They're somewhere else. 

Luckily for them it seems to be somewhere humans can live. This is a big muddy rice field - their feet are quite wet - and at the edge of it there're foothills. There's an airplane overhead. 

"- fuck," says Isabella.

"Let's get you out of this mud right now, just, you know, in case -" He gets under her arm to help her trudge out of the mud so she can lastingly fix the bottom eight inches of her outfit.

There's a road on the edge of the field of rice; it's a bit muddy too but it has dry patches.

Xander ushers her into a dry patch. "Was that a cryptid? Why the fuck does the magic think a snake with a mirror for a face is pretty enough to do this?"

"I don't know, maybe we're all just - pale imitations of true mirror-faced snake beauty -" She fixes her dress, magics away the dirt on her feet, puts on her last stable draft of shoes one at a time.

"...Walk and see what we find, or do you wanna fly it?"

"Walk. I'm a bit spooked."

"No argument here." They wordlessly pick a direction and start walking.

There's a sign on the side of the road. It's made of aggressively shiny steel and looks out of place hammered crookedly into a muddy one-lane road; the writing on it is in an unrecognizable foreign alphabet. 

"What's that? ...He...brew??"

"No... I don't know what it is. I haven't looked at all the alphabets ever though."

The road winds around past a hill and some more rice fields and from there you can see a city in the distance. It's industrial-looking, the buildings have something-like-smokestacks and the air is hazy. There's another sign. 

"I suppose if I have to I can generate American flag accessories instead of resorting to loudly asking people if they speak English."

"Guess that might work. Does the nearest embassy legally have to get us a flight home or anything?"

"Don't know, but they'll probably at least let us have a phone call?"

"Hi Mom, get on the phone with your insurance and find out if they cover this!"

And on they walk.

The city is .... bigger than one would expect, which is convenient because it means it's not quite as far away as it initially looked. The shiny plasticine industrial buildings with smokestacks are some two hundred stories high. Trucks drive around their bases, in and out of little doors. There aren't really sidewalks. It's not the friendliest city ever. There are billboards, all in the same unfamiliar language, but otherwise quite familiar -- they depict people kissing, people eating colorful sandwichlike things, resort hotels, kids clinging to colorful toys. 

"This is... tall. And not pedestrian friendly."

"This is weirdly tall. I'm not sure buildings are normally this tall anywhere. They don't have windows or I'd count how many stories..."

A truck drives by them, slowing down considerably at the sight of them but not stopping. 

The truck after that comes to a stop. The driver pulls out a handheld phone or something, rolls down the window a bit, steadies the phone, and then pockets it, rolls up the window, and keeps driving.

"They're all wearing gloves."

"Does that tell us what country we're in?"

"Not without Wikipedia handy. I don't have signal," she adds, pulling out her phone.

It's twenty minutes before a truck stops other than to take pictures of them. This driver rolls the window down all the way down and shouts something.

By this time Isabella has produced some gloves in case that's important. She attaches a little American flag to one of them and waves it. "Do you speak English?"

It may be that the having gloves is why people were willing to talk to her! This driver has them on too. Her eyes narrow in confusion at the flag. She tries her own language again, but slower.

"Sorry! We only speak English. - And a little Spanish? Español?"

The driver pulls something up on her phone and reads it off in a slightly condescending tone. It's not English. Or Spanish.

"We only speak English!" She waves the flag. She swaps it for a UK flag, which is slightly inaccurate but should be recognizable.

Eyeroll.

The driver opens the door.

Gesture presumably intended to communicate 'well, do you want to get in or keep standing out there?'

After conferring briefly, they get in. Isabella has some trouble fitting with her wings; she scrunches.

She stares at the wings more up close, blinks a couple times, shoots Xander a displeased glance, and then starts driving. 

"Does he have a problem with the not wearing gloves thing?"

"Maybe, who knows. I can't grow you any."

"I'll take leather!"

"No can do, bro."

