68:10:21 (25th March 2001)
— Contact plus 05.06.23
After about a month on Uq̄aru-ɬöjp̄ija, all of the omniglots were more or less fluent in Minnisiät — and Beth was also getting there in Tšusomalhańath and Iqaɦak̄ö (or at least an approximation of Iqaɦak̄ö, the Pajc̄üɦoqa language wasn't meant for the human throat), plus bits and pieces of Tommutškalhańath and Che̊ņ (the dominant Chiss language) and Girshæth (the language of the Republic Beyond the Rift, which frustratingly just meant "basic" in itself), because even by omniglot standards she was absolutely ridiculous. There was a little more technical and formal legal language and the like they still needed to finish up with, and some more basic information about how the Law of Five specifically and interstellar society in general worked, so they'd have a better understanding of what might benefit Earth and what was actually on the table, so they had a shot at helping the diplomatic types back home negotiate properly. Omniglots didn't tend to be that much better at learning that kind of thing than normal people — Beth leveraging the talent to learn anything, not just languages, was another way she was just weird — but a couple weeks ago they'd switched to primarily lessons on that stuff, continuing to pick up the language as they were at it, so they were pretty far along there by now too. It looked like Soqhuńe's prediction that they'd be ready by the New Year had been a pretty good one, they were making arrangements to send them home already, far ahead of schedule.
According to Quńalhi, the Law were already preparing their delegation — they should be arriving on Earth at right around the same time the omniglots were returning home. Beth had been roped into a confusing three-way call with Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and Yuri João about all that a few days ago now, supposedly they would be preparing a location for the summit with accommodations for the alien negotiators. Which was somewhat complicated, what with people on Earth having no idea what would be comfortable living space for completely unfamiliar aliens, or what to feed them, hence Beth being brought into the call to translate. By the sound of it, they were planing on making it a whole big production, which did make sense. Formally entering Earth into fucking interstellar civilisation was kind of a big deal.
Beth was only annoyed because she was certain the various events that came up as part of the process would be recorded, for posterity, and since she would be there as a translator she'd be showing up in a lot of the video. There was basically no chance of history ever forgetting her at this point, which, fine, whatever.
So, they were in the final stretch now, maybe around ten days before they'd be returning home. There was still work to do, yes — the translation programme wasn't even close to finished, they'd be able to work on that at home anyway — but the schedule had relaxed somewhat. So when a local public holiday came up, they decided to take the day off, and basically take a school trip out into town instead.
Beth's understanding was that the holiday was sort of like Tết Trung Thu in Vietnam? It was a holiday that was originally just tied to a particular time of year — the beginning of Spring, in this case — which in later generations, after people weren't all living on farms and shite and the turning of the seasons wasn't so important anymore, gradually transformed into a holiday for children. While Tết Trung Thu was originally (and still was) a harvest festival, the Pajc̄üɦoqa version instead had some early spring stuff associated with it, but by this point that association was pretty superficial — especially here, away from their homeworld, where the seasons didn't line up with the traditional calendar anyway.
More modern events had far more influence on what the holiday was like now, in particular the aftermath of their liberation from the wakali with the assistance of the Law. Pretty much the entirety of the Pajc̄üɦoqa population had been enslaved, which could do shite to people, and their period in captivity and the war had left them with a lot of parentless children. All the stuff around that generation — not to mention the baby boom they'd had soon afterward — had left a big impression on Pajc̄üɦoqa culture in general, and this holiday specifically. Very much a childrens' holiday now, whatever it'd been before.
The omniglots and a handful of staff were loaded onto a couple of aircraft and brought over to a square elsewhere in the city. Well, not a square, technically — like seemingly all Pajc̄üɦoqa architecture, it was round — but the same basic idea. They landed a short distance away from the circle, she guessed, in a structure that seemed very much like a multistorey carpark, space for flying bloody cars to be kept — the major difference was that they didn't need all the big ramps and shite, since the things could fly, and also that there was plant-life bloody well everywhere, reds and purples and greens, speckles of other colours in the form of flowers and fruits.
Beth was familiar enough with local agriculture now, from picking up the language, to recognise that most of these plants were decorative, though some were culinary fruits. Aq̄hija said that plants in public places like this were a public good, so they could even pluck off berries and eat them if they wanted...
...though they shouldn't — some of the berries and things Pajc̄üɦoqa ate were poisonous to humans. Chiss and kharson had relatively similar tolerances to humans when it came to food and drugs and the like, but some species out there were very different, and the Pajc̄üɦoqa happened to be one of them. Even after being here for about a month now, they'd had barely any of the local food, for that reason.
It was only a brief walk from the parking structure over to the circle. They were a short distance from the nearest tall glass towers, this place here seemingly not part of one of the major neighbourhoods but situated between a few of them, several streets connecting different parts of the city intersecting here. Of course, there were building here, but the impression Beth got was that these were primarily public buildings — one structure, on the same street as the parking area just off the circle proper, happened to be the local offices of the Law of Five — the open space of the circle itself some kind of open market or something, doubling as a gathering place for big public events and the like. Buildings ringed the circle, made out of a mix of fired clay and the colourful glass common here, some structures detached but most longer buildings housing multiple different offices or shops or whatever, the face bent to match the curl of the circle. The entrances were recessed a bit, behind walkways and seating areas shaded by awnings — made out of cloth in bright colours, embroidered in curling patterns — in most places around the ring the buildings were two levels tall, the second floor with its own covered walkway, the material of the two tiers of awnings and the occasional dangling banner fluttering in the wind.
