"Are you asking me or her?"

"You, I'm wondering mostly whether this is a conceptual or a vocabulary problem."

"The Radch is civilization. That's not quite definitionally true, one could imagine there being something else which was unambiguously-enough civilization that they stopped being the same concept, but in the world as it is now, most people won't admit of any distinction."

"In English the word 'civilization' I think applies to any society that builds cities."

" You could perhaps say that the distinction between societies that build cities and societies that don't is comparable conceptually to the distinction between the Radch and other human societies."

"Because of tea?"

"Don't mind her," Xander says to the Lord, "she's nitpicking is all."

The tablet thinks for a while and consults with Anaander and then says, "Tea is metonymy for interstellar civilian trade safe enough to be worthwhile for shipments of moderate value per pound."

"Okay, I guess that's a useful sort of thing to have a metonymy for."

"Also people really, really value tea."

"Earth has tea - not interstellar shipments, but intercontinental - but we're just not that into it. Coffee's more popular in our country."

"I don't expect that to make you any enemies but also you should try something better than what's in the homeless shelters before you write it off."

"You're not wrong." She tries the tea.

It's much better than what's in the homeless shelters but it's still something that humans would conceptually sort as 'tea' and not a universally-compelling beverage or anything. 

"Yes. This is nice tea. I don't need to consume it with every meal but it's fine."

"I'm glad! Anyhow, if you were from an undiscovered human planet today the main things I would tell you were that interstellar trade is very important indeed, that there is a god here for any religious practice of significance to you, that the Radch is closely surveilled enough that no one here can kill ten million people even if they want to, which is untrue of other places once they develop enough technology and inevitably eventually catastrophic, and that we are protected by a treaty with the Presger which protects other human civilizations as well."

"Presger?"

"She's an atheist."

"I had been going to put off mentioning that!" hisses Isabella.

There's an engaged back-and-forth with the translator. "It seems possible that our worlds could vary in whether they have gods," it offers after a moment, "but it's not obvious enough that all people looking at the world are persuaded of it and it's of little practical significance on the individual level anyway.

The Presger are an intelligent alien species which, before the cessation of hostilities, dismantled human ships and their inhabitants for reasons still unclear to us."

"You managed to treat with them under those conditions?"

"It was and remains complicated - in particular, they think I can answer for all humans, which seems likely to be a problem at some point - but we have peace presently."

"Well, that's better than the alternative."

"Much better," she says fervently.

"What are they like? Besides... alien, confused, and sometimes hostile?"