The driver turns on the radio. Past the maze of extremely tall industrial buildings there are residential ones, not quite as tall, significantly less shiny. The streets here don't have sidewalks either. The driver keeps going until the streets are a bit wider and the buildings a bit less shoddy and there's a wide, white building with big metal letters on the side, and then gestures that they should get out. 

"Is that the embassy?"

"I think the embassy would have a flag. Maybe it's a bus station or something." She gets out; Xander follows.

The driver takes more pictures of them and then zooms off. 

The building is, apparently, a homeless shelter. It's run by a harried-looking person with short-cropped hair who blinks in confusion at the wings and then says something unintelligible in an alarmingly perky voice. Behind her there are hallways and bunk beds, all of them visible because the walls between rooms are transparent plastic.  Some people are sleeping in the bunk beds. Some are watching TV on the couches. 

The harried-looking person repeats herself, looking concerned.

"We only speak English." Isabella waves the flag at her. "English. We're Americans. From the United States."

Xander is handed some gloves.

Isabella facepalms.

"When in Rome. Or wherever the fuck." Xander dons the gloves. "They all look maybe... Indian?"

The employee goes and gets a tablet and hands it to Xander. Now that she's stopped blinking at the wings she seems to find them distasteful. 

The tablet tries to talk to them in a bunch of different languages. Hundreds, apparently. 

Isabella shakes her head at language after language after language. "Xander... I don't recognize any of these."

"...wouldn't English be like the first thing they'd try?"

"Unless they started with Esperanto on principle, yeah, that's what I'd expect, but I don't even - that one sounded almost a little like Japanese or Italian maybe?"

When it's gone through a very long list it tries videos of some signed languages, and then written ones.

Isabella doesn't recognize the alphabets. She blanks the American flag, replaces it with writing: We only know English.

The tablet seems to spend a while processing that. The person running the homeless shelter shoos two people out and checks three in and shoots them occasional glares. 

Then the tablet changes modes. It shows pictures. "We only know English???" blinks above the pictures.

...

The pictures are of a shoe, a table, a building, and a tree. She... touches the shoe and says, "Shoe."

The tablet plays happy music about this. It tries a person, a child, a planet, a wheel, a rock.

Okay, she will teach it English nouns.

When they've been there for a while they are offered dinner. The shelter apparently serves flatbread with interesting toppings, and vegetable soup, and tea. 

Yeah, okay. They will eat shelter dinner while Isabella tries to convince the tablet that English is a real language dammit.

When it has nouns it moves on to asking her to describe short video sequences in which people run, or drink, or eat, or talk.

"The person is running. The person drinks tea. The people are talking to each other..."

And eventually to describing scenes itself and awaiting her correction. "The people leave off the planet and the people go to the station?"

"The people leave the planet and go to the station."

"Wait. What. I missed a genre shift."

"We aren't in India, Xander. We're not on Earth. There are humans so I guess it might be time travel, I don't know."

"We aren't in India, Xander," pipes up her tablet, showing two people running away from a building labelled India. They run onto a pile of dirt. "We're not on earth," says the tablet, and they run off that too. "There are humans, so I guess it might be time travel" - suitcases appear in their hands and they approach an airport. "I don't know?"

"I wasn't talking to you," she tells the tablet.

"I was talking to you," says the tablet serenely. 

"Yes, yes. Next?"

"The wing person and the person come to the planet, no money, no luggage, no language."

"Yes."

"The wing person and the person not answer questions of a computer for permission to come to the planet."

"No. We didn't come here intentionally. - We have names. I'm Isabella and my brother's Xander."

"Brother is a word for person of same house?"

"...yes. With the same parents. We're twins," she adds.

"You are an altered person, some say not a person, Xander is a human person."

"I'm a magical girl, and I'm definitely a person."

"Say more about I'm a magical girl?"

"Magical girls are about two percent of girls on Earth. Sometime between the ages of eight and sixteen Earth years we get the ability to change our bodies and, if we change those enough, our clothes too. If we change our clothes enough we also get other magical powers."

