Diplomats

"Initiating diplomatic genesis. Stand by. Asootzo miagru noot blarichamicretifar," the computer said.

Quinn closed zir eyes and waited. It didn't feel like anything yet.

"Diplomatic genesis in progress. Mipto blarichamicrefaariblek." The alien language was a rumbling hum, resolving into syllables only because Quinn's ears insisted.

Zie had a building headache, rainbowing from the base of zir skull forward to zir eyebrows. It hurt, and Quinn flinched from pain - was tired and yearned for sleep - thought baby animals were cute, enjoyed food full of sugar and grease and salt. Aimed zirself at accomplishments hunting status, and security, out of anxiety or boredom -

"Diplomatic genesis approaching completion. Plarbofac rblarim blarichamicretfrem."

The pressure burst. Quinn was still a human, but less loudly. Zir head felt less overfull but, if anything, hurt worse, hollow and abraded and throbbing. Zie made a burbling noise and dropped zir head into zir hands. "Nf."

Through zir fingers zie could see glimpses of the alien across the room, a pile of green lobes and dark mantle.

On the table between them was a white box.

"Diplomatic genesis complete," said the box. The voice was Quinn's. Quinn's as it sounded from the inside. "Lokreb blarichamicoolt." Probably that was the foreign ambassador's voice. Or it wasn't. What did Quinn know.

"Welcome, diplomat," said the ceiling speaker, "alproot inawbeca chamic; are you able to select a unique name at this time? Vasprecimaritaliga cheartipren loor mo deprawingitel."

There was a quiet, except for Quinn's panting breaths as zie tried to exhale zir headache. "Call me Roon," the box said, at length, "kleetmorif atra roon." The voice was a little less like Quinn's this time, low and blurry. It didn't sound like Quinn trying to put on an emlood accent, though, it was too - authentic? If Roon's voice was different in the emlood language now, Quinn lacked the ear to pick up the difference.

Roon went on, after a moment, "I'll be an 'it' in English, I think."

"Ambassador Quinn," the ceiling speaker said, "thank you. You may now return to your quarters to rest from your ordeal."

Quinn made a vague hand gesture at the corner of the room where zie remembered the camera being. Zie piloted zir chair out the door without trying to listen to the equivalent remark in emlood. Did they give human ambassadors floatchairs if they didn't have them already? Zie had no idea and lacked the energy to ask.

Behind zir, ambassador rictic slumped out of the room too.

Roon, a whole soul made of rent halves, was left in the diplomatic genesis chamber alone.

Quinn woke up feeling like zie'd been through a thresher. Zie'd wanted this. It had been all zir idea. Ambassadors were set for life. It still hurt, though.

It'll grow back, zie thought.

Someone was pounding on the door. The doorbell worked fine, but people tended not to see it. Tharansi architecture was confusing like that sometimes. Quinn really did not want to deal with visitors.

The pounding ceased and then the visitor found the doorbell. Quinn also really did not want to try to go back to sleep with that racket. Zie groaned airlessly and reached for zir chair.

When zie'd floated all the way to the foyer - or what passed for a foyer, on Tharan - the doorbell had rung four more times. Whoever was there was also continuing to hammer on the door. Somebody wanted to talk to zir real bad.

Quinn's approach caused the door to open, sliding into the aperture in the wall, and the taller of the two women on the front walk (for Tharan values of front walk) stumbled when it wasn't there to slam her fist into again. The short one dropped the hand that had been prodding the doorbell.

"I was asleep," said Quinn.

"I apologize," said the tall one, pushing old-fashioned spectacles up her nose. "Keesha Janvier, Points of Interest. I'd be happy to reschedule for some more convenient time and I'm sure my colleague would as well -"

"Oh, no you don't," said the short one. She had blue hair and more gadgets attached to her face and collar and sleeves than Quinn cared to count. "Jeananne Palmeiro, IPNN. My network has an exclusive with the Ambassadorial Associates."

"That doesn't mean I have to talk to you," Quinn pointed out. Zie might have automatically been signed up for the union, or whatever the heck structure they had, but this just diverted a little of zir pay and, apparently, prevented disfavored publications from running stories about zir for the first couple of weeks or something. Zie was definitely not obliged to give interviews.

Neither journalist was deterred by this. "On background, Miss. -" said the tall one, and "But it'll be only a moment of your time, Mr. -" said the short one.

The reporters looked at each other.

"Don't wrack your brains trying to figure out if I've got no tits or just bad posture," said Quinn. "It's 'Ambassador'."

"My apologies, Ambassador," said the tall one.

"Ambassador, can you tell me how you feel about -" began the short one.

"I feel like I've had half my soul ripped out. Go away," Quinn snapped, out of patience as abruptly and inevitably as falling off a cliff. "Whatever it is can wait. Or not happen at all! Get off my lawn." It wasn't a lawn, but zie wanted them off it.

Keesha dipped her head politely and turned to go. Her counterpart wasn't so easily deterred. "- about the controversy surrounding -"

"I said get off my lawn! What, do I have to call security?" The roll of soul-pain ebbed, a little, as Quinn realized zie was ravenous. "Actually, no, I changed my mind. I'll let you in and answer questions while I eat breakfast but only if I get to watch you two glare daggers at each other the whole time, it'll make me feel better."

Keesha Janvier, Points of Interest, perked up and turned around; Jeananne Palmeiro, IPNN, took this as an invitation to shoulder her way past Quinn's chair.

Quinn floated into the kitchen, trailing journalists, and queued up a fake omelette and a cinnamon roll in the warmer. Zie didn't trust zir arms not to tremble with strain if zie tried to pick up a jug of orange juice just at the moment, so zie pointed this out to Jeananne and made her pour it. Keesha was tall enough to reach the vitamin pills without Quinn needing to increase the chair altitude. Zie didn't need the vitamins, but taking a pill, any pill, might help zir feel better. Ibuprofen or even opiates didn't do a thing for soul pains.

"So, take turns," zie said, once zie'd eaten half the omelette. Did it take calories to grow back a soul? Somehow zie hadn't read an answer to that either which way in all the informational materials they'd given zir. "You first." Zie pointed arbitrarily at Keesha, mostly because Jeananne looked like she'd make a funny face about it. She didn't disappoint.

"Ambassador," said Keesha, "I hate to start with such a stupid question, but what pronouns should I be writing my piece with for you?"

"Zie. Look it up in your style guide," said Quinn. "It's a stupid question - or it would be, but they wanted an agender ambassador for the emlood."

"Oh, and why was that an important consideration?" Keesha asked, leaning forward. "Was that a primary factor in your selection?"

Quinn rubbed one of zir eyes and started picking apart zir cinnamon roll. "Diplomats bridge gaps," zie said, mouth full of dough and icing. "It's easier if the gaps are smaller. Emlood don't have gender - there isn't even a minority among them that do. But a minority of humans don't have gender. So, I'm a good match for an emlood in particular that way on top of the usual ambassadorial considerations."

"Which," continued Keesha, "for our readers, are?"

"You can't look it up?"

"I'd much rather have a quote from you."

Quinn sighed. "Unattached people. People who don't care too much about having bodies. My diplomat's got most of my memories, and we don't want it missing a spouse or cranky about not getting to go skiing."

"Hence the chair?" asked Keesha.

"What do you mean, hence, it's not as though the Terran Commission took a sledgehammer to my spine to prep me for the job. I just happen for that among other reasons not to have a skiing hobby."

"You said 'it'?" said Jeananne.

"My diplomat named itself Roon and said it's an it, yeah. I didn't go in with something picked out but it's not surprising, since, emlood, gender, they don't mix."

"So," said Jeananne, "you didn't list interpersonal skills as a quality they look for."

"They don't. It'd be pointless. We're different species," said Quinn. "Unrelated evolutionary history. Human charisma, human social skills, all that nonsense, wouldn't translate. That's what the diplomat's for, so they pick ambassadors aimed at making a coherent diplomat over anything else. Except if I were a psychopath they wouldn't have considered me a good example of a human if they could possibly avoid it. I do think they wound up needing to go with one of those for some species that really can't merge with human empathy but it's not a first line and my diplomat cohered fine so apparently emlood aren't all that sociopathic. Victory for the advance of xenology. Yaaaay." Zie flopped back in zir chair.

"Is that all an ambassador needs?" asked Jeananne.

"I have to hold down the, you know, actual ambassadorial job. Relaying stuff to and from Roon, translating what it says for human ears. So they want people who'll get along with themselves, like having an officey job with support staff. I don't have a support staff yet. For some reason, they decided to give me some recuperation time after having my soul torn in half. Just to be nice, I guess. Can't imagine why. But I don't have to sound good on broadcast. Or talk to you."

"So you're going to live here on Tharan Prime for the rest of your life?" said Keesha.

"Sure. Ambassadorial capital of the galaxy. Also, in theory, this swanky house is in a gated community. I guess the gates are busted today because here you are. I don't need a mask for the atmosphere, the Tharansi don't have a love affair with staircases, decent shipping lane to everywhere I might want to import stuff from."

"You mentioned a staff. What will they do? Will they be all your colleagues?" asked Jeananne.

"I'll train people to talk to Roon so I can retire someday or have the glorious freedom to be struck by lightning at any time without costing billions in lost value. And they'll make more diplomats. They do for nearly every species pair. Cultural variety and sheer workload. I know there's only one with the Vree, but, well, they're the Vree. But I don't know how soon they'll do it, because it depends how we get along with the emlood talking to them directly instead of through the Tharansi."

"Do you know much about the emlood?" asked Keesha.

"Nah. I know a few words of the language my counterpart speaks. To understand, mind, not to speak recognizably. I can count to twelve and tell the difference in pitch between past and future tense. They didn't give me homework, this was out of curiosity - Roon wasn't supposed to start with preconceptions when none of the sources I could've looked into would be as good as Roon itself is at translating emlood concepts into human ones. Besides, for a long while it wasn't obvious my diplomat would be an emlood diplomat. They could have assigned me to the Green Fuzzies or the Mmiikan, I'm about as good a match for those."

"They did make a new Green Fuzzy/human diplomat, though, recently?" said Keesha.

"Sure. I've never met the ambassador, though, and I've probably heard the same three sentences about her that you have. Very enthusiastic Green Fuzzy otherkin, so she definitely couldn't have been in my shoes even if I could've had hers." Quinn finished zir breakfast. "If you two want to keep asking me questions you will do my dishes for me."

The reporters looked at each other, and by some silent process assigned Jeananne to washing and Keesha to drying and putting away. Quinn intended to buy an automaid with zir shiny new salary. Zie would have had a normal dishwasher, but some feature of dishwashers was apparently illegal on Tharansi planets for some Tharansi reason and the market hadn't yet come up with anything suitable to export there instead short of an entire robot.

"So, Ambassador," said Jeananne, dipping close to Quinn's head as she went by with the silverware, "what is your opinion on the recent controversy around contact with the emlood?"