The entire place was, as should be expected of the Pajc̄üɦoqa by now, thick with plant-life. There were paved walk-paths across the circle, a few islands here and there of ceramic tile, but much of the circle was instead covered in grass, the occasional bunch or arc of low bushes here and there. Unsurprisingly, given that they were walking into a public observance of a major holiday, the area was also packed with hundreds of people, possibly even thousands — predominantly Pajc̄üɦoqa, though there were members of a few other species dotted here and there, only some of which Beth knew the names of. (There were a lot of different peoples in the Law.) There were all kinds of activities going on, multiple different sources of music (which was slightly confusing), games and craft shite and whatever else. It was very busy in here, naturally, so many things going on all at once it was honestly a little hard to make sense of it. Big festival thing, you know.
The little Pajc̄üɦoqa children weighed down with beaded necklaces and whatever else and with their faces marked up with curling designs in colourful sparkling paint, all bouncy and energetic over the holiday, were surprisingly adorable.
And there was food too, of course, grilled meats and fried...things (some alien kind of bread, maybe?), candies, all sorts of things. A lot of it smelled good, but Qanšalhu gave them a blanket warning that they probably shouldn't touch any of it — some of the sweeteners and spices Pajc̄üɦoqa used were poisonous to humans, so. They'd be going to a restaurant later where they would be able to eat the food, just hold off until then.
They spent a fair while (Beth wasn't sure how long exactly) randomly walking around the festival in the circle, just, watching, occasionally asking questions about things. Aq̄hija and Lupac̄iɦ were both Pajc̄üɦoqa, and could explain what the various things going on were about...sometimes. When it came to cultural stuff, the answer to questions could end up being that's just what you do, especially when it came to why a certain thing was done, or what it had to do with this specific holiday. Which was fair enough, Beth would have as much trouble explaining Christmas to aliens, she guessed. It'd probably be a lot easier if half the omniglots weren't nerds, with a lot of complicated sociological questions, but whatever.
And it wasn't just awkward for that reason — jostled by the crowd, they had a bit of trouble keeping their group all together. As packed as people were in here, getting a group of fifteen people — the omniglots plus six people from the support staff to show them around — to move through the mess in an orderly fashion could get a bit complicated. It didn't help that they drew a little bit of attention at times. There weren't exactly very many humans around, and while most of the staff were innocuous, Quńalhi and Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký were both in Law uniforms — Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký was even visibly armed, as the security staff generally were, which Beth had learned by now was somewhat unusual here. (It wasn't illegal to carry weapons around, civilians just generally didn't.) They might warrant a second glance just for that reason. And then a third glance, when people noticed that Ḑiguqhȧnna was wearing an actual sword — some more religious Monatšeri, like Quńalhi, might keep a knife on them at all times, but something as big and obvious as a full-length sword was very unusual — and then as they took that third glance, they might think that a couple of people in that funny group seemed familiar...
Their hosts had tried to keep their corner of the university locked down, but they really couldn't stop information from leaking out. People talked, so it hadn't taken very long before the story of the primitive, pre-spaceflight planet that had managed to resist invasion by the scabs started getting around, and that the group of newcomers being taught Minnisiät here were from that same planet. And they hadn't really been subtle about magic since arriving, casually casting little spells here and there and doing the occasional obvious thing like openly teleporting around — since Secrecy had imploded years ago now, mages had gotten out of the habit of bothering to hide it — and stories about that had started to leak out.
And then, Beth and Ḑiguqhȧnna had started putting on the occasional show play duel, just for fun (and also foreplay, Beth realised by now), most of which had been recorded by random bystanders...and then put up on the net. According to Quńalhi, within a couple weeks of the first video going up literally trillions of people had seen them, which had Beth feeling kind of nervous retroactively — that was a lot of fucking people okay! There'd been a few spectators around at the time, of course, but she hadn't realised...
Well. The particulars of how the media here worked hadn't clicked for her yet, that was all. That someone could record something she was doing and put it up somewhere trillions of people might see it was, just, incomprehensible. Still difficult to wrap her mind around it, honestly.
It was obvious that some people put together who they were — which then made it even more difficult to navigate the crowd, very awkward.
(Beth wasn't allowed to go anywhere anymore without being recognised, apparently.)
They wandered around the circle for what must be a couple hours, before they were led over to one of the long buildings around the ring, up a set of stairs to the second level. One section up here was obviously a restaurant of some kind, outdoor tables scattered through the walkway out front — mostly kharson and other Monatšeri species, Beth noticed. By the sharp bite of the spices on the air and the script on the signs this must be a Monatšeri restaurant, primarily catering to the minority of non-Pajc̄üɦoqa people around. (Which was necessary, given the differences in their diets.) The inside of the restaurant was an interesting mix of Pajc̄üɦoqa and Monatšeri aesthetics, little elevated burbling fountains of scented water at the entrance (Monatšeri), the walls curved and the tables arranged in rings and arcs (Pajc̄üɦoqa), low tables ringed with kneeling cushions (Monatšeri), separated from each other with planters filled with alien flowers and bushes, vines crawling over the walls in places (Pajc̄üɦoqa), the light tinted orangeish and somewhat low, the room touched with moody shadows, and just a little hazy with fragrant steam and smoke (Monatšeri), barriers between different sections and in some places on the walls mosaics of stained glass cut into graceful curves (Pajc̄üɦoqa), where there wasn't glass instead banners pinned up, colourful and glittering with complex beadwork (that one could be either), doors leading off to private rooms or kitchens or toilets marked with beaded curtains (probably Monatšeri)...