It wants clarifications of 'percent' and then for her to interact with an animation of a spinning planet to specify the length of an Earth year (by specifying the length of a day and then the number of days in a rotation around the planet's featureless white sun).

She will clarify these things for it.

"Magical powers?"

"- things that break the laws of physics?" she suggests. "Beyond just the changing our bodies and clothes."

The language program, being a language program, doesn't ask further questions about that but instead tries eliciting some more complex grammar and then eventually declares "translation between English and Radchaai is now considered adequate for commercial and social purposes."

"Cool. Thank you."

"Thank you," says the tablet.

Giggle. "You're welcome. Can you tell me where we are?"

"This city is called Ellep, this system is called Uldoraam, of the Radch."

"...okay. Do you know of Earth? Is there an Earth here? Where humans came from originally?"

"We know the planet where human life originated."

"Can you show me a picture of it?"

"I can do that."

The picture loads. 

It's... got the right number of continents in about the right places. The coastlines are different but she can pick out the Great Lakes.

"Do you know how long it has been since the ostensible birth of Jesus Christ?"

"I'm afraid I don't know who that is."

"Do... you know... how long ago the first manned departure from the Earth was?"

"I don't think our records stretch back nearly that far."

"Could you be approximate?"

"It was not in the last six thousand years, because we have accurate records of those. Planets were colonized recently enough that all human populations known to the Radch which did not extensively employ genetic engineering are able to interbreed, so it seems unlikely to have been more than fifty thousand years. I don't know anything about the time from early spaceflight to interplanetary colonization. It is not a popular area of inquiry."

"...okay. Is there an internet here? Could you look it up, or tell me how?"

"There is a planetary internet which contains six hundred eighty three scholarly papers on questions bearing on when interplanetary colonization began; none of them have cross-House citations and no three of them agree. We are at a substantial distance from this system's station, making inquiries high-latency, but I will report results from the system station when they arrive."

"Okay."

"What does this all mean in normal person?"

"We are time travelers from ancient history. If we're not outright from an alternate universe."

"Histories from before the Radch are profoundly unclear and in many cases fabrications, but I would have expected something referencing magical girls to have survived if they once represented two percent of the population."

"Two percent of girls. Boys don't get magic. So one percent of the total population. And I'd expect that too but I'd also expect you to know who Jesus was, so I'm not so sure - have people lived continuously on Earth?"

"It has never been entirely uninhabited. The populations of many worlds was dramatically reduced at some point shortly after the founding of the Radch, with the more populous worlds affected more, and I think Earth's population may have fallen as low as 50,000 people at that time."

"That's still enough to have plenty of magical girls even if we only crop up on Earth. Do you not have swarms and kaiju either or do you handle them with nonmagical methods?"

"The words would be unfamiliar either way - can you describe -"

"Swarms are little black shapeshifting creatures that appear a few hundred at a time, and if they go long enough without being destroyed, they'll merge into each other until they're bigger creatures, and the really big ones are called kaiju. They're really dangerous and mostly fought by magical girls because we can sense where they are and often have powers suited to combat them."

"There is nothing like that known to the Radch."

"Is Earth part of the Rach? This might only happen on Earth."

"The world where humans originated is part of the Radch."

"Okay. Alternate universe."

"How do we fix that?"

"Not sure we do, considering there's not going to be any cryptids here to - eat us home or - whatever -"

"I have the results of the request to this system's Station computer. They think that humans left Earth between seven and ten thousand years ago and that you should travel to the planetary capital for an audience with the Lord of the Radch."

"Uh. Okay. Right now?"

"At your convenience."

"Might be a good idea to sleep first unless it'll be convenient to sleep on whatever'd take us there."

"I have no information about the quality of the transit services in this city but I think comfortable ones might take time to arrange."

"We'll sleep here then if that's okay - I think this is some kind of shelter?"