"Oh, uh, you know, these things always calm down sooner or later," said Quinn, scratching a phantom itch somewhere north of zir armpit. Why did missing half your soul have to suck so much, zie wondered. "I'm supposed to get my inputs from Roon and staff and so on, I don't really read the news." It was abstractly kind of embarrassing to be the only human ambassador to the emlood and not know what the heck she was asking about. It sounded like an ambassadorial sort of thing, keeping up with current events about zir counterpart species, and if it had been, it would have been an ambassadorial thing Quinn was failing at.

"According to experts and all the serious official sources," Keesha said, "there's no controversy anyway, but I too would really like your take on it - should I explain -"

"No, because you're the news, and I don't read you," said Quinn. "When the Premier sends me a brief on whatever this is, I'll read that. If Roon and I started following different blogs or took up listening to competing podcasts or something we would promptly both be lousy at our jobs, we'd get distracted having stupid political arguments and probably dragging rictic into it too if that's a thing emlood do, instead of figuring out common ground."

"Rictic is your emlood counterpart?" asked Keesha.

"Don't pronounce it with a capital letter, they hate that. But yeah."

"I... don't know how to pronounce things with or without capital letters, but I'll take that under advisement," said Keesha. "Well, to circle back to the human interest angle, I remember hearing that many ambassadors are - by analogy to not having a skiing hobby or a spouse - also asexual, does that describe you?"

What an idiotic question. Quinn wanted to go back to bed for the next fourteen hours. "Nope," zie said, "and unless you're planning to invite me to prove it, the both of you can clear out now, go, scoot."

"We did your dishes!" said Jeananne indignantly.

"Come back when instead of my dishes you did some kind of enforceable contract, oh wait, you can't, I don't have to talk to you, get out of my house."

They shuffled out the door, grumbling to themselves and glaring at each other as though each thought her colleague responsible for the breakdown of the interview, but really Quinn was just exhausted. Zie hadn't meant to be up so early. Had now gotten some calories into zir and had nothing else keeping zir up. Felt like zie was slowly and gently dying of soul-strain.

It'll grow back, zie thought, as zie floated back to the bedroom and shoved zirself out of the chair and onto the mattress.

"Have you experienced any side effects?"

Quinn rubbed zir eyes. "What I was led to expect. Pain, irritability, tiredness."

"And you still don't want a care worker in-home?"

"Doc, if I had a cat, I'd make Commissioner Zalas take it rather than be pained and irritable and tired at it. Don't send me a person. I bought an automaid yesterday, I'm eating, I'll be fine. How's Roon?"

"Roon's adjusting at a normal rate, meeting other diplomats and slowly picking up some work tasks. It's settled an academic argument about distinguishing emlood poetry and music."

"Yeah?"

"I'm sure Roon can tell you all about it. Unless you're not up to seeing it this afternoon?"

"No, no, I want to talk to it, hopefully it'll, you know, understand."

"The discomfort should lift in the next several days, and we expect it to be unnoticeable by the one-month mark."

"That would be very helpful of you to say if I'd unexpectedly had my soul ripped in half."

"- whereupon," the doctor continued, "you can step down your appointments with me to once weekly, if you prefer, though you can continue to come in more often if this would be helpful to you in any way. I gather you don't want to start interviewing support staff immediately."

"Hell, no."

"All right. But you do want to speak to Roon?"

"It must know what I'm like when I'm sick." This was admittedly more painful than the Venusian flu but it wasn't different in kind.

"Episodic memory transfers with the least fidelity, but it should have an idea, yes."

"If I piss it off I'll go home."

"All right. I'm scheduling your interviews with Commission-vetted support staff for three days from now. You have complete veto power, but if you can select a full complement from the initial round, it'd be substantially more convenient. Roon recommended adding a second fact-checker to your roster, you'd have to ask it why, on top of the clerical staff and personal assistant and media handler and linguist and Commission attaché."

"Could've used media handling yesterday."

"You were bothered? At home?"

"I saw their badges, they were genuine reporters. Probably someone let them in."

"Well, probably you should talk to the neighborhood gatekeeper about that, or delegate to your PA once you have one."

"Eh. They left when I shooed them. But if you see something in the news that has more about me than my Commission fact sheet that's going to be why."

"Understood. Anything else for today?"

"No. Let me talk to Roon."

"Hello, Quinn."

Its voice had shifted again, darker and more musical. Like some bluesy contrabass trying to sing without opening his mouth too much. Its mouth. Roon didn't have a mouth. Quinn discarded the analogy in frustration. It sounded like a human who'd also incidentally been listening to emlood number chants all day.

"Hi, Roon. How's being a diplomat?"

"Busy. Bodiless. I'm perpetually conscious of my power supply."

Roon was a bulletproof white box housing a civilization's triumph of electronics: a soul receptacle of Tharansi manufacture. It drew electricity wirelessly from half a dozen access points in its room. If anyone tried to touch it they'd get enough of the voltage into themselves in the process that they'd never carry it away from the grid. Even Quinn had to give a retina scan and a voice print and let the security goons check zir and zir chair for possible tampering before zie could enter the building, let alone the chamber. Roon was paired to plenty of peripherals so as to be able to see, hear, speak, probably do some emlood things too that there were emlood technologies for, but if something did manage to happen to its power supply despite all the security its battery wouldn't last too long.

"Wouldn't have expected you to worry about that," said Quinn.

"It isn't that I'm worried."

"Huh." What was it, then - no, Quinn didn't want to ask about that, not when zie was just getting to know this half-of-zirself. They could dig into the details of what kinds of exotic hybrid emotions Roon was equipped with later. "What have you been up to?"

"I spoke to one of the human/Tharansi diplomats. Lin," said Roon.

"I heard from the shrink that you talked to a Tharansi/emlood too."

"Yes, but kueci was less interesting." Was it really? Why would that be? Or maybe it was less interesting but more some other trait that emlood valued - no, again, Quinn shoved that aside. Roon was half-human and knew how to talk to humans, and more than that, was half Quinn in particular. If it said something zie shouldn't second-guess it. "Lin is the oldest coherent human/Tharansi diplomat."

"Is - she? I thought it was, I forget, starts with an M."

"She, yes. You may be thinking of Neem, who is the oldest conventionally created half-human diplomat. Lin was the first success of the abductions."

Quinn squinted, though there was no body language from the white box to scrutinize. "The what now."

"I think all the ambassadors must know. They wouldn't have put me in touch with Lin if I weren't supposed to find out, and no one asked me to keep it from you either. Probably the Commissioners - at least the ones I remember you talking to - would know."

"Know about... abductions."

"You - may or may not already know, I find I can't recall - that the Tharansi invented diplomats to bridge gulfs within their own genus. The spotted ones with the brown ones, the mountain ones with the swimming ones, and so on. If they ever learned to do diplomacy without it they forgot how long before they got into space. So when they started finding aliens they didn't know how to get very far with machine translation and guesswork, or at least it seemed - more complicated than they preferred. It's simple, by comparison, to kidnap a few dozen aliens, collect some Tharansi volunteers who have a few signs of possible sympathy to the species such as liking the way they look or finding their architecture less counterintuitive, and start making diplomats until one sticks and can help you talk to the aliens."

"I guess that's exactly the sort of thing that would be swept under a rug, wow. Probably no one even died, unless you count the diplomats that never cohered, but what a thing to do - but landing and saying 'we come in peace' would have a substantial downside risk -" Quinn said, muttering mostly to zirself, though zie presumed Roon could hear.

"Exactly."

"Is this what they always do?"

"Almost. The Green Fuzzies and the 'splal were from the same system, and already on good terms with one another when the Tharansi arrived. They kidnapped some 'splal but were able to source Green Fuzzy volunteers for making diplomats through them. And the Mmiikan, who were technologically advanced and also engaged in civil war to the point of being rather difficult to approach and kidnap. The 'splal were able to help via conventional diplomatic approaches when the Tharansi asked them. In every other case the Tharansi began with abductions."

"What... happens, to the abductees?"

"It varies. They were not much worse off than you. Most were put back where they came from. Lin's human ambassador chose not to go home and stayed to do ambassadorial work for six years before succumbing to cancer," said Roon.

"Wow. I would probably have more complicated opinions on that if I didn't ache so bad. - does it hurt for you too?"

"No. I'm uncomfortable but mostly in a more... philosophical way. Trying to figure out who and what I am and how to reconcile myself. I have the correct amount of soul, even if it's not all from the same source."

Quinn nodded. "- I'm glad you cohered. They say that the ones that don't never wake up, but - I'm glad you're not dead, I guess, even if you wouldn't have ever been alive if you were going to be dead - ignore me, I'm not making sense."

"No, I understand," said Roon. "Of course I understand."

And that was the point, after all, wasn't it.

Quinn went in to see Roon again a couple of days later, when the pain had faded to a throbbing ache, and rest seemed less indicated than distraction. The conversations were recorded. Always, unless one of them asked for privacy, they were going to be transcribed, compared, analyzed: here is Quinn. Here is Quinn plus x. Solve for x.

Roon described emlood neuroses and subcultures and aesthetics, or the closest things they had to those. Quinn could understand them only in fragments, because Roon sketched out all the information in terms individual to Quinn. Your crush on Kendall in third grade, it would say, only without anyone thinking it was cute, without anyone noticing at all, and your crush isn't on third grade Kendall, it's on who you expect her to be when she's seventy. But even if you later decided she wasn't going to turn out that way you'd still have the crush on imaginary future Kendall. Specifically Kendall and not Everly, they were different - focus on the way they were different. And Quinn would have to grope through this tangle of hypotheticals to come out on the other side with some scrap of recognition about emlood family dynamics.

Or: the way you feel when you've got the painkiller almost to your lips. Not after, once you've put it in your mouth, not before, when you've decided to get one, but: when your headache has not even started to be relieved, but you are almost but not quite irreversibly on the way to fix it. Only in this case it isn't a pill, it's a blob of orange goo you can sit on, and you're solving being bored, not having a headache.

Or: the fourth movement of that symphony. I've forgotten the title. I think you have too. But you know which one I mean, don't you? That one. The really good part.

Or: it's like being too hot - not like being too cold, only too hot - but just not quite hot enough to fiddle with the climate control yet, but you know that you could. Except that for an emlood the problem is that they are too cold -

Or: The exact, exact sort of fun it is to stick a balloon to your hair with static electricity. There's nothing else even slightly right. The balloon comparison isn't right either but it's as close as I can get.

Or: I don't know if you're right about what it feels like for snakes to shed their skin. But the way you imagine it, that's what it's really like, for them -

Quinn found it fascinating, even though it was a lot like trying to interpret the stage directions for zir recurring dreams about having been accidentally enrolled in a dental school that didn't have any bathrooms and was by taught by well-meaning fairies that thought they were zir grandparents. Quinn listened. Took notes. Asked questions, where zie thought the missing piece might be something Roon couldn't remember instead of something that was impossible to explain.