They paused at the entrance for a moment to dip their fingers into the water fountains, dribble a little over their brows and their collars, the omniglots who weren't familiar with the Monatšeri custom lagging a bit behind. According to Quńalhi, this sort of thing was a relic of absolutely ancient hospitality customs, which had managed to linger on millennia after they'd ceased being relevant. The original kharson homeworld — on the other side of the Rift, ruined by generations of industrial exploitation and abandoned going on ten thousand years ago now — had been rather hot and arid, providing guests water to wash off the dust and sweat on coming indoors had been the polite thing to do, a once far more complicated welcoming ritual now reduced to a token gesture. Quńalhi said it would be somewhat more involved in a private home, including taking off shoes and a few other little things, but they didn't tend to do all that in places like this. Especially fancy places, maybe, but never outside Monatšeri space, since other peoples had different ideas about propriety.
(The implication was that something would ordinary be included that other people might find inappropriate, but Quńalhi didn't spell out whatever it was.)
Once they'd quick gone through that whole thing, a host showed up to guide them over to a private room already set up for them — someone had called ahead, apparently. Here there was absolutely no table at all, instead cushions dotted over a thick, soft carpet, woven in a colourful pattern of alternating blocky shapes and organic curves (very Monatšeri), the walls covered in a complex geometrical glass mosaic (again a mix of Monatšeri and Pajc̄üɦoqa aesthetics). There were also open braziers in the corners, incense-burners, which the kharson in their group explained was rather old-fashioned, as was simply not having a table at all, but more formal practices tended to be more old-fashioned, and one would normally expect a special private dining room to be for more formal use, so that made sense. It seemed somewhat backward to Beth for more formal events to have fewer accommodations, even to the point of not having a dining table, but maybe it went back to the aesthetics of the revolutionary republics during and immediately after the collapse of the old kharson empire, which would sort of make sense. Slaves had probably been less likely to have big proper dining tables and shite, after all.
Someone in the kitchen staff must have arranged the food ahead of time, and they'd timed their arrival pretty well. They'd hardly finished settling in — sitting on cushions on the floor, which seemed visibly uncomfortable for those in the group not used to this sort of thing, particularly Cionaodh and Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký — still in the process of pouring drinks, when servers started filing in with the meal. They weren't all given their own plate, instead platters and bowls of stuff set out they were meant to serve themselves from. (The exception were Aq̄hija and Lupac̄iɦ, who'd presumably been given special Pajc̄üɦoqa-friendly food, but even theirs was shared between the two of them.) There were small plates and saucers and stuff for each of them, set with utensils on a squat little table set next to each person's left knee — it was rude to eat directly from a platter, instead you were supposed to transfer each serving to your plate before eating it. But this wasn't that unusual for them by now, many of their meals since they'd left Earth had worked the same way. The big difference was that they were normally less strict about the etiquette, their teachers taking the opportunity of this outing to get in a sort of mini-lesson on that.
Beth knew by now that Monatšeri tended to live in surprisingly large households, the nuclear family she was familiar with from growing up in Britain almost completely unheard of. Multigenerational families living together was pretty common, but it was also normal to have multiple unrelated families in a household — sometimes there might be a blood relation, some of the adults cousins or something, but maybe they were just school friends...or coworkers, or members of the same political group or social club, or even total strangers before going in on a house together, it varied. It was even pretty common, though not obligatory, for a household to switch to a shared surname and essentially consider each other family, regardless of whether they were related or not, or even the same species.
(Thisaku was pretty blunt about that sort of living arrangement probably being a consequence of the conditions they'd been kept in back during the imperial period, vaguely similar in concept to old slave quarters just with much better accommodations. Though, Thisaku's species had actually lived in extended households sort of like that even before being enslaved by the ancient kharson, so it was hard to say for sure.)
In these big households of theirs, it was pretty common for the breakfast and evening meal to be shared between all of them (if feasible, depending on everyone's schedules). So, to the Monatšeri, dinners like this where you had a bunch of people, the meal split across different dishes everyone served themselves from, that was just the normal, default, expected course meals were supposed to take. Pretty similar to some cultures on Earth, Beth guessed, the only big differences was the scale of it, the number of people who were expected to be involved. Which was neat, she thought it was interesting at least.
Also, it was relatively easy to just focus on the dishes that you liked, and avoid the ones that you didn't without drawing attention to it and possibly offending the host — and the variety of options meant you could probably find something you liked. Not really a problem for Beth, she wasn't really picky (especially after getting all over the world during and after the war), but she could tell by now that some of the omniglots were politely avoiding certain things. Ḑiguqhȧnna and Cionadh in particular were rather picky, though in different ways, but it was pretty easy to accommodate that, with the way Monatšeri did things, so.
Conversation over dinner started with more about the holiday, and some Monatšeri culture stuff, and a bit of talk about the complicated melding of influences that was going on in the more international spaces. (For lack of a better word — Beth still wasn't certain what terms would be appropriate to distinguish between the level of organisation of the Law of Five and of its members, didn't think Earth languages had proper words for it.) But their hosts had their own questions about Earth, some of it polite questions about cultural events back home, sure, but they were also curious about the non-human people there.
The impression Beth had gotten was that their teachers and such found the diversity on Earth...unusual. Of course, you'd expect a species's homeworld to be more culturally diverse than outlying colonies — especially in less advanced societies, as there would have been less time to smooth the edges out — but finding multiple different species on pre-spaceflight planets was extremely unusual. It did happen sometimes, but very rarely...and even then, normally as a relic of a previous era when they had had access to space travel. On the other hand, Earth had humans, yes, but also nymphs and lilin and veela, centaurs and merfolk and wilderfolk, giants (barely, very near extinction at this point), goblins and elves, phoenixes and thunderbirds...and arguably a handful more, it depends on how you draw the line, really.