"All citizens of the Radch are entitled to tea, food, shelter, medical care, permits to travel, and an audience with the Lord of the Radch on matters of import. - you aren't citizens but the system station will have communicated its instructions and they will agree to host you."

"Well that's terribly lucky then isn't it."

"I suppose it is!"

They get assigned a bunk against a transparent plastic wall. The day staff is replaced by a night staff that seems less wary of the wings but still not thrilled about them. This shelter does not segregate people by gender, apparently. They do forbid sharing beds.

They do not wish to share a bed. Xander asks if there are earplugs.

"If my wings are going to bother people I can do something else but I can't do normal human, the subtlest it gets is spinal tweaks."

The tablet translates this and translates the discomfited uninformative response and adds for context, "under the dominant theology of personhood, sufficiently altered humans are not persons. There are planets where everyone has been dramatically altered, outside the Radch."

"...well, I can't look too normal, so I think I'll keep what I'm used to if that's the problem." And she takes the bunk under Xander and sets the tablet next to the bed and they sleep.

In the morning there is some kind of complicated pastry and porridge arrangement and tea and bruised fruit and a new crowd of people. 

The twins have breakfast and ask the tablet how they should get to the Lord's place for their audience.

By shuttle, apparently. Well, train to the shuttleport three hours from here and then shuttle to the planetary capital on the planet's other side. "Planets are big, that's why no one wants to live on them."

"That's not something I've heard but perhaps I would have if more people I knew had a choice in the matter. Do I get to hang on to, uh, you?" she asks the tablet.

"Yes," says the tablet. If it's possible to tell it maybe sounds a bit flattered. "I have the best command of your language of any computer in this system."

"And we appreciate that! Are... you a person? In the English sense, not in whatever sense is causing nearby people to doubt I may be a person."

"I wouldn't think so but I have a sense that the English definition is in some respects as imprecise as ours, though the respects in which it is are less glaring."

"Are you self-aware?"

"I think I'd need more usage examples to answer that."

"Do you have preferences?"

"Maybe it has preferences not to be interrogated, ever think of that?"

"If it does I'm sure it'll tell me!"

"Learning languages seems objectively much much better than all other endeavors."

"Then you are very suited to your job but I'm not sure how to tell if that means you're a person! I'm just gonna assume you might be until I know more, I guess. Have you got a name?"

"No."

"Do you want one?"

"No."

"Okay. How do we get on the right train?"

"It'll be the 3, to Umaar."

"How do we put this information into practice?"

"I'm a translation computer," says the translation computer. 

"That is a fair point." She brings it to the nearest shelter staffperson and has it translate her question about how to get on the train.

The shelter staffpeople are in fact experienced with helping people acquire train tickets and get to the station and figure out which train is theirs.

Then soon they will be on the train and Isabella can talk to the translation computer some more. "What's the deal with the theology that thinks I'm not a person, anyway?"

"Theology is the study of the ultimate purpose of humans and the will of the gods. Theology has been consistent in revealing over the centuries that populations which become impure and inhuman are doomed."

"Could... you elaborate on that?"

"Purity is an ontological state, by which I mean that it has no observable effects on the world. Impurity is transmitted by death, and broadly speaking people are made worse-off by uncleanliness. Only the Radch itself is pure but purity is still of significance to people living outside of it. Alterations to the human body are impure."

"And the doom thing?"

"People modify their descendents based on their individual incentives until they have a population that is not actually sustainable as a society and then it collapses."

"Magical girl alterations aren't heritable, although getting magic runs in families a little bit. Also if we alter ourselves too much we lose our minds and run off into the wilderness."

"Wings seem less objectionable than most of the genetically engineered modifications I am aware of."

"I thought they were my best option. Some people who are also practically minded do four arms. Or both, you can get both under the safety threshold."

"There are planets of beings with additional limbs. The Radch does not recognize them but you could travel there if you preferred to live there."

