“Also,” says Lyrail, “if it’s running away from an entire industrial civilization—and it is, because they built that spacecraft somehow—but it doesn’t want to avoid people entirely, then something is badly wrong with its home. It’s a refugee. Like us.”

“Mmm,” says Var, “it might be that it can’t figure out the portal and is making up whatever it thinks will convince us to show it or something. Maybe we can trust it to swear to… peaceful intent or… not good faith, it might understand the concept differently…”

“It might not follow a decision theory where oaths make sense,” says Vethani.

“Oh, like you,” Lyrail mutters wryly. Vethani glares, for a moment, then decides that’s unfair of him and stops.

“You know,” says Neth, “it could have been a hypothetical.”

There’s a brief silence.

“It could have been a hypothetical,” says Vethani.

“That absolutely does not matter,” says Var. “We weren’t going to kidnap the alien either way, right?”

“…Right. I’m going to explain our position, unless anyone has any more objections.”

Lilan sighs and no one says anything.

“We don’t want to bar you from joining us,” Vethani explains to the alien, “but your environmental needs might not be compatible and we have no room for you on this ship. We also can’t confirm that the other end of the portal lets out somewhere safe, as opposed to in the middle of a star. So far we’ve been lucky. So we don’t particularly mean to stop you from following us, but we can’t help.”

The reply is a while in coming, which means it’ll be a long one, Vethani thinks. He hasn’t figured out yet how exactly the telepathy works but he thinks he’s noticed a correlation there. He starts trying to mentally estimate the time it must have taken to send him the language, and how long that means the alien was aware of them.

Then the answer comes. Vethani repeats it under his breath for the microphone so he doesn’t have to remember it all.

I would be safe in your atmosphere. I suspect you would survive mine but I am not sure. Your skin secretions may be mildly toxic to me but not significantly so in the quantities I would expose myself to by moving among you, even if we brushed against each other frequently. I personally produce both waste products and venom, both of which I think I could keep from touching any of you even in close quarters. I am three percent finished scanning your attendant microbes and have identified five that are likely to be able to mutate to infect me. I can simulate exposure to them in a way which will cause my body to develop a resistance to any deleterious effects without the risk of actual exposure, if I have samples of the microbes to use in the spells. I can in theory do the same for you, but it would be quite expensive to do it for all thirty million species of microbes present in this spacecraft if you have no way to identify likely candidates. If safety doesn’t await you on the other side of the portal, I am willing to offer my assistance in setting up a colony here instead.

Vethani shivers. Whatever an alien means by “assistance” there’s no guarantee it even slightly resembles what a human might mean. He translates for the others.

“I don’t like that it’s getting all this information,” says Lilan. “But if we want to check which diseases can cross to humans, can’t we just send Kara and see what she catches?”

“No,” says Lyrail. “We can’t. I volunteer instead. Kara’s not related to any of us.”

“We can clone her,” says Lilan.

“She might not even be vulnerable to the same things. We don’t know. And she knows things about what it’s like to live in a human-run society, even if it’s terrible. We can’t get that from a clone.”

“Also, you like her,” says Lilan.

Lyrail spreads her hands. “I checked all the laws and liking people isn’t a crime. Besides. If one of us is going to die it should be me.”

“You may go if you choose,” Vethani says.

Lyrail gives him an unamused look. “Thank you. You’re too kind.”

“I’m going to ask the alien what it’s running from,” he tells them. Then he does that.

The others know better than to distract him.

The alien answers: I am not in danger. I don’t feel like my society allows me to be myself. Many others feel similarly constrained. Nothing is likely to worsen or kill any of us very soon.

He repeats that for the computer, then translates it for everyone to discuss.

“If it’s not urgent we can worry about it later,” says Lilan.

“If we’re doing this, we could send someone to get sick now and pick them up on our way back,” says Lyrail. “Or, you know, after spending thirty times as long being watched and spied on for alien vaccine development.”

Lilan turns to her and regards her intently. “Do you want to go?”

“No. But I think it should be me if someone is going.”

Lilan shakes her head. “I want to go. I don’t know that it should be me, or that we should do it, but I at least think I’d find it bearable to get to know an alien. Although if that’s how we’re deciding, I think Var is probably getting claustrophobic.”

“I don’t want to go,” says Var, sounding horrified. “I would if you needed me to but you don’t.”

“So I’ll go if someone is going,” says Lilan. “I certainly don’t think it should be Lyrail. Well, Vethani? Is one of us going?”

“We’re going to stay here and see what we can learn while the alien studies us,” he decides. “Then we’ll see about sending someone.”