Roon wanted Quinn to learn more emlood vocabulary, too, at least in the language rictic and therefore Roon spoke. Zie'd never be able to pronounce anything intelligibly, of course, but there were computer tools for that; zie just had to use emlood text-to-speech. If there was ever a reason for zir to talk to an emlood somewhere other than Roon's room. But Quinn would work on that later. There was this diplomat zie was dying to get to know.

Roon didn't have to sleep, and Quinn didn't want to.

Quinn's bedtime was apparently informing Roon's schedule, though. At about the time when a responsible version of Quinn would have called it quits and gone home for more sleep, rictic showed up, through the opposite door that airlocked into the emlood atmosphere.

"Oh," said Quinn. "I'll get out of your way."

Quinn was Roon and rictic was Roon - and Quinn and rictic were strangers.

"Oh," said Roon, echoing. "I'll pretend you said something friendly modulo emlood, shall I. And I'll see you later."

"Of course." Quinn floated zir chair backwards, keeping half an eye on the pile of green flesh and the plastic mask apparatus keeping it alive. Zie felt a queer twinge through what zie imagined might be the empty space half zir soul had once been, when rictic's voice rumbled through the room. Roon rumbled back. They'd have the same automatic rapport as Roon had with Quinn, zie supposed. Or, not the same; some alien sort of emotional intimacy taking up the same space. If Quinn asked Roon zie'd be told to compare it with something silly, like zir relationship with zir stepsister except for never having met her before and first encountering her by sitting beside her in a wooden roller coaster and really liking her hat. Something like that.

The rumbling went on. Quinn reached the door and let zirself out.

During zir downtime Quinn studied emlood writing. The emlood had independently invented writing more times than humans had, but unlike on Earth, a single writing system had come to dominate all the languages in circulation even though - like most species - there were thousands of mutually unintelligible ones to cover. This was not, evidently, because it was simple and easy to learn. Maybe the inventors of this system had conquered all the other emlood at some point.

It was an alphabet, more or less, but the way it was written was mind-bendingly spatial: chunks of inscription were written in shapes, not rows, and flocks of smaller characters swooped between those shapes, past and sometimes overlapping others. Quinn had tried to learn hangul once. Zie couldn't remember anything about it but knew it had taken less than three hours to compose zir first grammatical sentence.

The software for writing the language was buggy, predictably for a program developed by and for a handful of overexcited linguists trying to take direction from yet a third species. Roon was days old; the software had been around for a few months, composed in sprints at the instruction of emlood/Tharansi diplomats talking to human/Tharansi ones talking to the programmers. The banner next to the logo encouraged Quinn to submit bug reports. The documentation said that version 0.6 would include the ability to animate the characters, which modern emlood electronics did. They'd used static writing when they had to, of course - no planet had rocks and pigments lying around on the ground that would jump in the relevant patterns of their own accord - but as soon as there were screens and e-ink and holograms the emlood had jumped on that with great eagerness and apparently the ability to read still characters was on the decline. So Quinn was learning obsolete alien literacy skills.

Zie sent in bug reports about once every ten minutes, wished it was realistic to learn on paper, and memorized the first twenty characters by brute force. Zie took a nap, and ate lunch, and re-memorized the fifteen characters zie'd forgotten. And then it was time for yet another meeting with the doctor, because Quinn's psychological stability was now a linchpin of interplanetary negotiations and would continue to be for a while.

"I've read the transcripts of your meetings with Roon," said the doctor.

"Figures," said Quinn. Zie wasn't really irritable anymore so much as listless. Zie would be going through all the phases of healing and regenerating from catastrophic soul injury and apparently this was one of them.

"Does that bother you?"

Quinn shrugged. "I'm aware they record."

"You can ask them not to. I've never gotten a transcript that my patient or diplomat had asked to have unrecorded, or a portion they wanted to redact."

"I'm not worried about that, it's just - weird that -"

"That your conversations are so interesting all of a sudden?" suggested the doctor.

"Yeah. They don't feel like public interest conversations while I'm having them. Does Roon get a shrink too?" zie wondered suddenly.

"If it wants one. But there aren't any experts on Roon's psychology - not besides you and rictic. And each of you only has half the picture."

Quinn woke up the next morning to a notification that zie wasn't to leave the gated neighborhood. Some kind of kerfluffle about the news media. Commissioner Zalas had written, It's not your fault. We'll get you in touch with Roon when it's necessary to do so. Which of course immediately made Quinn think that probably something was zir fault and that it must be a serious problem. What was it?

Okay. Quinn had internet access without leaving the house. It had to be something about zirself, or Roon, or emlood, so those were the terms to search.

Ah. There it was. New Human/Emlood Diplomat Generated. How had - which one was it - Jeananne's editor let that slip? Quinn didn't understand it zirself but zie knew better than to put "emlood" in capital letters, wouldn't even start a sentence with it in case some outdated software insisted when zie wasn't looking, and zie'd warned those reporters. Now the emlood government was demanding the editor and Jeananne Palmeiro delivered to them, which was really unlikely to end in apology gift baskets and handshakes.

The article wasn't fresh, but presumably news filtered to the emlood only gradually and through intermediaries and they'd taken a while to be aware that someone had published an article with a capital letter in their species' name. Who'd told them, Quinn wondered - zie wanted to ask Roon if it'd been its doing, but what would zie do if the answer was "yes"? Roon hadn't met the reporters, that had happened after the genesis, zie might have considered the lives of a couple strangers unimportant compared to the emlood sense of honor. Or whatever it was. The sensation of tweezing a hair out of the weird mole on zir arm while playing vintage television in the background and reflecting on the sound of the ocean, or something.

But Quinn was quoted in the article, zie could see in the pull quote, so if Roon had read it, it'd known that they weren't strangers to Quinn. That would matter to a human, or at least to Quinn, but would it matter to an emlood? Or rictic?

Quinn was jumping to conclusions. Zie shook off the storm of thoughts and opened the actual article.

Ambassador Quinn looks exhausted, though third parties say that the disheveled ponytail is zir usual way of handling zir long brown hair, and zir pajamas could pass for street clothes on some planets. Wow, Quinn did not like being a public figure. It wasn't even supposed to be part of zir job. Who'd let those people in? Clearly a terrible decision all around.

Zie was not actually supposed to read this. Zie was supposed to get information from the Commission, from Roon.

The emlood, said a later paragraph, were a signatory to the pangalactic Tharansi-proposed treaty forbidding warfare or preparations for warfare with other signatories. The emlood (through Tharansi ambassadorial relays) have maintained that they intend to abide by their obligations, but have not commented on the leak indicating that their ships have been found to be carrying terrain upheaval apparatus and weapons of planetary sterilization. Instead, emlood counter-accused the Mmiikan port authorities in the border sector of violating the more local regulations governing ship inspections. Ambassador Quinn had no comment on the matter. Ambassador Li Zou to the Mmiikan said that it was a clear violation of the preparatory clause even if the emlood are able to somehow prove that they have no plans to deploy the devices against any fellow sapients, and that his diplomat, Kelai, believed that the emlood should be found in violation. Tharansi enforcement has yet to issue any statements, even preliminary ones. The Ambassadorial Commission did not return requests for comment.

It was easily possible that rictic hadn't known anything, that Roon hadn't known anything. There were a thousand ways that reporters could have learned about a public accusation by the Mmiikan. There were probably also a thousand ways that emlood could have learned about the copyediting disaster; just because Quinn didn't yet know much about how they transmitted information among themselves didn't know they didn't have plenty of ways.

Why hadn't the article least been taken down?

There were other articles. Quinn opened one about the tussle over the extradition demand - ah, apparently taking the article down would be tantamount to destroying evidence by putting a fresh layer of wallpaper over it, if you were an emlood - did they ask Roon that, it sounded like a Roonish comparison. There were explainers about the terrain upheaval technology. About the plausible peaceful uses of planetary sterilization weapons (well, comparatively peaceful - you could, if you weren't very ecologically minded, use it to clear out a hostile biome that didn't include any people.)

Quinn looked and looked.

...cautioned that without the ability to communicate directly with the emlood, overinterpreting the discovery prematurely could be provocative, but Ambassador Quinn has not reached out to give...

...Mmiikan diplomats assured their ambassadors that the Mmiikan are likewise staunchly against weakening the protections of the treaty...

...anonymous professor of terraforming engineering has rendered the expert opinion that no species is likely to find terrain upheaval a valuable part of benign interventions intended to make a planet more habitable to them, being as it renders the area ongoingly geologically unstable, and...

...await comment from Ambassador Quinn, once zie is recovered enough from diplomatic genesis to perform zir duties...

This wasn't one of zir duties, zie didn't have to talk to anyone, zie was not a charismatic public relations manipulator, zir job was to talk to Roon.

And Roon hadn't said anything about it.

"I don't want this recorded," Quinn said.

The covers for the cameras didn't shut. Those were Roon's cameras. But they had indicator lights that went from white and on the left to blue and on the right.

"What is it, Quinn?" Roon asked.

"Talk to me, Roon."

"She sells seashells by the seashore." It didn't need to use a mouth to speak; it didn't trip over its nonexistent tongue.

"Roon, am I going to have to be ambassador to a species that throws around weapons of mass destruction?"

Silence. Then, "I'm sorry. I didn't know. I've found the article now."

"Are you sure rictic didn't know?"

"If it did, the memory didn't transfer."

Quinn's ponytail was slipping. Zie pulled out the elastic and refastened it. "I was hoping for a cushy nigh-professorial 'furtherance of understanding' gig," zie said. "Not trying to relay for people who are shooting at each other. Those things aren't very defense-oriented. God, Roon, do they have the concept of not shooting the messenger, am I safe if they get pissed off? I had to come here under armed guard with decoy convoys just because they're paranoid about lone actors shooting me to make a statement. I shudder to think what will happen if the emlood as a state entity want me dead."

"The emlood signed the treaty agreeing that diplomats and ambassadors are not targets... but they also signed the warfare preparations one. I can see why this wouldn't reassure you."

"Guesses," prompted Quinn.

"They picked rictic for its human-compatible psychology, not for social connections or strategic knowhow; they didn't know how much leeway they had to screen on other desiderata since I didn't exist to tell them. It's more of an outlier for an emlood than you are for a human. I could ask it to come here, and we could at least figure out if I'm missing anything that it knows."

"- what, right now?" said Quinn, shifting uncomfortably in zir chair.

"Its schedule isn't like yours. I can ask it to come here whenever I like and it will come." A silence. "You don't like it."

"I don't know what to think of it, Roon, it's illegible to me. I know you're half it, but you act just kind of like you're - me with the ability to read rictic's mind. Why, does it like me?"

"That's sort of complicated."

"Do emlood not like people?"

"- kind of. Not in the same way and not for the same reasons. To the extent the idea translates it has a good opinion of you, mostly for being chosen as its counterpart, partly because it likes me - for emlood values of liking, again - and you come as a package deal with me."