But that diversity was sort of artificial? It wasn't like they'd all evolved independently or anything — most of the intelligent beings on Earth were all closely related, everyone on the planet having a common ancestor maybe only fifty thousand years ago or so. Ḑiguqhȧnna — lounging lazily across the rug, her hair brushing over Beth's leg — explained that her people had been human, as recently as ten thousand years ago. (They didn't have an exact time, remembered as oral history, but comparing against the archeological record people made guesses.) The ancestors of the People of the Song, Ḑiguqhȧnna translating the name into Minnisiät literally, had transformed themselves in a great ritual intended to give themselves the ability to fly — their mind magic abilities and gifts with fire magic were, they assumed, an unintentional effect of the other elements of the ritual, but nobody really knew for sure. They'd been one people then, the division between lilin and veela had developed over time, first as a tendency for some of them to be strongly polarised toward light or dark magic, that trait spreading through the population, and then becoming strictly heritable, at which point the more obvious physical differences in their bird forms that existed now had become noticeable. Nobody was really sure why it'd happened, but the People of the Song were more intensely magical than most — they were born human-looking but were entirely resculpted into a big bloody bird when they hit puberty, Ḑiguqhȧnna's present appearance was technically a transfiguration (like an animagus in reverse) — and sometimes magic made weird shite happen.
The Monatšeri seemed unexpectedly unsettled by Ḑiguqhȧnna's explanation of where her people came from, an impression that only got worse as the Earthlings explained that centaurs and nymphs and giants and merfolk probably also had their origins in ancient ritual magic. The only one they knew about for certain were vampires — their self-transformation had happened thousands of years ago, but still recently enough that there was an historical record of their appearance — but they assumed the same about most of the other beings on Earth. Quńalhi explained a bit about the lost arts of the kharson mage-lords of the distant past, and, Beth was hardly an expert, but it did sound a lot like the kharson had once had something that sounded very much like bioalchemy.
Of course, kharson had mostly used bioalchemy to make absurdly dangerous magical monstrosities, often thrown at their enemies in war to sow fear and confusion. That wasn't actually unheard of on Earth — chimaeras and manticores, for example, had been created with bioalchemy — but it didn't sound like the ancient kharson had had any benevolent uses, at all. Bioalchemy was illegal in magical Britain, so Beth hadn't really known much about this, but the most common uses of bioalchemy on Earth were actually medical. Genetic illnesses could be cured or at least treated with it, it could be used to heal serious damage from injuries or curses, regrowing organs or lost limbs. What Beth had been told was permanent curse damage could be fixed, by cutting off any cursed body parts and burning them up with certain special kinds of fire magic, and then just replacing everything with bioalchemy. Bioalchemy was also used for what was basically magical cosmetic surgery, where a lot of the weird physical traits in mages came from — the peculiar green of Beth's eyes, in fact, had almost certainly been introduced into the population with blood alchemy, and possibly her hair colour too. Some magical cultures were as paranoid about bioalchemy as Britain, but in other places it was super normal, it really depended on who you asked.
(Though it was actually more widely accepted these days than it'd been before — it was difficult to be irrationally terrified of the evil Dark Art that had just been used to heal the disfiguring injuries you'd gotten from the omnicidal space aliens.)
There were stories of kharson mage-lords using bioalchemy to change people...turning them into half-crazed supersoldiers fanatically loyal to them and them alone — when Ḑiguqhȧnna described the creation of the People of the Song, that was where Quńalhi and Soqhuńe and Qanšalhu's minds had gone, instantly. But it wasn't like that, the examples on Earth were descendants of people who'd changed themselves, because they wanted something. To fly, for the People of the Song, or to abandon the land for the sea, in the case of merfolk, or to live in quiet peace in the bloody woods, for nymphs, that kind of thing. Nobody had done it to them, they all had stories about why it'd been done, deep spiritual shite, you know.
Of course, not all beings on Earth were like that. Wilderfolk sort of were, one step removed: the child of an animagus and their target animal (and their descendants) were wilderfolk. (And yes, that was sort of creepy, people generally avoided talking about it, but the wilderfolk themselves could hardly be held responsible for that.) Phoenixes and thunderbirds were their own thing, alongside a handful of other beings which seemed to be more a manifestation of magic itself than a result of any natural process of evolution...though there were some questions about that — apparently there was a kind of magical bird living somewhere in central Asia that had similar fire magic to phoenixes, but weren't intelligent, and weren't reborn from their own ashes the way phoenixes were. Maybe it was a mix of the two things, who knows. Goblins and elves, along with a handful of other related races, were also an off-shoot of humans, but a much older one. Nobody was really sure, the evidence they had was spotty, but the archaeological shite they had suggested maybe twenty-five to forty thousand years ago, somewhere in there, the split between the different beings in their part of the family happening later. Like, there were goblin off-shoots in different places around the world, the same as there were human off-shoots — including leprechauns, apparently, Beth hadn't known that — and a few different kinds of elves, only some of which she had even heard of, small groups dotted all over.
(Red caps and erklings were goblins and elves, it turned out — members of a particular violent, extremist goblin cult were called "red caps" in Britain, and "erkling" was a word for wood elves who hunted humans. Beth hadn't known that until literally this conversation, they were talked about like they were entirely different species in Britain.)
So, yeah, some of the diversity on Earth was due to ancient bioalchemy, but some of it was just a product of natural evolution...or magically-assisted evolution, in some cases, because magic did weird shite to your genes sometimes too. But the bioalchemy wasn't bad, you know, it's not like the People of the Song would want to undo it. The ancient kharson mage-lords might have done some fucked up shite with bioalchemy, but it wasn't like that on Earth, for the most part.
Of course, that conversation just raised a different question. And it was something Beth had been wondering about herself, Soqhuńe was really doing her a favour getting ahead of her on it.