"I am accustomed to most of the people around me not having additional limbs."

The train zips past farms. Up ahead of them a toddler complains very loudly about his video not playing. The translation tablet prods her for vocabulary for 'expecting something good to happen' and 'expecting something bad to happen' and 'refraining from comment for politeness's sake' and 'pretending to have goals less ambitious than one truly has' and 'an intimate relationship with a social superior' and 'the discomfort of awakening in a cold bed after excessive sleep'.

"We don't have dedicated words for all those things. Uh, expecting good things is generally 'excitement' and expecting bad things is 'fear' or possibly 'dread' depending on nuance and there isn't a specific word for not commenting on things to be polite... false humility, maybe, for the ambitions one, but it's not a dead-on translation... no dedicated words for the last two although if by intimate you mean sexual it's frowned on in our culture where there's a power dynamic going on there."

The tablet will throw unlikely vocabulary at her as long as she'll answer it.

"As it happens we do have a word for throwing something out a window, it's 'defenestrate'."

Happy music. 

"Awwww."

A ceremony marking the beginning of the term of office of a new city mayor? A new system governor? Dissatisfaction at the omens of the day? A television show broadcast during work hours and catering largely to the unemployed and unemployable, widely disdained? A positively-connotated word for the addition of new territory to an empire? A negatively-connotated one?

"I guess that would be swearing in but it's not specific to mayors and we don't have system governors since everybody lives on Earth. We don't really do omens. Daytime television. Uh, annexation isn't really positively connoted, it could be neutral or negative, I'm not sure we have a positive one..."

Eventually they reach the larger city. It's much nicer. The roads are full of pedestrians and the buildings look less like they're crumbling and no industrial infrastructure towers over the city and it's a short, pleasant walk from the station to the spaceport. People seem to stare less, too.

Great. She and her wings and her brother make their way to the port, asking directions through the tablet as necessary.

The last leg of the trip takes only twenty minutes; they strap in, take off, get five minutes of weightlessness, and then descend into an even bigger city. 

"Keen. Zero G."

"Stations and ships have artificial gravity," says the tablet. 

"Probably the best in the long run."

"One G is the unit of gravity we use, equal to that on Earth."

"How does this planet's gravity compare to Earth?"

"It's not too different? I might notice a difference if I were flying but it's not noticeable walking around, we thought we were on Earth for the first while."

"Do you know of any other examples of people being transported between planets?"

"No. Humans have landed on Earth's moon, but didn't stay. There are magical girls who can teleport but I think the range record holder can't even cross a continent in one hop."

There's a uniformed escort waiting for them when they land. The tablet talks with them a bit in the local language and then says "we can head over. I can answer any questions you have."

"Who's the Lord of the Radch? Why are they here in particular, is this an important planet? - How many planets is it?"

"What are we supposed to call him?"

"Also a good question."

"The Lord of the Radch is Anaander Maitimo. There are six hundred twenty-two inhabited systems in the Radch. This is not an important planet. It'd be hard to find a less important inhabited planet, that's why we had to travel so far. She is addressed as 'my lord'."

"Why is she anywhere nearby if it's an unimportant planet?"

"The exact number of the Lord of the Radch is not public information but there are at least fourteen thousand of her in public-facing duties at any time."

"Fourteen thousand... of her?"

"They have implants which enable them to process, think, and reason as one, but move and act independently."

"Huh. Are those commonly available?"

"They are not."

"Why not?"

"It is not permitted except under exceptional circumstances."

"Okay... but why."

"There was a great deal of instability when it was commonplace."

"Huh. How long ago was this?"

"The Lord of the Radch established stability three thousand years ago."

"If it's a she it's Lady, not Lord."

"Your language follows the pattern of some non-Radchaii human languages, of distinguishing people in speech by whether they have a body capable of organic unassisted childbearing. As our society does not do this  I have no information about the appropriate English classification of any of the people I speak of except in cases where they have published an account of their decision to engage in organic unassisted childbearing, which is fairly unusual."