Quinn chewed on that explanation. It had no dreamlike analogies, which was somehow worse. "What about you?" zie asked.

"It depends. I like you in a human way. It has a lot to do with familiarity and identification. For that matter that's mostly also how I like rictic."

"Wow. - we should have that chunk of conversation over again sometime when we're on record. This time I just want to figure out how to finagle the - terrain upheaval, planetary sterilization, treaty violation - thing."

"I understand. I will ask rictic the next time I speak to it."

"I - no, go ahead. Call it in," sighed Quinn. Zie looked away. This was pointless, Roon had cameras all over the room and didn't have to look at zir from the white box. "How long will it take?"

"It will be here in less than ten minutes." It sounded cheerier, presumably on purpose. It wanted its components to get along. Quinn had not done much thinking in advance about how zie would, if zie'd been the half of zir soul glommed together with an alien in a box, feel about the working relationship of zir ambassadors. Perhaps zie should have so zie could know if this was surprising. Probably it wasn't, probably it was just the desire of a child of divorced parents to see them back together, notwithstanding that rictic and Quinn had no previous acquaintance and certainly hadn't raised Roon from childhood. "I'll translate, even if you've been very diligent about your homework you're never going to be able to hear all the subsonics."

"You sound so human," Quinn remarked softly.

"Oh?"

"You said 'subsonics'. Below the human range of hearing. You can hear them fine. But you're verbally taking for granted that this is a superpower you have, not a human limitation I have. The language is too low, I'm not just tragically deaf."

"I'm speaking English," Roon reasoned.

"Yeah. I just - wonder what I'm missing."

"That's what I'm here for," said Roon.

And then rictic slid through the airlock.

Quinn didn't look directly at it. For one thing, zie wasn't sure whether it was rude or not - both norms could be found in human cultures, let alone alien ones - and for another it probably couldn't track zir gaze. If it cared, it could ask Roon, who'd say something appropriately... diplomatic. Whatever would serve the same social function as politely neglecting to mention that Quinn did not really care for the look of emlood flesh heaped on itself.

They started rumbling. They didn't so much interrupt each other as overlap, like there was no reason to be quiet while another person was speaking. Quinn couldn't distinguish their voices. Zie didn't know if that was a deficiency in zir ability to tell emlood voices apart or if Roon had just adopted this voice without any alterations like the ones it made to Quinn's. It might signify something different in the one case than in the other. Come to think of it, it wasn't even obvious what it signified in Quinn's case...

The rumbling stopped. Quinn's chair, settled on the floor, stopped conveying a low buzz into zir spine. Roon said in plain English, "It didn't know."

"Well - what does it think of it now it knows?" asked Quinn.

"You can't tell anyone."

"- huh?"

"It doesn't have the kind of - status - within emlood society, that it would need, to give a genuine opinion, if someone else might find out. Me and you are different to it, but you cannot tell reporters, Commissioner Zalas, anyone. I also assured it we weren't recording."

"Okay..."

Roon took that for the agreement it was and resumed rumbling. Quinn levitated zir chair; it was slightly less comfortable to have it wobbling on thin air instead of planted on firm ground, when zie wasn't even going anywhere, but the floor conducting the noise was threatening to grind zir bones to powder.

Eventually they fell silent. Quinn looked expectantly at Roon. Wondered crazily if zie could put stickers on it - probably the voltage would prevent it in practice, but would Roon mind -

"It thinks," Roon said, "that there must be a good explanation."

"And how much was lost in translation there?"

"Rather a lot," admitted Roon, "but the gist is right. It doesn't know why they had those weapons, but it doesn't think that the statements that they aren't going to use them to prosecute a war against any signatories are likely mistaken."

"Mistaken," repeated Quinn.

"You might say 'lies' to express the same idea, but it means something closer to 'mistaken', because there would have been too much social pressure and structural incentive involved, in producing those statements, for anyone to lie in the emlood conception. So they'd either be mistaken, or not mistaken, and it expects the latter."

"Do you have to explain this much to it about everything I'm saying?"

"It's less interested. When it comes up, yes, more or less. We haven't been doing this for very long yet, we'll all get used to it. Do you want to ask it anything else?"

"Does it know anything else?"

"It could speculate."

"...Are the emlood hoping to colonize someplace that could use sterilization and upheaval, someplace with just plants and bugs or whatever? The terraforming expert said upheaval wasn't useful for terraforming, but maybe he's full of it."

Roon and rictic spoke, and there came the report: "It doesn't know of any specific colony prospect that might have to do with this business, but they are generally interested in colonizing, and it could imagine finding a mountainous or wetland area inconvenient enough to alter seismically even if it would take considerable time to settle."

"I guess that would be a good explanation, if that were how terrain upheaval worked - I suppose they could have something cutting-edge - but why wouldn't they tell the Mmiikan that was what was up? -"

"The Mmiikan/emlood border is mostly well-defined, but it does have a few places where it remains relevant who has established the most Tharansi-legible claim to a system first," said Roon. "So it's possible they want to settle the place before the Mmiikan know it's desirable. They have similar living condition requirements, if only at some extrema."

"Hunh. Well, I guess that makes it sound somewhat more likely that this'll all blow over without much blowback onto me... is it going to be able to find out anything else?"

"It can try. Are you done for the day, Quinn?"

"- nah, I don't have anything else to do, and maybe if I stall long enough they'll call off the guards and I can float home by myself. We can do understanding-furtherance stuff, take my mind off everything."

"Resuming recording," said Roon. The little indicator lights on the pickups flipped back into their usual place.

And they talked about other things, Quinn and rictic each querying their diplomat in their own ways and getting their own answers.

The emlood didn't like capital letters because they didn't like the implications of a hierarchy as simplistic and unnuanced as "capitalize proper nouns, and extra capitalization for God, but maybe only if you're religious". It wasn't that they preferred to be lower-status, Roon explained, but that the institution of capital letters was so laughable that being offered this status wrapped all the way around to being insulting. They had an enormous vocabulary for smells but no words for colors, though they did distinguish them. Albeit the blue rictic saw was not the blue Quinn saw - Roon's cameras had both modes. The emlood had something very like the common human appreciation of tidy round numbers, except in base eight, and much more openly acknowledged. They were planning to colonize seven new planets for a round octet as soon as they had seven candidates lined up, all in parallel, so as not to spend any awkward period of time as a three-planet species.

Humans liked keeping cats, and riding horses. Humans could cast adults in teenage roles in movies, which would have been implausible for the metamorphically maturing emlood. Humans, to emlood ears, sounded like a certain bug-like family of creatures from their world, with four wings and an annoying yelping vocalization that attracted predators away from its eggs. Humans artificially colored their food. Humans sometimes used titles so sarcastically that their original polite form was all but lost to history. Humans could recover very quickly from even fairly substantial abdominal surgery, but really didn't want to have any if they could avoid it. Humans did not like standing in the rain, even though they evolved in a planet where it rained and often chose to clean themselves via artificial rain.

Quinn wasn't sure if it was more interesting to learn things about the emlood, or to hear things about humans in this defamiliarizing context, learning what aliens thought was most fascinatingly alien about zir.

According to Roon, rictic had been picked as an ambassadorial candidate because it was missing an entire normal emlood emotion, as strange as a human unable to experience fear. "It's analogous to you not having a gender, in some ways," Roon explained, "but in terms of how it's understood by other emlood and how it's dealt with it in its life so far, it's more like it's autistic, it learned all the rules explicitly with wide error margins to be safe." Quinn wound up taking out zir mobile to play Torus Crash during the prolonged subsequent explanation of human gender. Maybe emlood back on their homeworld were waiting with bated breath for this key insight into how humans ticked. They'd have to settle for Quinn's outsider view on it, but that was probably better than nothing.

Humans hedged bets and slacked off and vented to their friends. Meanwhile, emlood recited numbers to themselves and sat on orange blobs (Quinn still did not understand the thing about the orange blobs after Roon had a go at translating it) and stuck rocks in their mantles "sort of like chewing gum, or like trichotillomania?". Humans wrote stories about talking animals. Emlood children invented complicated relationship tangles for their collections of nutshells and ritually destroyed the ones that lost imaginary popularity contests. Humans started with arithmetic in math class, and with the alphabet in literacy. History classes for emlood were taught in a style of falsehood, with a standard transformation you had to apply to any remark about a past event to find out what really happened, and all the expected irreversible casualties when the sorts of things that were told as conventional lies actually occurred.

They both thought Green Fuzzies were cute - humans because they were fuzzy, and emlood because they were green. Green things were just cuter, explained Roon.

They both liked looking at the stars.

Quinn stayed until zie had to go attend to zir human need for dinner and sleep, and left the other two rumbling at each other with a smile on zir face.

Quinn hurt all over when zie woke up, and this was so customary that zie took about three minutes of disconsolate lounging to notice that zie also wasn't in zir house.

Come to think of it, zie also hurt more than zie should. It hadn't been this bad yesterday. Zie didn't think it was one of those healing processes that went two steps forward, one step back.

Zie sat up. Zir chair was nowhere to be seen. The place looked like a human room, if not necessarily in a human building - there were those rounded lower corners and that scallop-textured ceiling, but the furniture, none of which was zir chair, all looked like you'd find it in a hotel. There was even an art print on the wall. A watercolor of a trio of ducklings.

Whoever'd put Quinn here hadn't tied zir up, but zie wasn't going to get far without the chair. It definitely didn't look like a hospital - zie hadn't been coshed over the head on the way home and then rescued by nurses who needed remedial mobility-device-related training. Zie had most likely been coshed over the head and then successfully abducted. And not by Tharansi who wanted to make first contact, either.

"Ambassador," said a voice. The door was sliding open - definitely a Tharansi door - that also explained why there weren't any windows -

"Random kidnapper," Quinn replied flatly.

"If it amuses you to call me that." The random kidnapper had a gigantic bushy black beard, and he was, like some kind of movie villain, wearing a deep hood that covered the rest of his face.

"I'm amused as all get out here. You know what's hilarious? Not having my chair. That's just absolute comedy gold right there."

"Would you have preferred to be handcuffed to the bed?"

"I would have preferred not to be kidnapped. You don't even get a you-tried star for not handcuffing me. I am not going to interview a few hundred past victims and award you Most Improved because you went from hanging folks upside down in a rattish-infested cellar to the business travel edition."

"There's unfortunately too much at stake to have passed up the opportunity," said Hooded Villain, sounding awkward if not chastened.

"Oh, I'm sorry to have maligned your no doubt worthy cause, see, you've caught me with half my soul missing and I'm not at my most charming."

"We're aware of that."

"What do you want?"

"What everyone else wants, of course," said the kidnapper. "We want you to talk to Roon."

