I've got a list of names | Glowfic Constellation

Afen is disappointed in the universe. He bounds back and forth across his room explaining why to his wife, his infant granddaughter, the end table, and a reporter flabbergasted by her good luck and cringing silently against the wall in the hopes he won't remember she's there.

"There is no reason to suppose that a species evolving independently of Amentans, with their own evolutionary history and living mammalian species likely related to theirs, would end up looking like us. None. Every explanation every scientist has ventured to the press has been unimaginative and unconvincing retroactive refitting of bad models to baffling data. Aliens shouldn't look like us but with different hair colors. Aliens that are not made out of carbon at all would be unsurprising; aliens with only as much physiological dissimilarity as exists between us and animal species on our planet would be mildly surprising; aliens with opposable thumbs would be truly remarkable. This is not remarkable and biologically enlightening; this is just inconsistent with everything we understand about the universe. It doesn't teach us new things about evolution; it should make us rethink evolution. - don't quote that part, they'll take it out of context."

Reporter nods rapidly.

"All of that said, I've picked up three of the languages and I'm working on building a good machine translator, it's a challenge with as little as they've produced in the way of electronic records. I'm absolutely going there to meet them as soon as the politicians figure out what to do with themselves."

"Do you have any predictions about that?"

"About politics? Why would I have predictions about politics? They deliberately obscure relevant information, for one thing, and for another it's deathly boring."

"- I mean, sir, surely you hear from your son about -"

"I have seven children and some of them are very dense indeed but not quite dense enough to try to interest me in politics."

"I was referring to -"

"I know who you were referring to. If you want a statement from Aitim go bother Aitim."

"Thank you for your time."

"I did not alter my activities in response to your presence and therefore you can't yet be said to have wasted any of my time though you should go before you do."

...out skitters the reporter.

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Aitim drinks his lemonade. "I am not going to assist in arranging that rapists escape justice, Minister. Anyone, wizard or Amentan or human, who attacks one of my citizens will go before a judge for it, and whether each such incident is a massive secrecy violation or handled discreetly and with maturity is up to us."

"I do not think it is in your interests to make secrecy difficult."

"Oh, open conflict would be devastating to us both, and when I made arrangements for the base of operations on Mars to be prepared to conduct a war if necessary, I did so with the sincere hope that it would never come to that. But you do not have and will not get our cooperation with enabling people to prey on others. If they bother my people they'll be sentenced appropriately."

"You do not have the rabbit Animagus now."

"And I'm not asking for him back. I have no requests of you at all, actually, I asked for this meeting so that you could have some information. If they manage to escape, fine. If they don't manage to escape, they will be arrested, tried, and executed, and their personal effects returned to their next of kin if there's an address on record."

"Where did the jinx over your residence come from?"

"Jinx? Is this related to the teleporting not working?"

"Yes."

"Being unable to teleport I did not know that anything about my residence made teleportation unusual."

"Someone for some reason has done it. Do not play dumb."

"I don't know who did that or why."

"You are lying."

"Are you imagining that if you say that sternly enough I will come up with a different answer?"

"If I decide to kill you all the records in the world won't bring you back."

"You wouldn't like my replacement. I haven't told him about wizards because I'm anxious that his first reaction will be 'destroy Earth'."

Minister Du looks skeptical.

"Aren't you claiming to be able to tell if I'm lying?" Aitim looks directly at him. "We have the means to destroy the Earth and I think Aleva Neli would do it if he learned about wizards in a manner which suggested they were a threat to Anitam."

"It is obvious you are lying about the Anti-Apparition Jinx. I have not been reading your mind so far but I could begin to do so."

"I think you should, I think that wizards underestimating us has the potential to be catastrophic. Do I need to do anything? Say it again?"

"No," says the minister, holding eye contact.

Aitim is thinking about starships. His people are from a planet around a different star. The ships that go from here to there go unimaginably fast. The light from his star takes three hundred thirteen Earth years to reach Earth. The ships take a week.

You could point one at Earth while it was moving that quickly. You shouldn't. It'd be awful. It would draw strong condemnation at home; it would be a terrible waste of a planet, everyone would cry out, and it would also be a billion people dead but fewer of them would care about that. Whether they went ahead with it might depend on calculations Aitim hasn't done - if it killed everyone on the planet but left it habitable afterwards, then they'd be much more inclined to go ahead. A temporary fireball raising planetary temperatures to something no being could endure, dissipated in a year or ten so that Amentans could settle the ashes - yes, there would be people who'd sign off on that.

Aleva Neli is one of those people. It's not even a particular mark against his character, it's useful to be that kind of person if it's something people will know about you.

If Aitim dies there is an explanation that will make its way into the right hands. It is incomplete but emphatic that operations will need to be conducted from Mars. There are security precautions to stop a wizard boarding a ship - no, he doesn't want to think about the security precautions already in place to stop a wizard boarding a ship, he will instead think about his husband, who he adores immensely, and his sex life, which is very satisfying.

"You are being deliberately evasive," says Minister Du.

"I'm giving you the information I want you to have and not the information I don't want you to have, that being how conversation works. My species is also very distractible in springtime, it's hard to avoid this even when we're trying to."

"The Anti-Apparition Jinx."