He tells the alien this, and then asks: “While we wait, can you send us what you know about this planet in some less terribly confusing and awkward medium?”

This is the way I have to contact you. I can teach you another way. I will have to use this way to teach you. I am ten percent finished scanning your microbiomes.

After he’s translated all that, he asks the alien to teach him.

----------------------------------------

Datsvan has actually been asked that before. It was before he’d earned a name or become a man, back when he was a child called Moon. Way back then, Moon was the brightest in their age cohort, and the only one Moss ever asked for help.

Of course, Moon asked Moss for help just as often, but on this particular occasion, it was Moss who couldn’t quite understand the theory behind long-distance communication by reciprocal scrying. Of course Moss had memorized the textbook’s explanation, but it wasn’t a very good explanation, and Moss hadn’t quite caught the trick the time it was demonstrated in class.

The thing about Moon was that Moon had extremely wealthy, doting parents, who would pay the material costs of trying spells half a dozen times each. Moss, in theory, also had that; no one was supposed to know how much of Moss’s father Nr’s wealth was going to medical bills for Moss’s sibling, or to being blackmailed about the fact that Moss’s sibling wasn’t well.

And since Moss had neither relevantly rich parents, nor the ability to ask for the sort of help they offered to poor students, it fell to Moon to give them a second chance to watch spells on the rare occasions when Moss couldn’t get them right the first time.

So Moss showed up and Moon let them in and gave them a short and cryptic explanation that was all Moss really needed, and then practiced the spell with them once. They’d blocked out a significant fraction of the morning for this—it could, in theory, have taken that long, and probably would have with someone stupider than Moss—so they were left with the rest of that time to themselves, with their whereabouts accounted for and their parents unworried and out.

Plenty of time to get out a heavily scryproofed notebook and talk about plans.

“So they have a batch ready,” Moss said. Meaning a batch of long-acting contraceptive potions to force-feed to everyone who hadn’t shown their worth lately or had too many children. “Did you figure out…?”

“Yes. It’s confirmed genetic diseases first, then rapists, then miscellaneous—that’ll be most of the people we’re worried about—then murderers, then other diseases, then people with four already.” Because of course Extvri didn’t want people who didn’t conform to very narrow standards of acceptable behavior to reproduce.

“Had to stick our people right in the middle there, didn’t they,” said Moss. “How much would it take to cover just the first couple categories and can we leave them just that much?”

“Probably not very precisely. They don’t publish how many in each category they’re planning on this time. Also, I’m not sure they won’t just use less humane means…”

“So not worth it yet.” Moss made a face. “We have something good here and those idiots care so much about stuffing everyone into their little convenient boxes that we’re going to lose it.”

“You think what we have here is good?”

“Some of it. Yes.”

“If you say so.”

“People like you. People like Horn. People who are already good and clever and wise and fun and just need not to have to worry about meeting other people’s arbitrary standards all the time. I just—don’t want to lose that.”

“I’m not in danger.” Moon had already grown out of their speech impediment and now Moon was acceptable even by Extvri’s standards, and they hadn’t done anything illegal yet.

“You are. Not because you’re going to fail to contort yourself exactly how they tell you to, but because you’re going to lose something doing it. You’re already losing things. You don’t joke anymore even with me. You’ve stopped reading about historical linguistics. You cook more and you pretend it’s because you like it but you’re distracting yourself—you know if you start wondering about the people who spoke Th’hn you’ll start wondering about questions Extvri tells you have right answers you’d better come to, and you don’t want to keep silent but you don’t want to be wrong and this way you know it won’t come up, if you don’t start studying things that might make you want to study things that might make you care about the wrong questions. Sure, your life is safe this way, and nobody thinks there’s anything wrong with you. Is that what you are? The ability to keep drawing breath? You are not safe, Moon, no matter how much they praise you.”

And that embarrassed them, but they weren’t exactly about to deny it just because of a little emotional discomfort. It was true, anyway. And it was corrosive that it was true, and more corrosive to know it was true.

“I’ve been a coward lately.”

“A coward? No, you’ve been lazy. You aren’t afraid they’ll catch you. You just think it’s too much work and too much… discomfort.”

“Maybe,” Moon said. “I’m not sure. But what would you have me do?”

Moss shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know what you’re doing isn’t good enough.”

“Maybe Extvri is the problem. One society, one set of standards everyone has to meet. Maybe the problem is that there’s nowhere else to go, no competing society with its own standards that would compete with this one to be just as safe and productive and comfortable but more… tolerable. But if that’s the problem then we’re doomed; as soon as the other society won it’d be able to decline just as badly…”

“I don’t think it’s as sick as all that,” said Moss. “Just… needs to get rid of a policy or two and let people be who they already are.”