Hooded Villain hauled Quinn firefighter-style into the next room. No one had picked Quinn up since zie'd been twelve and zie didn't appreciate the return to form, but zie didn't waste zir effort batting at the kidnapper with zir ineffectual fists. There, the rest of the gang of four was assembled; Hooded Villain's colleagues acquired the mental monikers of Venusian Stereotype, Pink Dyejob, and Chip (who was, at the moment Quinn failed to come up with any better nickname, eating chips).

Once settled in a (completely nonfloating) chair, Quinn was presented with dubious microwave moussaka, with a side of something incongruously fancy made of lentils and squash ribbons and lemon. Zie figured if they'd wanted to poison zir they could have done it while zie was unconscious, and they were all eating from the same serving bowl, and Venusian Stereotype didn't stop zir from swapping forks at the last second... so zie ate it, being as it was hours past the dinnertime zie'd skipped to be kidnapped instead. It was distracting, though, to have to maintain zir position in a chair that didn't have armrests; it was difficult and if zie messed up zie would fall onto the floor. "I want my own chair back, you jerks," zie muttered.

"It's safe," said Venusian Stereotype.

"What, are you going to hold it at gunpoint for my cooperation? What do you even want?"

"I said, we want you to talk to Roon," said Hooded Villain.

"They're not going to put me through to it under these conditions, moron."

"Roon hasn't been operative long enough to be very useful without you. You represent a considerable investment and I think they'll want you back."

"I think they'll express that with the armed forces, not with a line to my diplomat so I can parrot whatever you want me to say."

"You don't know what we have to say yet," said Pink Dyejob.

"I assume you have some kind of demand. Or maybe you just want to insult the emlood in a really culturally literate way. Whatever. It doesn't matter," Quinn said. "They're not going to give you access."

Venusian Stereotype, from the far end of the dinner table, snorted. "You haven't heard what we want you to say," she reiterated.

"That might have somthing to do with your not having said it yet," said Quinn.

"Did you read Palmeiro's article about you?" Hooded Villain asked. "Even if you were just reading it for vanity and it was the only coverage you saw..."

"You suck," Quinn said, pointing a fork at Hooded Villain. "Like, as a person. Deep within your soul."

"Souls are, funnily enough -"

"Don't quit your dayjob, comedian."

"- the thing at issue. What would you think of me if I didn't have one?" finished Hooded Villain.

"If you try to make two diplomats in a row the second one just doesn't work."

"No, no, if I never had one, any fraction of one."

"I admit that it would be hard for me to think less of you than I already do, what with the kidnapping."

"Engage with me here. Suppose -" he began.

"You kind of kidnapped me on my way home without my chair, asshole."

"Oh, for fuck's sake," said Pink Dyejob. "There's aliens without souls and the emlood are going to genocide them and the Tharansi are in on it."

"Take it up with Wildlife Among The Stars or the Conservation Party," snapped Quinn.

"They're not animals," said Chip, softly; it was the first time she'd spoken. "They build cities. They have controlled fire, plumbing, a chemical analogue to writing."

"Fancy space ants," said Quinn derisively. "Hurrah."

"The Tharansi thought they were people, too. They took more than a hundred of them trying to make a first diplomat. Didn't work. They tried over and over, in case it was just bad luck," said Pink Dyejob. "They were so convinced that they had to have souls."

"They thought maybe they were just too different from Tharansi in particular," murmured Chip. "They recruited some people from other species in case one of those was close enough. Quietly, through Lin, who you might not have heard of -"

"The first human/Tharansi diplomat, I know, I know."

Chip inclined her head. "They took me and some other candidates to the planet. More humans, lots of Tharansi, couple of Green Fuzzies, at least one Vree. They showed us around to see if we'd be likely fits, if the place looked - comfortable, aesthetic - to improve their chances. They got us to pick out who to kidnap, who to try pairing with. I thought I was helping, I - so they showed me a bunch of them and I picked one I thought looked friendly. They're not cute exactly, not pretty, but one seemed friendly-looking and that was all we had to go on... And when it didn't work they gave us a lot of hush money, compensation for the soul damage, I..." She choked a little. "I think they gave up then. I think they didn't put them back, I think - I think maybe my opposite number got dumped in a waste chute."

"If the Tharansi don't want to try doing soul-invariant diplomacy," said Hooded Villain, "the 'splal could. The 'splal haven't been told this species exists. The new planet is right where the emlood want to expand. And they don't have souls, so the Tharansi think it's fine for the emlood to wipe them out."

"So tell the 'splal," said Quinn, grouchily cutting up a stubborn bit of eggplant. "I recommend doing it without kidnapping any of them. My consulting fee will be -"

"Do you know anything about the 'splal?" asked Venusian Stereotype.

"I was never a candidate to be their ambassador, so no, not really!" snapped Quinn. "Next time you want to have me over for dinner you could let me know what my homework is ahead of time, though, that would help!"

"The 'splal care a lot about procedure," said Venusian Stereotype. "It's why they're so good at doing the whole from-prime-numbers-on-up thing compared to everybody else. They make very small, conservative moves. They have all their data analyzed by tons of people to make sure they're pruning out all the chauvinist assumptions. They don't act very differently when they have access to diplomats and preexisting lines of communication. So they're not going to go visit this species without all the boxes checked and the treaties signed. The 'splal will never start a war - because they never do things that are at all like 'show up on a planet the emlood want to sterilize without Tharansi authorization and attempt to talk to fancy space ants'."

"Thank you, this has been so educational, now what do you want with me?"

Venusian Stereotype went on, "The Tharansi have made up their minds. They care more about souls than anything else, and they've made pretty sure that the new species doesn't have any, and it's obvious they don't care to consult anyone else before confirming that the emlood can have the place because it's in their general area and they want it. The emlood - we don't know much about emlood yet. You're the first ambassador to them we've got. One of the first any species has got, Quinn. And that means we, being humans, don't know if they can be persuaded."

"Your inconvenience is temporary," said Hooded Villain. "An entire species is on the line. We didn't think an email would arrive, uninspected, and be taken seriously -"

"So you decided to kidnap me."

"The Tharansi kidnapped scores of the new people," said Chip. "I think mine was scared - it was tied up opposite me, when they tried to make a diplomat of us, so it couldn't get away. You don't seem concerned about them."

Quinn glared at her. "Do you always try to open negotiations by telling your prisoner they're selfish for being more concerned about being personally kidnapped than about space ants they've never met?"

"Every time so far," said Hooded Villain. Rather than pick Quinn up again he shoved the chair, ground-bound and wheel-less, back to the hotel room where zie'd woken up. "It seems like you're done eating."

The chair legs scraped against the floor and rattled zir aching bones. "I hate you," zie said.

"I think I'll cope." He dumped Quinn out of the chair into bed and then took the chair with him on the way out of the room. Quinn was left alone.

In the morning, Chip brought zir breakfast. "Hey. How are you?"

"Kidnapped. Missing half my soul. Immobile. Bored."

"Bored enough to listen to me talk about the new species?" she asked.

"Could I possibly stop you?"

"You could put me off till later, I guess."

"Oh, no, I wouldn't want to keep you waiting, please, wax rhapsodic." Quinn stabbed at zir fruit salad with unnecessary force. A grape escaped.

Chip sat down on the edge of the bed, sighing, looking subdued.

"Have you named them, or anything? Save the insert name here?" asked Quinn. "I've been calling you Chip, in my head."

"Chip? That's awful. Call me Violet, it's not my real name but at least it's a name. I have something I call them but it's not official and you'll probably laugh at me."

"Fine, space ants it is."

Violet looked away, lips pursed, like she didn't want to make a face while Quinn was looking. "If you say so. They were scared, I think, of the vehicles. They didn't try to attack us, just got out of the way. They don't look like ants. More like... fluffy millipedes. They're not too fast overland but they can go from zero to top speed real quick. Scattered when they noticed us coming on all those feet. They come in shades of brown and grey. They dye themselves, with clay and plants and ashes... The one I picked ran backward, so it could look at us while it got out of our way. It was so funny. It didn't chase us, but we circled back later, and it was the same one, it'd dyed half of its left feet purple... so I picked that one, I said I'd try to make a diplomat with that one, and the Tharansi grabbed it in a net and it didn't make a sound. They don't make sounds. They have sign langauge and the chemical writing I mentioned. I don't know if they can hear, I don't know why they don't use symbols to write like we do - I don't know much about them at all. Because the diplomat didn't work. I'm farther along than you at regrowing my soul, probably I'm at sixty percent now, but if I seem a little run down..."

"Tragic," said Quinn flatly.

"Yeah, yeah, we kidnapped you so you don't give a rat's ass. And they tried to get half a soul out of my friendly alien and it didn't work. You couldn't tell for sure, just from the two of us - were we just not a good enough match? Does it not have a soul at all? Does its soul not tear in half the way everyone else's does? But every other species we've met works the same way, and they tried so many times. So the Tharansi decided, that they were just strange animals after all."

"And you want me," said Quinn, "to tell Roon to tell rictic to tell the emlood that there's been a mistake, they can't have the planet after all, they have to tell their 'splal ambassador to tell their 'splal diplomat to tell their other ambassador to go talk to space ants."

"Yes."

"And you decided the best way to communicate this -"

"Your mail's being screened."

"I don't want to sift through doorstoppers from every green ink maniac who thinks the emlood are sending them messages via alphabet soup, no shit they're screening my mail!"

"I don't blame you. But you can see why they might not have let us get through to you, especially if Tharansi are participating in the screening. The emlood don't want to be delayed by debating about it. You'd have to ask your diplomat for details but I wouldn't expect any species to have evolved to be indifferent to getting what they want when they want it. The Tharansi are accommodating them and for more on that you'd need to talk to a Tharansi diplomat. Which I encourage you to do. After you've talked to Roon about the new species."

"Do you have some plan that involves letting me go do that ever?"

"We aren't mindreaders. If you're a good liar you could probably get us to let you go without intending to do anything to help. Even though it would take two minutes and could prevent a genocide."

"Remarkably strong word, that."

"They have sterilizers and terrain heavers. They're not going to leave any alive."

"Have you tried going to some ecology interest group? They'd go for it whether or not the space ants are people. Save the xenomoss. Protect the charismatic megabeasts. A shikken in every zoo."

"That's where we got - well, we're not giving our real names -"

"Hooded Villain, Venusian Stereotype, or Pink Dyejob?"

"...the pink one. She's with an ecology group. They aren't able to talk directly with the emlood. The only person who can do that is Roon."

"They'll make more diplomats."

"It's possible none of them will cohere until it's too late. It's possible that even if they do, we won't have any better way to get through to them either."

There was a silence.

Violet said, "Will you talk to Roon?"

"Give me my chair back," said Quinn.

"Will you?"

"Fine, damn you all."

"Thank you," said Violet. "Someday - when we know how to talk to them - maybe they'll thank you too."

"Oh yay. Chair."