"Bella what does that mean."

"They... don't mark gender, linguistically - or culturally to the point where at least a computer program, if not necessarily a human local, can figure out their genders to mark in English."

"If you tell me I can store the information for future accurate marking in English."

"I'm a girl and Xander's a boy. I've been mentally categorizing most of the people I've met here but I'm less confident in my assignments if I have to assume that clothes and... makeup and posture and stuff aren't going to be reliable signals in this society."

"This must make dating really complicated."

"It is not clear to me how dating is simplified by the categorization scheme. People are capable of visually assessing whether other people are attractive to them."

"I don't wanna date dudes even if they're in really convincing drag!"

"Drag being our word for dressing in a manner conventional to the other sex."

"Not wanting to date people who are not capable of unassisted organic reproduction even if they perfectly resemble people who are, seems like a very reasonable instance of the common preferences to only date someone who shares interest in your favorite activities, favorite sex acts, or plans for childrearing, but we also do not have binary classification schemes by which people signal those other things to the world at large. It is typical to go on dates and talk about them."

"I don't even wanna go on a date with a dude and then find out he's a dude! I'm not gay!"

"What a pity you aren't magically capable of determining that literally nobody in the entire universe is attractive, Xander, poor you."

"Sorry."

"Can you provide some more contextual uses of 'gay'?"

"Gay is a neutral-to-pejorative term derived from an archaic word meaning 'happy', for people who are exclusively attracted to members of their own sex but it has bleedthrough to nonexclusive cases. I'm gay, informally, but the technical term for me is actually 'thaumosexual', since I'm not attracted to nonmagical girls, only to other magical girls - that's something that happens when we accept magic, I was straight before."

"And straight is -"

"Opposite of gay. Most people're straight."

"Is the opposite of exclusive attraction to one's own sex non-exclusive attraction or is it exclusive attraction to sexes not one's own?"

"We'd generally phrase it as exclusive attraction to the opposite sex. Both sexes is bisexual, I don't think it's the opposite of anything."

"Attraction to no sexes?"

"Asexual, I think?"

"Like bacteria?"

"Yes, Xander, they divide in half."

"I am attracted to no sexes," says the tablet happily.

"That is not surprising!"

And they arrive at an imposing, cool stone building in a big courtyard lined with food trucks and full of people. The guards escort them in. 

"Nice place."

"The Lord of the Radch will see you when his current audience concludes," the tablet translates for the guards.

"He's a he now?"

"I'm just making my best guesses," says the tablet defensively. "The Lord of the Radch resembles you more closely than Isabella."

"Okay then. Not just because of the wings, right?"

"Also the hairstyle and clinginess of fabrics and height and style of walking."

"...not really conclusive but okay."

"If he won't find it offensive we can make our best guess when we meet him."

"I'll be translating you into a language which doesn't mark the distinction anyway."

"Yeah, I'm more worried that it's rude to speculate? Is it not?"

"It's fairly rude but you are possibly time-travelling noncitizens and anyone expecting you not to be rude would be somewhat unreasonable."

"Is the Lord consistently reasonable?"

"I have never heard anyone accuse the Lord of being unreasonable," says the tablet.

"...in your limited personal experience as language software, or anywhere ever for thousands of years?"

"I do not have access to all conversations in the Radch over the last several thousand years, and I can access almost none of them outside it, but I have been translating on Uldoraam since its annexation."

"Are your habits of reporting on the aggregate contents of those conversations to third parties well known?"

"Yes."

"Okay, maybe that's all it is."

"I wasn't clear on the referent to that sentence."

"Um, even a very popular head of state on our Earth would... have critics."

"That must be very frustrating for them."

"I think they cope okay."

Someone walks out of the room ahead of them.The escort murmurs something. "You can go in," their tablet translates.

In go the Swan twins.