"As long as we're on the subject, speaking of the human family on your world raises a...curious question. One that some of us have been discussing for some time." Beth noticed Soqhuńe glance at Quńalhi in particular.
"Don't leave us wondering, then, Soqhuńe," Hlynur drawled. "What's on your mind?" He translated the idiom into Minnisiät literally, which maybe wasn't quite natural, but Minnisiät speakers were accustomed to interpreting alien turns of phrase like that.
"I imagine it may have come as a surprise to find humans out in the galaxy."
Beth snorted. "Yeah, you could say that."
"Well, it is no great surprise to us to find humans most anywhere. Humans are..." Soqhúne paused, his eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a moment. "They are somewhat rare in our region of the galaxy, that is true. But on the other side of the Rift, they are far more common — I am uncertain whether they may be considered a plurality or not, but." He shrugged. "The Republic Beyond the Rift, for all of its long twenty-five thousand years of history, has been dominated by humans. In some of their more...regressive phases, they have even turned to human-supremacism, so ubiquitous and influential are they there."
"That's not unreasonable." Farrokh took a sip of his muqsa, then seemed to realise a possible implication of what he'd just said — he let out a sharp hum, held up a finger as a swallowed. "I don't mean the human-supremacism, of course, but the timeline. We noticed that humans featured in some of the documentation we were given, of course. The scientists back home think it is possible that populations could have been removed from Earth after the development of the species, but before the beginning of civilisation as such. So, aliens could have visited the planet long enough ago that there would be no memory of it, and, so long as this contact was brief and intermittent, it might have left no physical evidence behind. If you follow."
"Yes, of course, but..." Soqhuńe trailed off, glanced at Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký.
While he hesitated, Quńalhi said, "The human homeworld is known, he means to say, and it is not yours."
"That's impossible," Farrokh insisted, "humans evolved on Earth." He reflexively used the French term, the language the omniglots most often spoke among themselves (other than Minnisiät, for practice).
"How certain are you of that?" There was a sort of gently condescending tone there, as though Soqhuńe trusted that Farrokh (and the rest of them) believed that that was true, but that this was more a matter of religiosity or nationalist self-delusion or something of the like.
By the faint glare on his face, Farrokh also picked up the unspoken implication. "Extremely."
"Why, where do you lot think humans come from?" Nāgamaṇi asked. "Because I understand our scientists are quite certain."
"Colussan, of course," Soqhuńe said. "Well, ultimately Colussan — there are multiple lineages of humanity. Beyond the Rift, it was long something of a mystery how humans managed to spread themselves to so many worlds before the advent of hyperspace travel, the mechanism lost in the haze of prehistory. However, there are a handful of societies which managed to retain some basic knowledge of their origin, even if primary documents had been lost tens of thousands of years past. The Chiss," said with a quick nod to Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký, "and the sotšuńalh, for example, remember that their homeworlds had been settled by sleeper ships, great structures which carried millions of passengers kept in carbonite hibernation at sublight speeds, journeys which could have taken centuries, or even millennia. Various human or human-related groups have similar stories.
"There is some direct archaeological evidence of this, on some of the less thoroughly built-over worlds." Apparently some planets had become so densely populated they were basically one big city, which was absurd. Beth guessed that would make it difficult to do archaeology there. "However, what is missing is the data necessary to directly connect the origin point of those sleeper ships with Colussan — that determination was made mostly with indirect evidence, through genetic and linguistic studies. It is believed that these sleeper ships were sent out in waves, between approximately forty thousand to twenty-five thousand years ago, from Colussan.
"However..." Soqhuńe broke for a brief moment, taking a bite of the saucy chunky goop he'd mixed up on his plate, mixed up from multiple dishes. "...not all human populations derive from this migration. I believe you will have learned of the Laqqakh from your readings?"
Beth wouldn't have learned it from the readings, of course, but she'd talked enough with the other omniglots that she knew what Soqhuńe was talking about. Laqqakh was the kharson term for an ancient civilisation, predating even the Republic Beyond the Rift. This was so long ago, and there'd been so many major wars and stuff, that basically no records have survived, but by a few references from other ancient civilisations (and the oral history of the Metha in particular), it was thought that the Laqqakh had dominated the galaxy for at least ten thousand years, until their empire collapsed about twenty-eight thousand years ago. Nobody was entirely sure what happened to them, they'd seemingly just imploded for no obvious reason — there were stories about rebellions of subjugated peoples (which had included humans and kharson and countless others), a messy civil war, some kind of plague, all very dim and vague thanks to the tens of thousands of years that had passed.
The Metha, one of the major species of a state on the opposite side of Chiss space from the Law of Five, actually were the Laqqakh — or, to be precise, had been. The collapse had been so severe that they'd essentially been reduced to a pre-industrial level of development, only finding their way back into space about five to six thousand years ago now, returning to galactic society as a very different people. The Laqqakh had been a violent, ethno-supremacist, often xenocidal society, ruling one of the largest, cruellest slave states in galactic history, some of their technology literally fuelled with blood sacrifice; the Metha were totally different, though, peaceful and highly egalitarian, known for their willingness to offer aid when it was needed without strings attached, disproportionately found among the diplomatic staff of the Republic of Akame, what the big interstellar state down there was called in Minnisiät. The name Laqqakh had stuck around in legends and stories and stuff, from all the way back when the kharson had been subjects of their empire, but even after learning of the connection with the Metha they didn't use the name to refer to the modern people, out of respect for the Metha's insistence that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with their bloodthirsty, slaving ancestors. When talking about the ancient empire, they were called Laqqakh, and the Metha were never called Laqqakh.
