---Sentinel---
---Tcakqaal’s perspective---
“Come in…” comes the woman’s voice.
I wave open her door.
She spares me a glance before smiling “Ah, Captain… how can I help you?”
“What are you… watching, Ms Soltani?” I ask, indicating the footage currently displaying on the wall over her desk.
Seven dark skinned, barely clothed Humans sit in close proximity, lashing stone heads onto [arrows] in tropical looking environs.
“Academic surveillance from North Sentinel Island… and please, call me Yasmin.” she answers, casually.
“Is that… some form of themed retreat?” I ask, unsure what academic value there could be in watching people enjoy pretending to live in Stone Age conditions.
“No. This is how these people live.” she shrugs.
Confused, I offer “Is it a reserve like the one that Mr Nulgynet comes from?”
She wobbles her head indecisively before saying “Yes… and no… It is a special exclusion zone where people are allowed to live unmolested by the encroachment of modern society or technology… but there are some fairly substantial differences.”
“What are the differences?” I say, walking across the room to get a better look at the footage.
“Well… for starters, Tymancha’s home continent isn’t on Earth… meaning that everyone on it is descended exclusively from people who’ve ridden an FTL capable ship at least once… This is an uncontacted tribe, on Earth.”
I point to the screen “This is on Earth? This is modern footage?”
She nods “Yes. This was taken in 2712. None of these people or any of their ancestors have any idea about Humanity’s vast interstellar presence, nor the fact that they are living at a time after we’ve made contact with extraterrestrial life, they don’t know they’re deathworlders, they don’t know what gardenworlders even are and they have no idea that they’re being filmed, much less that a woman fifty thousand lightyears away knows every one of their names(!)”
“Why… why does your government allow these people to live in such a way?” I ask, a little disgusted by what seems like a needless cruelty.
She shrugs “Because they’ve made it very clear that that’s the way they want it!”
“How have they made that clear? I thought you said they were uncontacted?” I ask suspiciously, hopping onto the desk to look between the woman and the uncontacted people in the footage.
“For around 800 years now, almost every time someone gets too near their island, they pepper them with arrows… and any time some idiotic missionary or lost, illegal fisherman ends up landing on the island, they kill them… Couldn’t be much clearer that they want to be left alone… The Unification Agreement grants them amnesty in perpetuity from contributing taxes, submitting to conscription or being prosecuted under our laws for crimes committed on their island… They know what kind of technology we have, or, at least, know that it’s so far in advance of theirs that it might as well be magic… they don’t care. They’ve very clearly decided to send the message to the outside that whatever we’re selling, they aren’t buying… They might as well have carved “NO SOLICITING” into their beaches in 20m tall letters(!)”
I look at the people sat, smiling and laughing, as they talk with eachother in an incomprehensible language.
“What could possibly have made these people decide to so fiercely reject outside contact?!”
She chuckles “Well… for that, we probably have to thank your Chief Security Specialist’s forebears!”
“Victor’s ancestors are responsible for this?” I ask, extending my flight feathers to the screen.
“Yes… sort of… He’s told you what the British Empire was?”
“We’ve talked about it… an Imperialist enterprise, perpetrated by the polity that existed on his home island before Unification, that, at it’s height, dominated a quarter of the Earth’s land and people, and practically the entirety of its oceans, until it bankrupted itself fighting the two World Wars and spent the next [half a century] slowly and grudgingly relinquishing its control over the people it had oppressed.”
She nods “That’s a fairly accurate one sentence summary… So, in the late 19th Century, when it was at the height of it’s power, it controlled the archipelago that North Sentinel is in. In those days, of course, the sea level was higher, so there were actually four main islands, North, Middle, South and Little Andaman… These days, it’s just two, Great Andaman and Little Andaman, and they’re close enough that you can wade between them at low tide. Anyway, the British appointed this guy called Maurice Vidal Portman to govern the Andamans and, at the time, there were a few different people groups living in more or less the same way they had been since the last Ice Age. One of them was the Sentinelese… these guys…” she gestures to the wall “…Portman wanted to know exactly who he was governing there so he mounted an expedition… He knew there were people there because, a few decades prior, some shipwreck survivors had been attacked, while they awaited rescue, but he spent days looking and found no one… until he stumbled upon a family of six, two elderly adults and four children… he effectively kidnapped them and took them back to Port Blair but, very quickly, the elderly couple got sick and died and so he dumped the kids back on the island with, according to him, ‘quantities of presents’… though, he never specifies what ‘presents’ he gave them…”
Very confused, I ask “How would that possibly have induced [eight centuries] of such fierce isolationism?… Him kidnapping the family is bad but, surely, the children would have understood that an elderly couple perishing from sickness wasn’t the fault of all outsiders!”
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“Well…” she muses “…in a sense, it was the fault of all outsiders… in the sense that by that point in history, mainland Indians and Europeans will have had extensive natural immunity to diseases that the Sentinelese had never been exposed to… But, if you think of it from those children’s perspective, you and your family are kidnapped from your home by people who don’t speak your language, you’re taken to a place you don’t understand at all, you’re treated less like a person than a lab animal, your (grand)parents get sick and die and you have no way of knowing whether the outsiders caused that to happen on purpose and, then, you’re just dumped back home with some useless trinkets for your trouble? You would, understandably, not be best disposed to those who abducted you and that’s even before we get to the fact that we don’t know whether any of the children were carrying any diseases… If they were… if their return caused a deadly outbreak that they easily could have seen as being a perfidious outsider deception… based on that first contact, it seems quite likely that, the next time you have outsiders putting ashore on your beaches, you’ll view it as a threat! And that’s before we get to what might have happened to them when Emiko’s forebears’ Empire occupied the islands in the Second World War…”
“What did they do to them?” I ask, dreading the answer.