"All right, all right," she laughed. "We'll have to load you up and drop you off somewhere else, I'll tell -"

"CHAIR," barked Quinn, and Violet got up and scampered.

The Commission didn't let Quinn go straight to Roon after zie popped up, zir chair out of battery and zir mobile having been left behind entirely on the moss by where zie'd been ambushed. They wanted zir to sit a psych evaluation, first - what, did they think zie'd been hypnotized - and tell the human unit of cops who came to zir house everything zie could remember about the place.

They didn't actually seem to want to know why somebody'd chosen to kidnap Quinn and then just let zir go. Zie mentioned, once, "did they send you any demands -" but they hadn't. Said, during the psych eval, "they had some political complaints about the emlood -"

"Whatever they want to complain about, it'll have to go through channels. They're fixing up the security in the residential, I think the cops are actually interrogating the reporters who got in here in case they used the same hole but they're going over everything like ants in a candy shop. Do you want to move to a new house?"

"No," said Quinn. "I just got moved into this one. Did they take me out of my house, I don't recall."

"No, it looks like they had the guards infiltrated. Investigation's still underway and I don't have many details for you. So if you don't want to move it's not a security essential."

"Good. What an enormous waste of time. They didn't let me have my chair, you know."

There. Quinn didn't feel like zie was being cagey about the kidnappers' motives - little though zie wanted to talk about them, it seemed a little early to be fomenting rebellion against zir Commission handlers, especially while zie was still recovering from major anima injury - and spent the entire session instead processing zir mobility issues.

Quinn was pronounced fit to resume zir nominal duty schedule the following day, and if zie sat up half the night mulling over space ants, well, zie didn't feel that this was anybody's business.

Zie brought breakfast into the diplomat chamber the next morning. Roon told zir to take it right back out again, so zie ate in the hallway outside and came back in, cranky but not especially deterred from zir plans. Distracted, though, yes. "Is eating private for emlood?"

"Yes," said Roon.

"...were you going to elaborate on that?"

"I suppose it's my job but I'd like a day or two to collect my thoughts on it before I try to discuss them. Imagine if rictic came in and started peeing on the floor."

"Is it likely to?"

"No, but if it did that'd be about the level of awkwardness. I heard you got kidnapped?"

"I got kidnapped. They took my chair."

"Wow."

"They were like, would you rather be handcuffed."

"And you said, I'd rather not be kidnapped, you assholes?"

"Nearly verbatim. They did eventually let me go."

"I was worried about you."

"Well, you'll have to get by without me one of these days but not this one. I have a question for you, though - uh, let's stop recording -" Zie was trying to sound offhand, so anyone looking at the transcript wouldn't feel like there had to be something really juicy in the redacted section. Maybe they'd think it was about emlood pee.

"Okay," said Roon. It wasn't fooled at all. It knew zir too well.

Quinn waited a heartbeat, another one - they were getting faster -

"Quinn?"

"The kidnappers wanted something."

"What was it? If there was a ransom demand or anything like that I didn't hear -"

"No, they - they said they knew what the emlood were going to do with the weapons. They said -

"- Roon, I have no idea where your sympathies on this really lie. I can't even figure out my own. The Tharansi seem to know what they're doing, they made a decision, and hell, it's not like I'm a huge fan of the folks who kidnapped me that I want to pay loads of attention to what they want out of life, but -"

"It's okay," murmured Roon. "It's just me."

"I barely know you."

"You know me."

Quinn gripped the arm of zir chair. "There's a species that looked mighty sapient to the kidnapper I talked to who'd seen them. But they don't have souls. The Tharansi gave up trying to make diplomats. And it's in the emlood sphere of expansion."

There was a silence. Quinn might have been imagining the electronic hum from Roon's box growing louder.

"That's bad," Roon said at length.

"Yeah. That's bad. They wanted me to talk to you to find out if the emlood can be convinced. They didn't specify convinced to what - try another hundred times to make diplomats out of them, try letting the 'splal talk to them the long way, try leaving them alone for a hundred years and seeing if they invent radio. Probably any of those would be better than nothing. But - you're the one who'd know."

Silence. Silence. What must it be like, Quinn wondered, holding such a vague concern as what to do with soulless aliens in a diplomat's mind. What if they really, really weren't people and no amount of trying would uncover their secret intellectual prowess? What if they were, but once the Tharansi recognized them they started demanding recompense for their abductees, or from the emlood for having wanted to colonize their world? What if they were people, but the emlood didn't care, and the Tharansi weren't convinced in time? And then weighing it against emlood concepts that would not, would never, match, rumbly strange guesses about what people Roon had not met would think based solely on its half-soul's guidance. And on top of that translating it back for Quinn. No wonder it was taking so long. The surprise was more that their conversations were usually swifter.

"Quinn," said Roon, "I have an idea, but you are going to hate it."

"Here I hoped you were going to have a plan that had no drawbacks at all," said Quinn. "Out with it, what have you thought up?"

"I think that you should go to the planet," said Roon, "and bring rictic along with you."

It was a crazy idea. Roon couldn't come along, since it was a usually stationary installation, and machine translation wasn't up to anything more complicated than asking where the bathroom was yet. It turned out that rictic could fly an emlood ship, but Quinn would have to stay in a single cabin with the pressure and atmosphere suited for humans, just zir and enough food and potable water to last for the week and a half the trip would take. Zie would have to use an emlood toilet, and the less said about that the better; it was from a certain angle fortunate that the appliance would work for Quinn, or even a fully mobile human, at all.

From another angle it was profoundly unlucky because it meant that Quinn had been talked into this crazy idea and was now locked in the only room of a ship with breathable air, using a stack of pallets containing assorted instant porridge and bottled water as a table to prop up what would at home live on zir nightstand.

Quinn hadn't expected this to work at all. Surely the Commission wouldn't want zir going somewhere with nobody but rictic for company to a planet that the emlood hadn't even colonized yet. Surely the emlood would be restricting landings on space ant turf. Quinn didn't even have an environment suit fitted, so presumably any rock the emlood wanted to live on would kill zir if zie tried to float out into its atmosphere.

Not so. By some emlood process, Roon and rictic convinced important emlood to supply and authorize the trip. The closest Roon came to explaining it was that it would look bad and impair the diplomatic project if they wouldn't let even ambassadors see. The Commission gracefully acquiesced when Roon told them that there was a fact-finding mission for which Quinn's presence was required. And the planet had air that would be intolerably, but not fatally, thick and muggy and methane-laced for Quinn. Zie had an airmask to make particularly sure. It was temporarily survivable for emlood too, though they were planning to sterilize the ecosystem and replace it for their comfort in that as other domains. The gravity would be hard for a human to walk in, but, well. Quinn didn't walk, and it wasn't bad enough to make it hard to breathe.

Quinn sent Roon encrypted letters, most days of the trip. But it was somehow much harder than talking to it in person. Quinn didn't know why. Roon didn't have any body language unless you counted twitching a camera in its aperture for a better angle. Maybe Quinn was usually relying on it being able to read zir mannerisms and tone a lot more than zie expected. Letters were at least better than nothing, though, and especially important for things like "can you get rictic to look into the climate control system, it's boiling in here" and "no, tell it I'm fine, I just knocked over a pile of snacks and swore a lot about it". Quinn knew more of rictic's language than rictic knew English and that wasn't saying much, so transmitting letters to and from their mutual diplomat was actually faster than trying to pick through a collage of emlood letters and punctuation marks and hoping that conveyed what zie meant adequately.

The trip was somehow overstimulating and stultifyingly dull at the same time. The emlood ship was loud. There were so many high-pitched noises emlood couldn't hear that they hadn't designed away. Quinn's room had an air recycler and it was sealed off from the rest, but the temperature conducted through the walls was enough that zie was constantly sweating and eventually decided to go naked since nobody was looking at zir anyway. Zie should have sprung for a chair upgrade that would let zir cool it off directly to suck some heat out of zir thighs. And there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Zie didn't often nip out for a recreational float around the block, or even go shopping in person, but being completely unable to escape these six walls was threatening to drive zir mad. Perhaps it would have been better if the climate control issue weren't manifesting as a desire for "fresh air". Was Roon having this problem and just being quiet about it? Quinn'd have to ask later.

Quinn tried to read books, watch movies, play games, anything, but zie was too cranky and too confined to enjoy them. Trying to concentrate on anything while perseverating on the space ants was an exercise in frustration.

Zie wound up sleeping a lot. It helped a little with the soul-aches, and a lot with passing the time. Zie had unsettled dreams full of fuzzy millipedes, dying to a sterilizer, falling to the ground, their bodies spelling out words in a language no one would ever learn again.

They approached the planet with their plan all worked out with Roon in advance. Since interplanetary comms were fast but not instant, they wouldn't be able to course-correct with it in real time. Quinn was going to land in a human-designed, autopilot-capable shuttle, which had spent the trip magnetized to the ship's hull. Meanwhile rictic would remain aloft and wait to be signaled, or for two days, whichever came first. If Quinn signaled, zie'd do it from the shuttle, by preference, and then come up in it once rictic was on the lookout for an intercept. If zie couldn't signal from the ship zie'd do it from a device temporarily attached to zir chair and rictic would direct the shuttle to zir location, or if necessary land the entire ship to collect zir itself. If zie didn't signal at all, it would land and set out on a manhunt, tracking the device's location. Without satellites this planet didn't have yet, it wouldn't be very accurate, but Roon assured Quinn that rictic was very committed to zir safety.

As far as getting to the shuttle went, Quinn's strategy for getting through the emlood atmosphere to the airlock hatch was: wear goggles and hold zir breath. The stuff they breathed wasn't that bad, and the dash wasn't that long, and none of zir ability to move fast depended on zir ability to breathe freely.

Zie felt a little like zie might throw up, which would complicate an attempt to hold zir breath, but zie'd brought half a pharmacy's worth of meds just in case because there was no way to take a doctor along on this ridiculous excursion. Zie took an antinausea pill and waited fifteen minutes for no reason and then, ready as zie'd ever be, sealed the goggles over zir eyes and undid the safety locks on zir cabin door. In the corridor - if you wanted to call it a corridor - rictic was waiting to conduct zir in case something went wrong, but Quinn made it to the hatch just fine.

When everything was sealed and double-checked and found according to plan, the shuttle took off.

This part of the journey, also, was long. Not as long as the interstellar portion, but shuttles didn't just pop up and down like elevators. Quinn watched the space ant planet come into view by degrees. Zir chair anchored to the reference frame of the shuttle so zie scarcely felt the acceleration. Zie put music on. Tried to sleep through it and failed because zie was so overstocked on rest.

The shuttle came to a stop on the surface of the planet a reasonable floating distance from a population center of space ants. Quinn would have preferred to go observe a group of them who hadn't recently had a bunch of their number kidnapped by other visitors from the stars, but unfortunately, hoping to cover their bases thoroughly in checking for souls, the Tharansi had sampled individuals from the entire space-ant-inhabited part of the planet, which was most of the northern subtropical band and a fertile-crescent kind of place leading north from there. Since Quinn could not use this criterion zie was instead landing in the place with the nicest (to humans) weather, one of the northernmost hives where it would only be thirty-five degrees centigrade at high noon.