One would think that modern galactic civilisation would have nothing to do with an evil empire that had collapsed so long ago, but the Laqqakh were surprisingly important. See, it turned out, a lot of the advanced technology that these aliens had was actually reverse-engineered Laqqakh tech. Beth had sent on some technical stuff to Hermione, and she was told that Hermione and her colleagues were finding it extremely frustrating — partly because the French algorithm wasn't finished yet, so the translation had been pretty spotty, but even manuals and textbooks and shite that supposedly explained how their technology worked were unexpectedly unhelpful. Hermione had tried to explain the problem to her, and Beth hadn't entirely followed (she couldn't copy shite out of Hermione's mind from hundreds of light-years away), but by the sound of it nobody entirely understood how their technology worked, especially the faster-than-light stuff. They just knew they had to put these components in these arrangements, and it worked. They could get different results by fiddling with the inputs, but how the device did that exactly, that they couldn't actually explain, had several competing theories.
Though, even if the aliens didn't really know what they were doing, Hermione claimed people back on Earth had already made a few connections. For one thing, the aliens didn't know why the thing worked, but they did do tests to analyse the magnetic fields and whatever the fuck else was going on when they turned this stuff on — while trying to figure out how to translate the alien maths into something that made sense, someone had suddenly noticed that it looked very similar to the arithmancy for apparation. Not that Hermione was saying hyperspace travel and subspace communications were apparation — the maths weren't exactly the same, and they didn't follow the same rules — but her fellow brainy types had taken that as a big fucking clue, they were working on figuring that out. One of the things that Beth had sent had involved an explanation of the history of hyperspace technology, which Hermione claimed made it very obvious that this was some kind of magic they were fiddling with, apparently there was something important there, but Beth hadn't been able to follow it.
A couple of the omniglots confirmed for Soqhuńe that, yes, they were familiar with the Laqqakh, and that they'd had an enormous slave empire. Once he was sure they were all on the same page, he said, "It is assumed that the human populations who have no story of such a migration may have simply forgotten, or instead may have been relocated from Colussan or another slave world by the Laqqakh. The śoni, for example—" The humans among the Monatšeri, he meant. "—have been proven through genetic studies to be related to populations originating from Colussan. The position of their homeworld far out on the rim and the length of their own recorded history lends credence to this theory, as the timeline would not allow for such a long journey at sublight.
"The picture is complicated somewhat, though, by Cuwalla. There is a second primary lineage of humans who have settled large parts of the galaxy beyond the Rift, who traditionally claim the world of Cuwalla as their ancestral home — there is precious little proof of this, but neither is there any good cause to doubt it. Since the invention of the hyperdrive, these humans have founded countless colonies all throughout space, spreading even further and wider than the humans of Colussan. Numerically, perhaps two-thirds of all humans are primarily descended from the Colussan group, and the other third from Cuwalla, but if you count according to human-settled worlds instead, perhaps eighty per cent feature majority Cuwalla ancestry.
"The origin of the Cuwalla lineage is still something of an open question. Long hybridisation between human populations complicates the matters somewhat, but genetic studies suggest that the lineages of Colussan and Cuwalla diverged perhaps one hundred to one hundred twenty thousand years ago. The best explanation is that a population was removed from Colussan to Cuwalla by an even more ancient people than the Laqqakh. The Cuwalla system does appear to be a project of the Star-Shapers, so this is plausible."
The Star-Shapers were an even bigger mystery — basically, nobody had any clue who the fuck they were. There were ancient constructions scattered across the galaxy which were unbelievably old, much older than the Laqqakh, and often did weird magic shite that nobody could explain. They were generally assumed to have been made by an exceptionally magically-powerful people, the first interstellar civilisation there was any real evidence of, but they'd vanished so long into the distant past that even the stories about them had faded away.
They were called "Star-Shapers" because apparently they'd done wild shite like move around stars and even black holes, and in a few cases create solar systems from scratch. Some people even thought the Rift was artificial, created by the Star-Shapers, but nobody really knew for sure. Again, absurdly ancient history, weird magical shite, it was all just guesswork at this point.
It seemed like Soqhuńe might have been building up to a point — that humans on Earth were descendents of a slave population relocated from Colussan or Cuwalla, by either the Laqqakh or the Star-Shapers — but before he could quite get there Meñaśi interrupted him. Giving him a toothy sneer, her pointed teeth making the expression slightly unnerving (though Beth knew it showed a kind of disdainful mockery, not really threatening), the little elf woman drawled, "You see you are cutting from the same colour."
None of the aliens seemed to understand the literally-translated goblin(/elven) idiom, giving Meñaśi a variety of confused looks. "Your claims do not necessarily contradict ours, she means," Farrokh explained.
Meñaśi nodded, the variety of dangly glittering piercings in her ears faintly tinkling. "Thus so. You already hold two independent lineages — or to say, standing firm, two lineages which were made independent from each other a very long time ago, longer than you have any knowledge of. Your only explanation to this is to say, oh, a group was moved from Colussan to Cuwalla long ago — with no knowledge of when or why or how, no different than those who hand mysteries they cannot themselves answer up to gods. And even you say, these lineages were split so long ago. Would it not be clearer, then, to say both these lineages were moved from somewhere else, gathered from different peoples at different times? You would then expect those of these lineages to be cut of their own block, independently."
"This is not simply an assumption," Quńalhi said, sounding faintly annoyed — by the bit about handing mysteries up to gods, Beth assumed. "There is evidence."
"Eh? And what evidence is this?"
Rather more gently than Quńalhi, Soqhuńe said, "We do have records of observations made by the calummi, of a pre-spaceflight, industrial society on Colussan." Beth had no idea who the calummi were, but she guessed it didn't really matter.
