"Are there wars between Alteri houses?"

"Yeah. Never anything like the war between the Alteri and the Carthons - inter-house wars are always for authority and control of resources, not to annihilate the other house. At least the ones I've heard about. But it happens, yeah. I'm not sure how often it happens in practice, but it's not ridiculously uncommon."

"And they all keep slaves?"

"Yeah." 

"I'd love to hear more about your life in general. What projects you worked on, what technologies you used, what behavior they enforced, what they cared about..."

This is harder than the other questions in that it's less specific (and she doesn't know which parts of her life are important), but she nods.

"Up until I was fourteen I was a domestic servant. Lots of cleaning. I looked after Alteri eggs for a while, too. Normally I'd never have ended up in space, but Tellari was short on available spacers when Earth was discovered, and figured that an eleven-year journey was enough time to train non-spacers for spacer work. I've only been doing real spacer work for the last six months or so. We've mostly been working on the gate, mostly on replacing damaged parts with what we think are suitable replacements. 

They care about efficiency, about what you spend your time doing. You have to eat a certain amount. You have to sleep a certain amount. You're not allowed not to take care of yourself. Not allowed to waste time. Not allowed to enter most parts of the ship without a reason. Not allowed to use unofficial channels when you're out in space, which means no talking during work, unless there's an emergency or unless you're close enough to someone else to make hand signs. Allowed to talk at other times, mostly, as long as you're not interrupting things or plotting anything. Lots of things that aren't formally disallowed but which can still get you in trouble; you don't want to insult your superiors or think about insulting them. No hiding contraband. Never really sure which things are contraband, it changes quickly and it's not uniformly enforced. We usually work fourteen-hour days, with some scheduled meditation breaks to keep people focused. Sleep ranges from nine hours to five, depending on what they think you need. You get other assignments if you don't need much sleep. Uh, some of this is specific to house Tellari, but I'm not sure exactly which parts. I know the houses have different rules, but they're not very different when they're sharing the same ship space."

Humans can't usually work those kinds of hours. Of course, no one here has tried forcing them to do it anyway. 

"Alteri eggs?"

"Yeah, they lay eggs. Not huge numbers at a time, usually not fewer than four and not more than ten. Takes several months for the eggs to hatch, and then there's a larval stage and they hibernate for a bit and come out of it looking mostly like adults. You have to maintain a certain environment for them - certain temperature, certain humidity - but it's not that hard to take care of them. Just takes time. We mostly don't take care of them after they hatch, after that it's mostly the parents looking after them."

"The parents have up to ten at a time without help?"

"Yeah. The reproductive cycles are automatic, too, they can't stop having kids even if they stop mating, though if they do then all of those children will be sterile. They're not two-parent families like Liars have, though, complete Alteri marriages are generally between seven participants. They don't all traditionally help with raising children, but still. Individual households can get up to a couple hundred people before they split up, though a normal number is probably more like - I dunno, sixty or seventy? The one I was assigned to had eighty-six when I left."

"How does a seven-participant marriage ....I suppose there is no particular reason you would know that."

"I know some stuff? It's not like they gave me unlimited access to their personal lives or anything, but I did live in an established household for years."

"I am curious what kind of social institution a marriage with seven participants is."

"So for one thing, they're not all directly involved with each other - they're all different genders with different social roles, but essentially you have one mother and six fathers, and the mother has a relationship with all the fathers but the fathers don't necessarily have any particular relationship with each other, beyond the fact that they all have the same children and usually live in the same household and stuff. It's still an important social unit, your family defines your basic place in society, but it's not like all of the members of the family are necessarily constantly interacting with each other. Still a lot of competing with each other for status, though, even within the same family unit."

She is not super sure if that answers the question, but she's not super clear on what sort of institution marriage is expected to be, so hopefully that's a difference.

"Huh. How very alien, but I suppose of course it would be. Do people marry within or between Houses?"

"Both. Neither's particularly encouraged or discouraged. If you marry into a house then your primary loyalty is supposed to be to the house you married into, except for the mothers. Mothers are always supposed to be loyal to their mother's house, unless they decide to start their own."

"They can just decide to do that?"

"Yeah. They mostly don't, because it means forfeiting a lot of the support structures of your existing house, but if you're very powerful and you have reason to believe that your house won't react badly to you starting your own, or you have another house that you know will accept you as a subordinate house, then you can, yeah."

"What an interesting social structure. I'm considering whether we could ally with some of them for assistance with both of these wars."

She goes quiet for a few moments. Her face stays mostly neutral, but there's a general tensing of her posture.

"It's not impossible," she says, after a moment. "They're not all equally bad, and you can definitely play them against each other in plenty of situations. They're not trustworthy, never with aliens and usually not with each other, but if something's in their interests then they can see that. But they don't - they don't respect aliens, mostly? It might be different if they think you're at a similar advancement level, but you look like Liars, and they'll be judging you based on that. And there aren't any groups that will give up their slaves without being forced into it. No groups with any significant social power, anyway." Pause. "But it's not impossible." 

"Are there groups without significant social power that you know of that might give up their slaves?"

"Not that I know of, no. But they're different enough from each other that someone must have thought of it, the way someone must have thought of freeing livestock or banning marriage commitments or something. And most of them would do it if they stood to gain from it - even without Liars, they'd still have suke, that's something, it's not like any of the house leaders would have to actually get their hands dirty. And maybe there are people in favor of it and I've just never heard of them. Never, though, not even as a hypothetical."

"Suke?"

"The sterile ones. They have nine genders - seven that take part in marriages, suke who are sterile, and the mise, who the Carthons created and who can clone themselves indefinitely. The mise don't even really fit into the rest of society properly, but there are always lots of suke around. The houses keep some of them and give some of them to the government, if they don't want any more. They're not really slaves but they're not really - I don't know if anyone's free, I guess, in the sense of getting to make their own decisions. But they never have marriage connections and they usually don't have house connections, so they do a lot of the really unpleasant, unprofitable work that people don't care enough about to assign slaves to."

"Has this society looked into, uh, having computers do work?"