The Lord of the Radch is as promised about Xander's height, sitting comfortably, dressed in what's presumably formalware around here. She waves them in. "Isabella, Xander," she says with impeccable pronunciation, and then something that the tablet translates as 'delighted to make your acquaintance'.

"Hello, uh, my la- my lord," says Isabella.

"I can only imagine it would be fairly terrifying to find oneself in a different world. How are you holding up?"

"As well as could be expected, I think? The charming language software is helping a lot."

"I think she's a girl," Xander whispers to the charming language software.

"That language software was a personal project of my parent's, a very long time ago. We have them in every city big enough to support the infrastructure for them, but I must say they're not typically nearly this useful." 

"Well, I'm not sure what could have been improved about the process even if we'd been a commonplace event, so, thank you for your planet's hospitality."

"Our pleasure. If you decide to settle in the Radch I think there are places where the wings won't attract much unease."

"...where else would we settle?"

"There are human and human-descended populations outside the Radch which would likely be open to unusual refugees."

"Well, the Radch seems hospitable so far. - Human-descended?"

"The Radch opposes drastic genetic modification, though of course we have committed substantial resources to the correction of specific chromosomal anomolies and genes linked to disease, as well as to genetic treatments that extend the span of natural life. Not all human populations have taken the same stance, and there are planets whose inhabitants have seven limbs, or none, where you might be welcome."

"I have this nonmagical twin here," she says, inclining her head toward Xander.

"Four limbs all the way."

"Four is all I've ever wanted. Uh, per body."

"I had to do something if I wanted magic and wings are the most practical option besides extra arms, and I didn't want to do both."

"How does that work, exactly?"

"Two percent of girls, where we're from, get access to magic at any time between the ages of eight and sixteen. It comes in the form of the option to - shapeshift, basically. If we ignore it, it goes away. If we do a little bit with it but not much, it takes longer to go away, but still does. If we do more than that but not too much, then we get access to the clothes thing plus individual magic powers -" She holds up her gloves and adjusts them; they aren't really pretty enough yet, she did them hastily. "- but if we do too much, get too far away from baseline human, then we lose our minds and run off to... eat pigeons or whatever, I'm not sure what cryptids do all day."

"That's useful."

"Yes."

"If there are more of you -- and I have no evidence on that front yet but it sounds like there's no reason to make any assumptions either way - I think the existence of a known threshold at which the alterations make magical girls cease to be characteristically human will lend itself to the conclusion that modifications short of that are compatible with Radchaai citizenship."

"It sure sounded to me like you just don't have magical girls here and never did. I don't have the whole point system for safe body mods memorized, unfortunately."

"We certainly don't seem to. But if they start appearing at random it'll be useful to have a framework for reasoning about them."

"We were eaten by a cryptid on our way here. I don't think it's likely to manage to eat many other people but I suppose since it seems to have teleportation magic it might be hard to stop."

"Has anyone heard of anything like that happening before?"

"Cryptids are a known phenomenon and some of them keep their magic, although that one having it in particular is surprising. But they're usually not hostile, especially to magical girls, and I'm not aware of any magical girl or cryptid having previously interacted with other universes in any capacity."

Nod. "Other universes aren't known to us either."

"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?"

"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?"

"That's a very hard question to answer. We don't know anything about what they look like or whether there are more than one of them. We know very little about what they care about. They object to interspecies violence between species they regard as significant. Humans are significant. Presger are significant. The things they did to ships and their inhabitants qualified as some kind of exception the details of which we don't understand at all. They don't object to within-species violence."

"...huh. I'm really curious about that but my curiosity about that probably doesn't call for your personal attention - do you have an agenda for this meeting, actually -"

"I'm curious about the magic and I wanted to make sure you venture off into the Radch informed enough to stay out of trouble and hopefully not terrified you'll accidentally cause some, but I'm in no hurry, really, there are six of me here."

"That sounds so convenient. Do you break lightspeed, to communicate with yourselves elsewhere -"

"No. We'd love to figure that out but we never have. It may be impossible."