“Maybe. Well. We can’t do anything about the contraceptives just yet. But there’s probably something—I wonder if it’d help if we had a good way to circulate satire and ideas Extvri doesn’t want people talking about.”

“Hard to do that safely.”

“Well, now you’ve said that I’m afraid I’ll just have to paint it on every wall of the main cavern.”

Moss snickered.

“Oh, no,” said Moon, “I’m not joking.”

It was indeed not a joke.

----------------------------------------

Well, it was sort of a joke. In that it made the two of them laugh. In private, anyway; Moon’s public rage and contempt were pitch perfect.

Moon did feel like they had back a part of themself that they’d put away.  And they did pick their historical linguistics research back up, and they did start wondering about the Tosom civilization where Th’hn was spoken, and they did start coming to their own conclusions about the parts of history Extvri had very strong opinions on.

They mentioned this to Moss, months later, with a sour look. “And,” Moon said, “you know the worst part?”

“That they were right?”

Moon gaped at them.

“What?” said Moss. “You’re the one who wasted all that time cooking.”

“Cooking is fun! I’m allowed to have fun! And you don’t even like historical linguistics.”

“But I like knowing when Extvri is lying to me.”

That was fair as far as it went—Extvri was full of lies—but still. “You didn’t tell me.”

“Would it have helped? Would you have trusted me? Would you even have been able to figure it out without playing with what it would mean for Extvri to be wrong?”

“I’d’ve known I wouldn’t have to hide my thoughts forever.”

“Really? You agree with every single part of the party line?”

Moon shrugged. “I can spin ‘technically Tosom early child mortality was probably only about thirty percent, not fifty’ a lot better than I could have spun ‘actually, Tosom was a bastion of decency and did no genocides at all’ if that had been true.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m good at spin.”

“I know. Just—you worry me, sometimes.”

“First you worry I don’t defy Extvri enough, now you worry I do it too much…”

“I’m not going to stop worrying as long as the world is… the way it is. Are we going to do anything else about that?”

“Well, obviously. But I haven’t decided what yet.”

Moss rolled their eyes. “And of course you’d be the one to decide.”

“Well, you know, I am smarter than you.”

“That test was a fluke and you know it.”

“Panicking when faced with a test is one way of being stupid,” said Moon, “and keeping your head is one way of being smart. And I get better grades.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it, and I’ll prove it with the next exams anyway.”

Moon opened their mouth to argue, and then reconsidered. “Hey, Moss,” they said instead, “they set us up so which of us was smarter would be a salient thing to argue about, and all our evidence comes from their tests. I feel set up but I can’t see what they get out of this.”

“Distraction? Motivation to do the kinds of things they approve of? When we’re adults that won’t mean these sorts of tests; it’ll mean the things we do for society…”

“…People are motivated to do well on these kinds of tests. Are they even good tests anymore, with everyone trying to game them?”

“Being able to figure out how to cheat on an intelligence test is probably a kind of intelligence.”

“Well,” said Moon. “What would we be doing if their clever tricks didn’t work on us?”

“Frankly, I think we’d be arguing over which of us was the smartest, but with different evidence.”

“That sounds like a colossal waste of time, now that I think about it.”

“But are you going to stop?”

“Of course. Words are nothing. What I need is proof.”

“That is not stopping.”

“Of course it is. After I’m done there’ll be no argument. See?”

“I’m sure whatever you’re planning I can do better.”

“Oh? Are we betting on that?”

“Yes. Yes, we are.”

----------------------------------------

They were old enough to make their naming-projects for the bet, which ended up being hard to settle. Moss managed to be the first in their age cohort to earn an adult name—Xreygh—with their paper laying out the reasons to believe in a multiverse and the most likely configurations of worlds relative to one another.

Everyone in the cohort was old enough to start trying on adult genders by the time Moon earned his name; in fact, his name project took the longest of anyone in the cohort.

But going back to the present for the moment. It’s an interesting change of pace for him to explain magic he’s been able to take for granted since before he had a name, and an interesting challenge to do it by this particular medium, and a relief to talk to another person. The alien is a quick learner, too, even starting with no background; he’s very interested in the theory, but eventually sets that aside to focus on just getting the spell working.

And then the alien makes a face. “I am almost inclined to ask if you’d be willing to just accept a gift of a camera and microphone.”

OBVIOUSLY I will accept ALIEN TECHNOLOGY, Datsvan writes, but then thinks better of it and sets that note aside.

I will accept only if you send me two of each, so I can take them apart, and if you explain how they work, his second note reads, and he sends that one.