"Unfortunately I don't think my magic theme is such that I can expect to ever get it to stretch to getting us home. Maybe I will settle down somewhere and have twelve daughters and hope some of them are magic."

"Oh, it's genetic?"

"It's not only genetic. But it does run in families. My great aunt is a magical girl - but my mom and grandmother on that side of the family are not."

"Well, if that's something you're interested in, it's an experiment I think we have a great deal of interest in enabling."

"I wasn't really planning on having kids without first meeting some girl and settling down and discussing it with her, but since I think I can safely assume there is no one in this entire universe I'm going to want to settle down with I might as well consider single parenthood."

Nod. "Can my assistant get either of you anything to eat or drink?"

"I could eat lunch, yeah."

She gestures. "And now I'm sure you have a lot of questions which a translation computer either wouldn't be able to answer or would strategically decline to get into."

"The only thing it's outright been unable to help us with except by translating questions for humans was about how to get on the train but I haven't been talking to it long enough to ask it everything I'd want to know. What would you tell us as an introduction to the Radch if we were from, uh, some - undiscovered human-occupied planet outside Radch space who strayed into it?"

"It'd depend very much on - what they were looking for, and where they were coming from. I'm afraid I know very little of ancient Earth."

"How did you guys lose so much history?"

"That one I can answer. So it transpires that there are a number of extremely dangerous inventions which require extensive surveillance to prevent and which permit humans to cheaply wreak enormous destruction on their worlds. For obvious reasons I am not going to specify what they are, but as soon as they became within our reach about half of human civilizations annihilated themselves and the other half came close. If they'd come within our reach before faster-than-light interstellar travel did, it would have been over. But humanity had reached a few hundred worlds already by then, and so enough of us survived."

"And this didn't even leave readable artifacts?"

"There was a lot of deliberate destruction of anything from which dangerous things could be rederived but there's still things left. In many cultures they are highly prized religious texts and occasionally a translation will be a best-seller. But - it's been a very long time. There's much less left than you might expect."

"That's - mindboggling, but..."

"We lost all the computers, if that helps make sense of it."

"Okay, yeah, that would have been about the right scale of catastrophe."

"I imagine a lot of people will be grateful for this chance to relearn some of what was lost."

"I don't think we could possibly begrudge the historians, to whatever extent they consider our information usable since it's from an alternate universe with magical girls and swarms."

"I suppose it's possible that that changed enough that there are no real similarities, but I bet they'll want to know all the same."

The servant brings lunch and tea and a little folding table for it. 

Twins take lunch. "Lot of tea," remarks Isabella.

"Tea is one of the defining features of civilization."

"Do you have an alternative translation for that?" Isabella asks the tablet directly.

"People in the Radch assign tea a great deal of significance, compounded by the fact that most of the neighbors we have any trade with don't have it."

"Are the neighbors not civilizations?"