Yasmin gives me another shrug “We genuinely don’t know… Before they surrendered, they destroyed all documentary records of their occupation, but we know they committed atrocities in other territories they conquered and occupied so it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that they may have landed on North Sentinel and that that interaction may have further soured the Sentinelese toward outsiders… Toward the end of that Century, the Indian government did have some mildly effective attempts at establishing contact… they figured out that having at least one woman with the contact group made them less likely to be met with hostility… They inferred an all male group is more likely to be perceived as a warband.”
“So… there’s just a group of people that the UTC is happy to allow to live outside its laws, on its cradleworld, on an island [hundreds of kilometres] out at sea?!” I say, still disbelieving.
“Yes… but I do need to correct you… their island is only 10km from Great Andaman, these days. Port Blair is only 50km away, as the crow flies.”
“Don’t be… That’s… that’s close enough to see!” I say, my scepticism deepening.
“It is.” she confirms.
“Is it close enough for a Human to swim?”
“It is.” she confirms.
“Then…!?”
“What’s keeping them there?” she smiles.
“Yes!… Why aren’t they constantly swimming over and coming into conflict with… erm…” my mind struggles for a term. Something tells me that I should avoid referring to modern people, living within the law, as ‘normal Terrans’. Eventually, I settle on “…nonSentinelese?”
She smiles “Nothing’s stopping them from swimming over and, occasionally, some do… As to what’s stopping them from causing trouble, there’s an agency tasked with supervising them. That’s where I got this footage from… well, technically, I got it from Jae but she got it from the Sentinelese Management Bureau. As academics, we’re allowed to study this, it’s not meant for general viewing… strictly speaking, you shouldn’t be looking at it but I won’t tell if you won’t(!)”
Turning my head away from the forbidden footage (but trying to do so subtly enough that I won’t be mocked for it) I ask “So, this Bureau… it just spies on them…?”
“It doesn’t just spy on them… It also manages the ≈100km2 Coastal Exclusion Zone that faces the island, making sure unauthorised people don’t just wander in, it patrols the Maritime Exclusion Zone to make sure no illegal fishing boats or hobbyist sailors get too close, it keeps track of their language and, whenever any of them make it over to Great Andaman and don’t look like they have any intention of going back any time soon, they’re the people in charge of approaching them to say ‘listen guys, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here’(!)… Whenever any Sentinelese ask the SMB to be integrated into wider UTC society they always end up becoming instant celebrities… Their stories are often quite sad, though… It’s made quite explicitly clear to them that, once they’ve chosen this, they can never go back to the island, so the ones who take the offer are usually ones with quite harrowing stories that end with them having nothing to go back to! The periodic surveillance is for a) making sure that we’re keeping abreast of their current linguistic register and b) making sure that they aren’t facing any society ending threats!… In the nearly 6 centuries that we’ve been watching them, we’ve never needed to land boots on the ground but, every now and then, when they’re experiencing a particularly bad drought or famine, we’ll arrange for a few crates of food or water to conveniently ‘fall off a transport’ in just the right place that we know ocean currents will carry it to their island as a windfall.”
Still grappling with an uncomfortable mix of emotions about this island of Stone Age humans that I’ve just learned existed, I ask “And you’re watching this footage to…?”
“To learn their language.” she answers, nonchalantly.
“How large is this island Ms So… Yasmin? How many Sentinelese are there?”
“Around 600… The island’s about 160km2 these days, though, back in Mr Portman’s time, it was only around 60km2… It’s actually spoken by several times more SMB employees than native speakers! When you factor in all the academics and enthusiasts who’ve learned it for fun that probably adds up to ×100 or so its native speakership!”
“Why learn a language only spoken by a few hundred people on an island you aren’t allowed to visit?”
She nods her understanding “That exact reason is why it’s never reached the top of my list until now. I’m… not really able to get excited about learning a language where, realistically, the only ones I’ll likely ever speak it with are other nonnatives… but, well, Jae told me she had these files to study their culture in preparation for the new species. I found myself between languages and so I asked her to send me a copy… You never know what insights you might be equipped with by studying a language of an analogous culture!… Obviously, I know it won’t be one-to-one as these…” she gestures at the screen “…are people fully aware that the outside world exists and with a very negative opinion of it… They’re also Human and that will definitely colour a lot about how they interpret the world… but still, I think there will definitely be some value in learning it, even if I don’t necessarily know what that is yet!… At the very least, learning about Portman has given me a very solid idea of how not to handle a first contact(!)… Even if I’m sure Emiko already knows all about him!”
At this point, the unwittingly recorded group burst into a mix of laughter and groans and Yasmin smiles and chuckles.
I turn to see one of the young men present grinning stupidly.
“What was the joke?” I ask, curiously.
“He just made a very silly pun that doesn’t work in R’qali…” explains Yasmin, causing me to realise that she’s just had this entire conversation without a translator and I didn’t realise until now “…it involves a Sentinelese near homophony between ‘arrows’ and ‘flatulence’…”
The woman beside the stupidly grinning man puts her right hand on his forearm and her left on her swollen belly and speaks, smiling.
“She says ‘You can see he is about to become a father’… Apparently, bad dad jokes are universal(!)”
I smile at the pair, remembering my own father’s bad jokes, made a lifetime ago…
“Did you… need something from me, Captain?” asks the linguist.
“Oh… err… yes… I’m just going around making sure that all required personnel are aware that they need to be at the shuttle bay at [5pm] to go down for the security briefing and [meet and greet] with the new team members.”
She smiles “Yes, I got the notification… from Emiko, from you and from Victor(!)”
I affect a Terran head nod “Alright, see you later then, Ms Sol… Yasmin.”