The shuttle settled for a moment, waiting to deactivate until its subsidence detectors were confident it had chosen a stable patch of ground. Then it switched its engines off and released the clamps on the hatch.

Quinn suited up and floated out.

Zie had landed two miles away from the hive, or the city, whatever you wanted to call it. Far enough away that based on the Tharansi and emlood observations Roon had to work with, there wouldn't be any locals - any of the disputed animals - any of them right there to witness the landing. It was unclear how good their distance vision was, but since Quinn wouldn't have any trouble floating two miles over nice flat terrain and would have started to run into battery trouble if it were twenty this was the site they'd picked out.

The place stank. The mask Quinn wore wasn't rated for completely replacing zir inhalations with Earth-grade air; it was there to supplement oxygen and filter out particulates and trace objectionable gases. It did nothing about the smell. Without any way to be sure what specifically was contributing which flavor of wet brown stink that suffused the air zie couldn't even steer around particularly offensive plants. Or animals. The animals didn't flee from Quinn. They didn't know what zie was. Planets with herbivorous sapients like the Green Fuzzies tended to have bolder wildlife, and ones with particularly inhuman residents - like, Quinn supposed, the fuzzy millipedes zie was here to meet - sometimes left their creatures willing to go right up to human visitors, for better or for worse.

Nothing was so bold as to leap onto Quinn's person, which was good, because zie hadn't actually suited up for that eventuality.

Zie floated southeast, checking zir compass now and then. It wasn't a real compass - the planet didn't have that kind of magnetosphere - just a doodad with an accelerometer that would by dead reckoning figure out which way zie was facing. It was good enough.

There weren't roads. Zie was drifting along above spiral-leafed plants, the distinctions between their several types quite lost on zir. They were at least green. The whole place was very green. Perhaps emlood thought it was cute but that wasn't, evidently, going to give them any pause in razing it to the ground.

Grasses taller than Quinn grew in copses zie slalomed around. Drooping ropes of viridian needles hung from twisty red trunks. Moss-stuff writ large enough to brush the bottom of the chair partially hid busy flocks of many-limbed pink things.

There weren't roads, but there were farms, if you wanted to call them farms. They were at least fairly consistent swathes of specific plants. And something that could be a town, if you squinted. Quinn squinted. Zie didn't have anything better to do, here.

Roon had said this would help but had struggled to articulate why. It hadn't even sounded very confident.

It wasn't that the place didn't look like a town, Quinn mused as zie drew closer. It did. It had paths between the structures, and buildings, and they were made of mud but humans had once built with mud too. Still did sometimes, if they were dedicated reenactors. But there was an organic quality to the mounds that made Quinn imagine it was built by the space ants - millipedes, whatever - chewing up wood pulp or something, and spitting it into place. Birds' nests, termite mounds, those big hives that Tharansi lizard-things built in the ambassadorial neighborhood before the groundskeepers knocked them down. (Quinn wasn't sure what the groundskeepers had against them; the lizards were harmless and pretty cute.)

Quinn got closer, chair brushing the tops of alien plants and releasing more smells, bright sour ones and harsh bitter ones and one that made zir imagine a rose farting. Beavers reshaped the land around them too, zie knew. Ants, literal Earth ants, built hills and tunnels, waged war, farmed aphids or leaf fungus - and they were still ants.

The millipedes weren't hostile, and the plan was for Quinn to approach quite close to the settlement, but it was always possible that they'd learned to be hostile when a bunch of them were kidnapped and failed to make diplomats. Had the Tharansi tried all the possibilities? Was there a 'splal being paid hush money? An emlood, doing due diligence before their species laid waste to all this malodorous green? The conservationist groups had a point, thought Quinn, it would be a shame even if these were just dumb bugs.

Zie could see some of the millipedes as zie crossed the innermost farms. There was a texture to the outside of their structures, rough ridges, so even if they didn't have the clingy feet Earth bugs had, they could climb up the sides and into the windows; they were doing it. Quinn could see them looking at zir with their three-eyed faces, and then skittering away, often without turning around first. Maybe they echolocated or were using smell to navigate or just knew their way around really well. They didn't approach zir chair.

Quinn couldn't blame them. If they were just bugs, fuzzy bugs the size of anacondas with a hundred feet apiece, then avoiding unfamiliar weird-smelling creatures still made sense as an instinct. The other animals hadn't run from zir but who knew what ecological niches these things occupied? If the millipedes were people - well, then it was smart of them, zie supposed.

Whatever they were, they weren't high-tech. Quinn didn't see evidence of fire, let alone electricity. Honestly, it had been pretty generous of the Tharansi to check these guys. They didn't appear to have textiles, pottery, sharp rocks, or wheels. Just crops, in loose blobby shapes - neither the circles and rectangles humans favored nor neatly tiling emlood rectangles, but maybe something else farmed that way, zie didn't know. And their termite mounds, with windows they ducked through to hide from Quinn.

It was so quiet. No sounds, Violet had said. Chemical writing, like ants - sign language - bees did that.

One millipede came into view as Quinn drifted through the town that was slower. Maybe it couldn't hear zir approach. Actually, maybe they were all deaf. It was in the middle of the wiggly lane between two hives, and Quinn came closer, thinking of checking to see if every other one of its feet on one side was purple. Silly. They'd killed Violet's would-be co-ambassador.

This one was a cool dim green-blue, like being six feet under the sea in the sunshine. None of its feet were purple, they were just black with little flecks of turquoise. It turned around and Quinn realized it didn't have eyes at all. There were scars across its face, like something had scratched it badly and it had healed but was now blind.

Blind animals didn't live very long, did they? Wild ones, at any rate. Ones belonging to species that were supposed to be able to see. This one was right now failing to run from something all its neighbors had been scared of.

Maybe blind bees could work in the hive, in the dark.

This millipede wasn't in the dark. It was standing in the street with its fuzz waving gently in the hot fragrant wind. Some of the others were peeking out of the nearest windows, looking at Quinn and at the blind one.

"I'm not going to hurt it," said Quinn. None of them reacted. Probably they couldn't hear. Why weren't they raising some kind of chemical alarm for the blind one? Had its nose been damaged too?

Zie got within a few feet of the eyeless millipede. It was a pretty color. Maybe the nature conservationists were the wrong tactic here and the kidnappers should have been appealing to furriers. Save the species by turning the individuals into coats.

Quinn was close enough to see that the blue-green millipede was - eating. Chewing, very slowly, with its creepy mouthparts. Zie was close enough to see over it, and - that was another millipede, dead in the street, butchered, and the blind one was eating some organ of the dead one. Was nobody warning it that Quinn was right there because it was a murderer and they wanted to see what zie'd do to it? Was it just really really rude to interrupt cannibalism?

The blind millipede moved away from Quinn. Maybe it felt zir shadow on its fur, or smelled zir, or it had nothing to do with Quinn at all. Zie could have darted forward and buried a hand in its fuzz, but even if zie'd been sure it wasn't poisonous, zie didn't want to trust its peaceability that far. The mouthparts looked sharp.

It took ten minutes to finish eating. It disappeared the last bites of its grisly meal, and instantly, the air from every direction suddenly stank of rust and vinegar. Quinn could taste it, like vomiting up blood, or biting into a chemical battery. Zie gagged. The blind millipede ran. It raced up the side of a corrugated burrow and plunged into a window. The city streets were at last completely deserted.

Quinn sat there, unmoving, in the middle of the city. Zie thought zie could hear evidence of some millipedes sneaking out back windows, but zie didn't scoot around to try to catch them at it. Maybe they needed to do farm work. Maybe they got cabin fever. Maybe they had alien millipede emotions which cashed out to the same thing.

The sun descended. When it got near the horizon and the shadows were stretched across the ground, zie went back to the meadow where zir shuttle was parked and boarded it. Smelled blessedly inoffensive air with a grateful sigh.

On the way back to Tharan Prime, Quinn wrote to Roon about everything zie'd seen. Zie wasn't a very organized writer, and everything came together out of order with followups like "And another thing about -" or "I forgot to mention that -", but Roon didn't have any problems with it that it saw fit to tell Quinn about.

How was this supposed to help? Quinn asked.

And Roon answered, Complicated emlood legal precedent, but I'll also try to get somewhere with the evidence you saw yourself.

Surely the emlood and the Tharansi both had seen enough millipede settlements to satisfy every curiosity they thought was worth indulging. But maybe that wasn't very much. Maybe the Tharansi only wanted to learn about people by hearing them translated by diplomats. Maybe the emlood would have been perfectly happy to exterminate stone age fuzzy people if the Tharansi didn't have rules about that sort of thing and they didn't care about what it implied that they practiced funerary cannibalism and kept their blind friends alive.

What're the odds? Quinn asked, but zie didn't expect a good answer for that. Zie'd never been good at putting numbers to things, and even if emlood figuring was identical - perhaps it was, but who knew? - zir counterpart wouldn't have been filtered on math skills either.

I don't know. I'm very new at everything I'm trying to do and there is a lot of it. It's worth trying.

"There is a lot of it" sounded like "stop writing me letters if they aren't important, I'm really busy" to Quinn. Zie failed at putting on a movie marathon. Failed at reading books. Eventually wrote Commissioner Zalas, instead of Roon.

Visit to planet went off without a hitch. I don't really understand what Roon's trying to do but if it has the weight of a Commission strongly worded letter to put behind whatever it is, you should tell it so. Are there any of the millipede guys on Tharan Prime? Can you ask one of the Tharansi diplomats?

Commissioner Zalas wasn't a prompt letter-writer. He had a habit of checking his messages once in the morning and once at the end of his workday. It was perhaps admirable that he left work at work but it left Quinn, whose sleep schedule had not survived the trip, fretting awake for the next twelve hours after hitting send.

Looking into it was all the reply said, when it came.

Quinn made a loud irritated noise, confirmed that this hadn't caused zir shipmate to write their diplomat to find out if zie was dying, and put on the most mindless cartoons zie could find in zir media storage to stare at until zir brains dribbled out zir ears. Zie fell asleep to the theme song of Octopus Girl and Captain Cuttle. Zie dreamed that the dynamic duo met mer-millipedes and killed them all and turned them into coats and ate their organs, explaining to the camera that they used every part of the soulless animals.

Back on Tharan Prime, Quinn went for a high-speed turn around the neighborhood zie lived in. The security guys had to follow zir on scooters to avoid losing zir on the uphill portions where they lost footspeed. When zie went back home to recharge the chair and check zir messages, Zalas had finally responded.

Neem says the specimens were terminated but not discarded. Why?

Longshot, said Quinn. Any joy on finding my kidnappers?

They caught the one with the beard. Others still on the lam.