"That doesn't mean anything," Nāgamaṇi drawled, somewhat dismissively — herself mildly annoyed by the subtle condescension from some of their hosts, Beth guessed. "We can assume a population that was removed from Earth may have been given access to more advanced technology by whoever relocated them. All that evidence does is constrain the timing."
Which was fair enough of a point, but Beth noticed a different problem. "I'll do you one better. You said these calummi, whoever they are, have records of observations — observations, not contacts. Just how close where these observations? Did they actually see that this industrial society on Colussan was made up of humans?"
Soqhuńe hesitated, before admitting, "Well, no..."
"Isn't Colussan one of those absurd city-planets? Are there actually any artefacts or whatever the fuck from that time? Are you sure that couldn't have been some other species the Laqqakh fucked over?"
While Soqhuńe and Quńalhi shared a glance, Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký muttered, "Tǻg̃."
"What?"
"It is known that the Tǻg̃ are native to Colussan as well. They were exiled from the planet long ago, the entire species rounded up and sent away on a sleeper ship — I understand the species is extinct in the modern day, the Mándo who still exist are now mostly human."
"You mean," Ḑiguqhȧnna said, "that this society the calummi noticed on Colussan could have simply been these Tǻg̃."
Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký nodded. "Yes. It is assumed that humans and the Tǻg̃ evolved on Colussan in parallel, but the overdevelopment of the planet has made that impossible to prove."
Waving her hand at the Chiss woman, Beth said, "Well, there you go then, these observations don't prove shite. What else you got?"
"Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký is exaggerating any uncertainty among experts in the field," Soqhuńe growled, voice low and rumbling, irritated. "It is universally accepted by scholars that humans and the archaic madoä once shared Colussan. Stories of the ancestral conflict between their peoples are widely distributed."
"That they shared the world, yes, but there is no direct evidence of their coevolution there. Unless I'm mistaken? I will admit," Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký said, with a low, almost teasing note on her voice, "that I am not an expert in the field, perhaps I am missing something."
"And it's no great shock that there might have been ancestral conflict between them," Beth said. "People generally don't like it when a bunch of foreigners get randomly dropped on their land."
Nudging Beth's leg with her shoulder, Ḑiguqhȧnna drawled, "And Beth's English, so she should know — her people have done a lot of the dropping, you see."
Beth rolled her eyes. "So, like I said, what else you got?"
"What do you have?" Quńalhi said, with a challenging tilt of her chin.
Farrokh snorted. "A continuous fossil record going back roughly three billion years — is that good enough for you?"
Soqhuńe's head tilted, eyes widening a tick. "Does this fossil record of yours include precursors of humans?"
"Yes, it does. As I said before: humans evolved on Earth. We know that, for a fact."
The conversation from there mostly stayed between Farrokh and Soqhuńe for some minutes, with only occasional comments from Quńalhi, Nāgamaṇi, and Qanšalhu. Beth would admit she wasn't very knowledgeable on this topic — she did know evolution was a thing, obviously, but this just wasn't something she'd ever payed that much attention to. She was kind of surprised how knowledgeable Farrokh was about human evolution and shite, she suspected he must have made a point of looking into all the stuff muggle scientists had figured out. He definitely knew enough to make the argument for the rest of them, so.
The aliens were amusingly dumbfounded at the revelation that there were close animal relatives of humans that still existed on Earth — the chimp population had taken a pretty serious hit during the war in Africa, but they were still around. Farrokh claimed that early genetic studies said that human and chimp DNA only differed by like one or two per cent which, er, that was wild. Apparently the variation within humans was only a tiny fraction of one per cent, which Beth guessed made sense? since most of the things that made up a person weren't going to change no matter what, the minor things that changed person to person would be a very small part of the whole. She guessed she'd just never thought about it that much. Farrokh projected illusions for them of chimps, and also monkeys and apes and shite, which were less obviously human-shaped than chimps, Beth guessed just making the point that it was a group of animals that humans came out of.
Apparently human-like animals like this didn't exist anywhere else in the galaxy, so, there was that.
There was also fossil history of humans too, of course. They had evidence of a few much more closely-related species, including a couple they thought humans were directly descended from. It was hard to say how far back they'd actually been beings — apparently pre-humans had been using stone tools as far back as three million years, and there was evidence they'd been cooking food with fire like one and a half million years ago, which was a little ridiculous, but okay. Farrokh himself thought the human family might have been full proper beings as early as Homo erectus, which first popped up like two million years ago, but that was a matter of debate. It was less debatable that Neanderthals had definitely been intelligent, they'd appeared around the same time as humans about three to four hundred thousands years ago before finally going extinct only forty thousand years ago, and were similar enough that some people thought they were literally just a subspecies.
Beth got the impression that Soqhuńe (and Quńalhi) had kept asking questions mostly as a test at first, to check if this was actually real science shite or just superstition or something Farrokh had made up, but the more information he gave the more fascinated the questions got. Apparently, it wasn't very common for 'modern' civilisations to have nearly this thorough of an archaeological record, since their planets kind of got a bit chewed up through the process of development, destroying anything that might have been there. They did know some worlds had had real archaeology at some point in the past, but that had been tens of thousands of years ago, and there'd been wars and shite, a lot of knowledge had been lost. Soqhuńe would probably be asking them to send him along some translated texts and stuff once they got home and had that shite working, because nerd.
Qanšalhu also got progressively more interested as the talk went on, almost even starry-eyed at points. That wasn't really so much of a surprise, Beth guessed — Qanšalhu was human, and it turned out humans out here didn't actually know that much about where they came from. It seemed the answer to that question had just been "Colussan, obviously" without any real information, learning that there were answers to those questions out there was probably a pretty big deal. Qanšalhu wasn't as much of a nerd as Soqhuńe, being a professional chef and all, but still.
