"OK. Food and water and language lessons, then. Probably some exercise at some point."

"That sounds great."

She returns to their regularly scheduled language lessons for however long it takes something else to happen. She's still not super enthusiastic about food, but she tries her best to eat, and asks Ettelië if there are other options when she really can't bring herself to do that for a given dish. She still takes frequent walks, but now they include conversations with the other Elves on board - she learns names and bits of identifying information for as many people as she can, and does her best to be generally pleasant to everyone.

There's a part of her that still feels really happy, and a part of her that feels like she's coping. But she is coping. She's pretty good at managing at least that much.

A few language lessons later - "Lord Maedhros says that he does want to talk to you. When is a good time?"

"Any time, I guess? My schedule mostly consists of doing other things while I wait to be of any strategic importance."

She might possibly be feeling the sudden need to get up and pace and work off nervous energy, but she doesn't think that feeling is gonna go away, so now is probably legitimately as good a time as any other. Except strictly superior, because she's pretty sure moving quickly is a good thing.

"All right." He twiddles with the computer. "Just a minute, then."

She nods. And tries really hard to believe that she's, like, a competent person who's ever known anything in her entire life ever.

He has a face on the screen. It's not a perfectly convincing face - there's nothing obviously wrong but there's something wrong. 

His voice sounds normal. "Imrainai! Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. We're so glad that we had the fortune to find you."

This is sort of weird, but is probably less weird than talking to a computer without a face. She smiles. "I'm glad too! Uh, partly because not being found would probably have meant suffocating to death in space, but I'm also really glad if it gives me that chance to help you, or for you to help us."

OK, good, yes, that's only sort of a terrible conversation opener, she can do this.

"We would very much like to help your people. It sounds like they are being treated unconscionably."

"Thank you. I don't have an extensive reference class, but I'm sure the situation could be improved considerably from where it is, if we had more resources to work with."

"That's good to hear. What resources do you have in mind?"

"All Liars except the ones on Earth are currently ruled over by the Alteri. We couldn't begin to improve things for ourselves without a method of disabling our implants, which I've been told you're interested in researching. If that can be accomplished, we'll at least have the possibility of rebellion. If it came to a war - and I expect it would in most places, though perhaps some houses would negotiate, if they felt there were too many slaves in their area who were capable of hurting them - then of course we would benefit from military aid and from the chance to transport children and the elderly to an area that had some level of safety or stability. But I understand that that's a lot to ask of you when you're fighting a different war yourself. I think if there's a method of disabling the implants, though, we'll have a shot, even without additional aid. It's not as though the Alteri houses will do well fighting a war on two fronts, either. It'll be particularly valuable if there's any way to disable the implants at range, without additional surgical incisions. I'm not sure if that's possible, but it'd completely change the situation if it were."

Frick, she almost sounds like she knows what she's talking about. Helps that she's been thinking about this for weeks, but still. She should pretend to be competent more often.

"That makes sense. They can be activated remotely by the Alteri, correct?"

"Yes. I know there's a range limit, but I don't know what the specific distance is. I don't think you can activate them from orbit if the target is on the planet below."

"With all electronics we know of, if it's possible to remotely send it instructions it is possible to remotely destroy it. I would be optimistic about the same being true of these chips, though we might not have enough data yet to design such a solution. It's a very good idea."

"That sounds promising. I'm not - I mean, I guess technically I'm sort of an engineer, but I'm not the sort of engineer who would know about specific technical limitations of the chips. I can tell you what I've observed, that's all. But it sounds like you do have the resources to investigate this, and that's good. We'd be tremendously grateful."

"Of course. I would love to hear about your communities - how they're organized, how you're trained, how you think they might be organized if they were free -"

She nods. "Liars are more embedded in Alteri communities than the other slave races are. Some of us work almost entirely on our own, but many of us work under or alongside Alteri. We usually live in spaces that are only a short distance away from Alteri living and working spaces, if in inconvenient locations. Our basic units of organization are our work crews, the groups assigned to do some particular task together - they're not particularly stable, since individual members can always be sold or contracted out to others, but they're the level on which group organization happens. You're working beside people who do similar or complementary jobs, so if you're not at your best, they'll have to make up the difference. So it's important for all of us to take care of each other. Below that, we're allowed families and partners - raising children without two parents is inefficient, so most houses either require forced marriages or simply present mothers with children and leave it to them to find someone to act as a father. They don't necessarily respect family ties, but they take them into consideration sometimes. We're often bred for specific tasks, though many of us are also reassigned later in life if it becomes convenient for the house. Skilled work is taught by a combination of Liar and Alteri instructors, though specific methods depend on the discipline. We're generally motivated to learn because skilled laborers are more economically useful than unskilled ones, and therefore less likely to be killed or made to work in unsustainable conditions.

I'm really not sure how we'd organize ourselves if we were free - we have no experience with it, and most of us never even think about the possibility. Even knowing about Earth, I don't think I'd seriously considered it even as a hypothetical until after I arrived here. I'm sure we'd benefit from contact with other societies that could be models for us. I'd hate to leave people in a situation where they're free, but their only model of a society that doesn't consist of slaves is that of the Alteri."

She nods again, indicating that she's done, and kind of unsure whether she's gone on for too long.

"What do you know about the other species that are enslaved by the Alteri?"

”There are two of them, neither as populous as we are. Thieves live underground and are mostly used for mining and construction work. They have at least one language of their own, but it's written, not phonetic, and I don't know it. I think my work crew leader does. Sluggards are crystalline entities that can barely move on their own - they live for a long time, reproduce slowly, and can't do much useful work, so there aren't very many of them. They're good structural engineers, though, if you can train them and get them to cooperate with you. We had one on the last ship I was on. Thieves have implants. Sluggards don't, both because they couldn't find a recognizable brain to attach them to and because Sluggards aren't really capable of dangerous defiance."

"How are the Alteri organized politically?"

"I can't go into specifics there; they don't feel the need to educate us on their government. I know the basics. As a rule, their first loyalty is to their house - a really large set of households, all with a common maternal ancestor, usually many generations back. I'm not sure how many there are, but I know they're not all equally powerful, and some houses are subordinate to others. They also have political entities centered on particular geographic regions, but those are less important than the houses for day-to-day life. Most things are settled within a single house or between houses; it's rare to call on the local government to settle disputes. I don't know that much about the legislative process or anything, sorry. I know most of the real government officials report to multi-house councils, that's about it."

"It's all right. It would be useful but I wouldn't want to make plans around it without having any communications with the relevant people anyway. Perhaps I can sneak onto one of their ships. Are there any houses in particular you know more about?"

She almost says sneaking is hard because the psyons will notice you, then remembers that she's talking to a computer and that computers probably don't sneak the way other people might sneak.

"Yeah. I was born under house Kendari, and was transferred to house Tellari when I was about twelve. Tellari's not a major house, but it's subordinate to house Atekri, which is. There were only five active houses in earth space, last I heard - Tellari, Atekri, Somri, Festri, and Nari. Nari is subordinate to Somri. Festri's independent, but they're not doing well financially. People say they might end up having to swear loyalty to one of the larger houses for protection soon. They're probably the second most powerful in Earth space right now, though, after Atekri."