I need to talk to the beard one then.

Why?

Ambassador reasons.

Quinn got an armed escort and swung by the lockup where Hooded Villain, divested now of his hood, was cooling his heels. Apparently his real name was Chester. Quinn hated this name and resolved to continue to think of him as Hooded Villain forever.

"Ambassador," said Hooded Villain, puzzled, when Quinn floated into view.

"In the flesh. Where's the would've-been-also-an-ambassador who was with you?"

"In the wind."

"- Look, I'm not trying to get her arrested, I wouldn't cry about it but that's not why I'm here. Does she have a burner email she might be checking? A sibling she might be in touch with even now? Would she watch an ad if I took it out in an episode of Galaxy's Greatest Hits? Help me out."

"Why?" asked Hooded Villain, if anything more confused now.

"I want to ask her to a candlelit dinner, of course," snapped Quinn. "Look, I just have something to tell her, I think she'd want to hear it, how can I let her know?"

Hooded Villain looked meaningfully at the guards. They didn't move an inch.

"Yeah, they're a little jumpy since I got kidnapped, I can't imagine why. Write it on a scrap of paper and pass it to me or something if you don't want them seeing that she put emoji eggplants in her email address."

With what Quinn thought was unnecessary ponderousness, Hooded Villain did as zie'd asked. Zie secreted the note away in zir shirt pocket without letting the guards or the cameras get a clear look at it.

Back in zir house, and finally alone, zie hopped onto zir neighbor's wireless network for that extra delay in track-covering, and emailed Violet, apparently also known as "barleygirlinabarleyworld".

Roon is trying something, but it's not remotely guaranteed. I have a stupid idea.

Violet answered that evening, while Quinn was eating dinner that wasn't any of the things zie'd thought to pack for the trip to millipedeworld. Your mail is being watched.

Yep. Stand by.

Because, Quinn was pretty sure, rictic's mail was not being watched. Nobody had kidnapped it. It wasn't acting erratic after having spoken to pollitical extremists. And it was studying English just as much as Quinn was studying its own language, if not more. Conversational, no. Capable of sending an email if Roon spelled it out letter by letter? Probably. Violet could read around a few typos.

Quinn went in to Roon's room and had a completely ordinary ambassador-diplomat conversation, fully on record, about nothing relevant to millipedes at all. On the emlood planet they sometimes enjoyed cold currents in their oceans the way humans liked hot springs. An emlood typically had two biological parents but under some circumstances could wind up with four or six, though it did have to be an even number. Eight had been achieved but only artificially and only once. Roon thought that emlood number chants weren't too dissimilar from the way some humans - though not Quinn, alas - enjoyed watching videos of people mixing colorful paints together, but that was a supposition about a supposition. Perhaps the next human ambassador to the emlood would have to be a watching-paint-mix sort of person to shed more light on this similarity.

And then Quinn asked for the recording to stop, and told Roon what zie wanted to send to Violet.

Violet showed up outside the Tharansi biological lab in disguise and with a rock in one shoe to throw off her gait. The Tharansi were no great shakes at telling humans apart, but it was possible they had footage or a photo of her somewhere, from when they'd recruited her to try to be an ambassador, plus Quinn had given a description of all the kidnappers when zie was first released. So, new hair color, outfit from the opposite corner of her wardrobe. It didn't have to last all that long.

Quinn was there ostensibly to visit the zoo, which they had attached to the same facility, and zir guards were hanging back so as not to spook the Mmiikan-homeworld racing turtles, which hated crowds. The Tharansi didn't charge admission. They met at the exhibit right next to the turtles, with Quinn supervising the long-horned ray-like sea creatures from Tharan Secundus and Violet fixing her eyes on a bug that would eventually fly close enough to the water to be struck, electrocuted, and eaten.

They didn't have to talk. Roon had relayed everything. Quinn led Violet through the zoo, looking at different animals on opposite sides of the switchback path that led sequentially through the zoo's contents. It went uphill by slow gradual degrees. The top of it was actually on the roof of the lab building, with the north wall backed up against the slope where all the exhibits were kept. Quinn had read, when looking up facts about the layout of the place, that there were tunnels through that hill into corresponding lab facility floors.

A garden full of Green-Fuzzy-world's answer to butterflies wasn't enclosed. On Tharan Prime they didn't get any of the environmental cues that would normally tell them to fly any distance, so they were sluggishly decorative, waiting for migration season their whole lives, letting visitors pet their bristly abdomens. And the tunnel to the third floor began in their exhibit, so that they could be brought into the lab and obliged to breed artificially lest the zoo run out of sleepy ornaments.

Quinn floated in like zie owned the place. The door wasn't hidden, if you'd spent any time around Tharansi doors, and it wasn't locked, either. Zie went right through, Violet at zir back.

In the corridor they really had to book it. Locked, no - Tharansi mostly didn't lock things just because people weren't supposed to go into them, since they didn't expect people to try doors till they had a rash of incidents with some specific one. Not many folks were interested in entering the space-butterfly-breeding room unless they were on an authorized behind the scenes tour. But there were certain to be people around. They had to be quick, and avoid being seen - till the critical moment, when they wanted a lot of witnesses.

Tharansi didn't do elevators. Fortunately, Quinn brought zir own. In the central column of empty air that the building's central ramp spiraled around, zie dropped, sickeningly, till zie spotted the floor zie wanted. Specimen freezers. Violet sprinted down the ramp behind. Zie'd meet her in a moment.

There were a lot of specimens, but the fuzzy millipedes were bigger than most things the Tharansi were keeping on ice. They had it all behind glass, with sliding doors. It was dark, but zie had a flashlight.

And a meat cleaver.

Zie was in luck. There, bagged and tagged and frozen solid, was the specific millipede zie'd hoped for, third from the top of a stack of them. Every other foot stained purple. Did it look friendly? Frankly, Quinn couldn't see it, but the important thing was that Violet could, and had.

Zie pulled it out of the stack. There was a sussurus of Tharansi activity behind zir now, they were alive to the intrusion, so zie didn't worry about the clatter as cold corpses cascaded to the tiles below. Zie knifed the bag, tugged the fore half of the dead millipede out, and heaved the cleaver over zir head, leaning crazily out of zir chair to bring the blade down hard enough. Chop, chop, hack, the sick thunk - the vibrating blade helped against the icy stiffness of the rust-brown innards, but it wasn't quite as fast as zie'd hoped. The cleaver went through unexpectedly far on the next swing and blunted itself on the floor. No matter, zie could see the organ zie wanted now. Quinn pried it loose with zir bare hands.

Violet had caught up at last. She was panting, flushed, but her eyebrows were drawn down in determination. She held out her hand.

Quinn handed her the hunk of crystallized tissue. It had taken the blind millipede a while to eat, but they had small mouths.

Violet swallowed it whole. Probably it tore up her throat. Certainly it was inadvisably cold. It didn't matter. She was expecting this to kill her just because food from another planet was almost always toxic. She was willing to get herself killed doing it.

Quinn gazed up at the ceiling as the Tharansi biologists closed in.

"Did it work?" Roon asked, later, after all the interrogations, all the psych eval sessions, after Violet's funeral.

"I will assert that it did forever," said Quinn.

"I'm not recording."

"I think it worked," said Quinn again, quieter. "I think that's what the blind one was doing. Eating the dead one's soul. I reckon Violet died a diplomat."

"But she would have lied about it," said Roon. "If it hadn't worked. She'd have pretended till her heart collapsed and then kept doing it after they defibrillated her until the minute they couldn't keep her alive."

"Probably. That wouldn't mean they weren't people, though, it'd mean - that I was wrong about what the cannibalism was for, or that it doesn't work if a human eats it, or that she and her millipede weren't that compatible after all."

"Or that they're not people."

"Or that. It'll buy them time to prove it. It'll get the 'splal trying to decipher their chemicals. Better them than me, they smelled hideous."

"Would you have done it?" Roon asked, after a silence.

"Done - what, swallowed the -"

"If Violet had gotten caught before she could, yes. You have a soul gap too, if anything more of one than she had. If that's even necessary - the blind one didn't look to you like it had had part of the relevant organ taken out first, did it -"

"It didn't, no... I don't think it would've cohered with me. I'm a reasonably generic ambassador candidate, but - I just didn't vibe with the millipedes much. They stank. I didn't think they looked friendly. Violet had the better shot."

"But would you have done it?"

"I don't know."

It's not a pleasant admission. Roon's in some ways very young. In most ways, really - lots of life experience, but about a totally different pair of lives than the one it led. It had very little experience with being a bridge between species, with being a white box of electronics built on an ancient Tharansi ritual to let two subspecies negotiate borders and trade routes or whatever it was premodern Tharansi had wanted to talk about. It was sort of like a teenager, accustomed to existing but not ready to do it without support yet.

Or so Quinn imagined. Zie still had plenty to learn from Roon about what it was like to be it, what it was like to be emlood. They had a job to do.

"I wouldn't want to leave you," Quinn added after the lull in the conversation had gone on long enough. "But - there've got to be millions of them. You'd - I know you'd miss me, but."

"I'll have to do without you one day. But not yet. Please," said Roon. "You're my other half."

"You'd still have your other, other half."

"Yes. But I need both of you. We're only just starting."

"There's no use wondering what I would've done. Violet got there in time. She got to - to meet her friendly millipede." Quinn scrubbed at zir eye. "Or at least got to pretend to enough to head off the colonization. - would your plan have worked, do you think."

Pause. "No. I don't think it would have."

"Then -"

"Then it's good that Violet caught up with you. And didn't choke or throw up. And was a good actress, or a good enough ambassador-slash diplomat. I just keep wondering, what if it'd had to be you. I don't know what you'd do in that situation. I don't remember being you in any situations like that."

"I don't know either. I didn't have a plan for the contingency, just this one crazy idea. But here we are."

"I'm glad you're all right."

"All right, nothing, I get flashbacks to the millipede planet whenever I let my leftovers sit too long -"

Roon laughed. "Ask me something about emlood," it said.

"Do they let food get moldy?" asked Quinn at once.

"The taxon on their planet isn't exactly mold, of course, but there are some simple organisms that will grow on things they eat. They can digest most of those too, though, very few of them are outright toxic to emlood - they'll cultivate different ones, like humans do with cheese - but there are exceptions. They're regional, though, they don't adapt quickly enough to wind up spreading across the whole civilization the way some things do on Earth. There's pretty extreme weather variation on their planet and they'll live underground to avoid most of it, but seldom ship food very far..."

"We should be recording, for this part."

"Oh, you're right. There we go, let me just repeat myself boringly for the microphone."

Quinn listened as Roon explained emlood dietary practices and food storage and then drifted to their cargo handling procedures in general. Not long after, rictic joined them, rumbling along, and Quinn was treated to glimpses of how odd emlood found the concept of soup, the shape of the standard shipping container.

Zie could do this for the rest of zir life.

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