Your earthquake preparations are your responsibility.

Please don't cause earthquakes while we're up here on the ice mountain!

...Fine, we'll stop mining the ice. For now. We need to build out the new town's facilities anyway, and enlarge the Kef, Archer, and Argo aqueducts.

The form of the duet is not as strict as he thought. Sometimes the second person in the exchange repeats the statement. Sometimes the aliens call each other by name or ask for information to be sent onwards to someone else.

The numbers that he thought were topics are definitely not topics. It never really made sense that they would always talk about the same list of topics in the same order, but the conclusive evidence comes from the long monologues. They're still usually completely incomprehensible to Siamek, but sometimes there are patterns. Phrases that get used a lot. And sometimes, those phrases start in one section and continue in the next! So it's actually a form of poetry where the length of each stanza is strict but the content is allowed to flow around in a way that seems sloppy to Siamek but he's trying not to judge the aliens on their artistic choices. Also, the stanzas are numbered. Maybe the aliens find counting soothing.

So, how do the aliens talk when they're not reciting poetry? Well, he's starting to learn about that, too! After several cycles on the ice, he began to hear long notes that warbled slightly and now he hears them most of the time. This resembles his kind of magic speech a lot better than the rhythm poetry! He still can't understand it, but the flow of these conversations seems a lot more natural to his sensibility, too.

"Do you... like Chime?"

"I guess... She's nice. She's very protective."

"That's her job."

"She's like, 'rest well, pups! - kits - everyone!' and asks each one of us individually how we're feeling."

"Did she do that before the accident?"

"No... but Larian doesn't do that."

"Larian's job is different. She probably told Chime to do that."

"Because Chime is more suited to it?"

"...Sure."

"She rides on my shoulders a lot."

"I assume the two of you have settled on a comfortable way for her to be warm without getting burned. Like the two of us." She pulls Calsa into a closer cuddle.

Tolesli is pretty sure the FD representatives know something. Maybe he's imagining it, as he watches with feigned hostility as they smile and nod as they pass each other. But something is keeping Siamek busy, whatever he is, and once he signed something furtively to Mofil, hidden between tablet and outstretched elytron, after making sure the Frozen City group was far along the corridor out of whisshopper range. Obviously Tolesli doesn't need to know, and there's no way to communicate anything to him out here, but he's still a little sad to be left out.

The next question is whether he should say anything to the Lei emperor. Would he even have noticed if he was an ordinary gardner loyal to Lei? Hm, he can check that...

"Do you think the FD is up to something?"

"Of course they are!"

"Are you asking me to do your spying for you?"

"I don't have time for politics. Ask Abilanedi."

"What a fascinating question! I certainly wouldn't want to offend our noble compatriots in this most unusual endeavor, this sprout of peace and proof of the value of pursuing cooperation between our peoples, united as we are on this planet, with such a vague, unfounded suggestion."

Is Mofil's feigned hostility towards him a little less feigned now? Maybe he's imagining it.

Sometimes one alien in the rhythm poetry game says a stanza, and the other alien doesn't respond, and then the first alien says it again. Sometimes the first alien repeats it many times before realizing that its partner is gone and giving up. It seems like the aliens don't have very good senses... Or their senses are not adapted to the environment of the drydark. Say, for them, all the air on Ansaf is bad air, so they're doing something like shouting from one drakehouse to another. One reverse-drakehouse to another. Eh. The point is that the aliens, or at least the poet species, can't keep track of each other. That also explains why they give information to each other to be passed onwards - they don't know how to talk to their desired recipient directly. And it also explains why the poets are so meticulous about their repetitive protocol - they can't tell if their partner understood everything until they get the response. Oh oh oh! And they break their message into stanzas so they don't have to repeat the whole thing, just one stanza.

The poets can't hear well and can't find each other, but they have an incredible memory. (Siamek does not have an incredible memory. He can mentally zoom in on a tiny brief part of a transmission but he can barely remember a single stanza.) ...Or they can write very fast. Some werewolves can take notes as fast as you talk to them, with a prepared stone like a book with very flat layers. Which requires extensive training, kind of like the way he has trained himself to recognize 'yo!' without having to zoom in on the beeps.

He's not even consciously aware of the beeps, nowadays. The deepest he ever needs to zoom in is the third-division-note clusters. An idea strikes him, of a country full of radiobugs, beeping frantically and aware of none of it. He shouldn't jump to conclusions, of course. But. Wow, that's a creepy thought.

He finds Mofil. "How will we know if the aliens are people?"