Beth joked that if Qanšalhu wanted to see some of these ancient artefacts or, hell, feed a monkey if you want, she could just come visit Earth. Qanšalhu spluttered a little, taken aback by the idea — but Beth noticed that most of the rest of the aliens suddenly got quiet, Quńalhi and Aq̄hija and Soqhuńe and Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký trading serious looks. "What? What did I say?"
"We are going to want to be...careful about that," Soqhuńe said, delicately.
"Why?"
"This is no small matter." Aq̄hija had been quiet for most of the conversation, apparently not having much to say, but she was jumping in now, a gentle sigh on her raspy Pajc̄üɦoqa voice. "I don't think any of us can anticipate how significant the discovery of the true human homeworld may become."
Her voice cold and firm, Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký snapped, "This must be embargoed. It does not leave the Law." Some information about the Law of Five was kept secret, for security reasons — not necessarily classified, ordinary people were allowed to know about it, it just wasn't supposed to leave their borders. Their star charts, for example, those were kept by the Law, and ships made here had special protections that basically wiped their memory if someone tried to hack them out. Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký was saying that Earth being the original human homeworld should be put on this list of secrets, to keep it from outsiders.
"Agreed," Quńalhi said with a sharp little nod.
Her confusion prickling through Beth, Ḑiguqhȧnna asked, "Is that really necessary? I mean, why is that information too dangerous?"
"In some sections of society, human supremacist ideology is still alive and well beyond the Rift," Soqhuńe said. "There is no telling how they will react to learning that their homeworld has been discovered — and that it is home to millions of magic-users of unprecedented skill, at that."
"I'm telling you, we're not that special. I'm sure magic is just as common out here as it is back home."
"I know you believe that Beth — perhaps in due time, we will learn that you are correct. But the humans beyond the Rift will act in accordance with what they believe to be true. The mages of your world will seem exceptional to all who hear of it, and will remain so for some time."
"And they cannot act if they do not learn of it," Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký insisted. "Perhaps the embargo can be loosened once your space is well-defended, but it will take time to build the necessary emplacements and reorient the Fleet."
"Emplacements? You mean military space stations? Isn't that a—"
Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký glared Farrokh down. "If the Republic Beyond the Rift decides to reclaim 'their' homeworld, I'm uncertain whether the Law will be able to stop them."
...Oh shite.
After a short, tense silence, Soqhuńe said, "The threat needn't be so...extreme. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that one per cent of the humans in all the galaxy decide they wish to visit their rediscovered homeworld, even only briefly. Let's assume these visitors will come only once, over the course of a lifetime — let's say a lifetime is one hundred years, to simplify the maths. Does your world have the infrastructure to accommodate one trillion tourists annually?"
...
Right. Right, Beth understood the problem now. "Let's try to avoid that, shall we? Raise your hands, who thinks it's a good idea to embargo information about Earth?"
Unsurprisingly, after hearing about maybe needing to deal with literally a trillion tourists — and that being the good option, above dealing with another fucking alien invasion — all nine of them raised a hand.
"There you go then, it's agreed. Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký, Quńalhi, pass that up the chain, please."
Looking a little amused, black lips curling and red eyes twinkling, Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký said, "I meant to anyway. You know that is a decision made by Command — they would have come to their own determination regardless."
"Sure, but I assume doing it at our request would probably smooth the process out a little? Actually, maybe we should set up a call with Yuri João, to make the request all official. I'm sure he'll think it's a good idea — not to say I think Earth is going to want to stay hidden forever, but at least until we can catch up a little technologically and better police our borders, you know." Beth could see how hyper-advanced, weirdly human-supremacist aliens trying to get in touch with their roots or whatever the fuck, or just exploit Earth for their own political purposes, could very quickly become a serious problem. At the very least, they should wait until Earth had the capacity to, you know, run space stations so they could control travel and shite. Getting some interstellar tourism would probably be good for Earth in the long run, they just had to have some controls on it to protect themselves, that was all.
Quńalhi gave her a sharp little nod. "I'll inform Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe immediately, to arrange the call. There is already discussion of your world due to your success against the jusannu and your magic, and the fascination will only grow with this news — we must get ahead of it."
"At least our network is still isolated from theirs," said Aq̄hija.
"Yes, that simplifies matters somewhat. Though we may wish to embargo your magic as well — it is difficult to predict how the Tśetai may react to learning of you."
While Shan-aṛ-ïmaṛký agreed that they should keep the Jedaj ignorant of Earth magic for as long as possible, Ḑiguqhȧnna muttered in French, "Oh yes, let's just do a second Statute of Secrecy, that sounds like a great idea..."
Beth didn't really think the situations were comparable, but she did get the sentiment...especially since the enforcement of Secrecy had gone badly for Ḑiguqhȧnna's people. But she didn't really agree, she thought caution was warranted here, to give them some time to catch up before too many people could try to mess with them.
Besides, she doubted the secret would be kept too long. All of the Law would be in the know, and space was too large, and porous. It would only be a matter of time before all the galaxy knew of them, and with the scale of their information networks and media and shite it would happen very quickly.
(Here's hoping it doesn't go too badly — she had a nasty feeling that the kind of attention they'd inevitably attract was not going to benefit them.)
Don't worry, Beth, I'm sure there's no way the revelation of the true human homeworld could ever end badly.
Gonna jump over to TGW for a few chapters — running through the final task of the Triwizard Tournament, in fact. Will come back here once that's done, bye.