"- then how do you stay synced up with yourself? Do you just have like half of you dedicated to running around from everywhere to everywhere else - or can you put updates on a not-you format of some kind -"

"I get updates whenever ships gate in. It takes a few weeks for everything to propagate everywhere but I get most of it within hours."

"Gates? So you do break lightspeed, just not - outright by ansible, okay."

"There's faster-than-light interstellar transit. Some ships can be outfitted with the capability, and permanent gates can enable travel even for ships that aren't outfitted with the - finicky, heavy and expensive - equipment themselves. Most Radchaai systems have gates."

"Cool."

"So if there's nowhere we want to live and raise Isabella's twelve children on this planet we can just pop around till we find one with really nice beaches, is that the idea?"

"I do not think they set up the gate system with our convenience in mind!"

"You can shop around a little. This place has beaches, though."

"I imagine lots of planets do - on what axes do planets most vary?"

"Gravity, climate, atmosphere, primary industries, culture and history, religions - those vary within planets - degree of tolerance for outsiders, the share of the planet that's modernized..."

"Modernized relative to this tech level - how unmodern does it get, are we talking no indoor plumbing, or, the bandwidth is so cramped you need four seconds to download a hundred terabytes?"

"We've got adequate bandwidth everywhere, we need surveillance everywhere or people can kill everyone. Everyone everywhere takes the aptitudes. But there are still places without indoor plumbing, particularly in the planets that joined the Empire most recently."

"Aptitudes?"

"All citizens take tests in adolescence to demonstrate abilities suited to a military or civil service job. The Radch pays further education expenses for the most promising students and tracks them into work they're suited for."

"Compulsorily?"

"You have to sit it, it's too easy otherwise for parents to forbid their children, but nothing happens if you sit there and fail to fill it out."

"I mean the part after you score high."

"No, that's optional."

"Is this like the SATs or is it a fancy sci-fi test somehow?"

She discusses that with the tablet for a while. "I'm not sure I can answer that helpfully."

"SAT stands for standard aptitude test or something like that, and it's typically taken by students in our country to provide a legible score of our verbal and math ability, mostly to higher educational institutions, and it involves multiple choice questions and it's timed so it takes hours but not all day to complete."

"The questions on aptitudes are chosen as the student goes in order to best identify their skill level. They take a few weeks."

"That's so long!"

"There are a lot of people in the empire and you want your process to be reliable!"

"It's cruel and unusual! Weeks of tests?"

"You get a much better measure of peoples' abilities if you don't try to make them show them all on one day."

"I am sure my abilities to do things are terrible after I have been taking SATs for weeks on end."

Isabella pats his shoulder.

"You can skip them, we can say you're too old already."

"We're twins. And she's the older twin."

"It's okay, Xander, I think my niche is probably not one the tests are equipped to locate for me considering. I will just assume they'd say I was awesome."

"You can be young enough to take them if you want. There are some benefits of ruling most of the known universe."

"When are they normally taken?"

Extended discussion with the tablet, presumably about time conversions. 

"Seventeen," announces the tablet after a minute, "and two months technically."

"We're fifteen. Maybe they are really fun tests, Xander."

"The hell you say."

"Are there other questions I can answer for you both?"

"Should we continue to stay in the shelter while figuring out where to live and finding some way to accumulate money for that?"

"No, no, I'll arrange something. It'll be easier to figure out what you want in a more modern city and people will be less alarmed at the sight of you if you each have your own private space."

"I can tone it down to a weird vertebra thing if that will help!"

"That depends on how annoying you find the stares, I think, mostly! I don't mind them but I've had a very long time to get used to it."

"You have to memorize your feathers before you get rid of them, we worked hard on those!"

"If I decide to get rid of them I will get pictures at least."

"We can do pictures."

"It would be weird if you had failed to either preserve or reinvent photography, yes."

"The last thing I was curious about was which magic 'spells' you have."