I am pleased to be here! The Seeker himself will probably need to help with the ships.

One of the diplomatic group's goals is to start thinking about what's fair to do about any discovered planets. We're not necessarily opposed to sharing planets or to all development on new planets. Especially ones that have to be terraformed first.

"Do you envision shared planets as having interpolated territory, or large chunks for Draak and large chunks for Amentans?"

Large separated chunks has the benefit of being more familiar and comfortable, with large stretches of a world managed the way we are used to doing it, but I can imagine benefits to a more interpolated way too - natural preserves across more variety of places and ecosystems, and our kinds would learn from each other more.

"There would be advantages to experimenting with both, but that presumes a pretty high supply of usable planets."

There is a lot of space out there. Most of it is dead. The ships are fast... But there are only a few so far. It would be bad to worry so much about which path to take that you stand still instead.

I offer more thoughts on the matter. We aren't going to like cities and I'm not sure how much acculturation will change that - either cities becoming more Draak-friendly or Draak getting used to cities - but I would not expect to ever be fully comfortable in one. Sapphires can live in oceans and lakes and waterways, and Rubies can be satisfied with small territories that they can dig in or in places like mountains and canyons. Or entirely underground in some cases. Those two clans will benefit from the marginal land Amentans don't want to use as much. Emerald Draak are a bit harder to satisfy since their preferred environment is the same as Amentans, though there are still equatorial and arctic regions, maybe?

It would be lovely if a Draak could manage a polyculture farm that mostly resembles the original environment with a lot of different plants and animals and export food from their territory and thus secure slightly more of a planet's land kept in a closer-to-natural way since there will be fewer farms necessary.

"Right, we're still going to prefer seasonable areas so Draak running food forests in the tropics won't be high opportunity cost. Though we do actually farm some of our tropics - some things only grow there, and if you pay a farmer enough they'll tolerate the permanent spring for a while - the climates of other planets' equators will probably vary."

A food forest or Draak-managed fishery somewhere on this planet might be a good thing to try.

Amenta has a better chance to make enough starship fuel to power a massive exploration effort. We've decided it's not useful to be so paranoid that we don't even tell you what materials go into the things. 

"I can look into a fishery in Tapai waters; we don't have tropical territory. What are the materials?"

We are going to want to talk to everyone else too. I presume you're inviting them?

The starship fuel is deuterium and helium-3, plus small amounts of some rare radioactive elements, but those are dangerous to handle and the Draak can take care of that part. Antimatter would theoretically be better but they don't have so much as a prototype for an engine using it yet.

Steel alloys, titanium, and a variety of rare earth metals will be handy for building more ships.

"People are converging here, yes. I'm told we can get those things."

We will have to come up with appropriate trades, of course. I think that can wait a while though.

"Do you have a preliminary idea of what might be appropriate?"

Concessions about planets? Transit service on the ships? Lots of money, earned some way or another? Maybe there are materials we have plenty of and you don't. 

"I could get a list of rarities if that's ever useful. Some of these things will tend to belong to private enterprise rather than governments; it seems like it might be simpler at least at first for governments to buy and consolidate the materials rather than for you to make deals with dozens of steel manufacturers, does that sound right?"

Yes. Complex interconnected economies are a new concept. Every part of the vessels we have was handmade often with great effort, and many of them only one or two Draak understand the full complexities of. The solar fuel - the ships have power plants that use a similar process to stars to generate hot plasma which is used directly and for electricity, that's what the fuel is for, hence 'solar fuel' - is the thing we are most worried about producing enough of, long-term. A skilled Draak could drive a ship by breathing specialized fire, but very slowly and it would be utterly exhausting.

"I think we'll be able to produce fuel if that's a step towards planets. It's hard to overstate our collective enthusiasm for planets."

Plenty of fuel is going to be necessary to move millions of people out to the stars no matter how the technology sharing and planet search works out.

"Yup. We'll figure it out. Even if most planets we find are uninhabitable we can mine them."

I think I want to study how specialization and economies work while I'm here. It's one of the biggest differences between our kinds. Shall I let you speak with someone else for now?

"Sure. I can send you an economist!"

Thank you. May you be blessed.

Ice goes to talk with some of the other diplomats. Partition scurries over with a big bag hanging around his neck!

I have writing materials!

Amseli can set him up with linguists as soon as they arrive!

He passes out sets of transparent sheets with colored characters on them. He warns the linguists that it's character based and it might be hard to learn because it was designed before anything else to be intuitive to Draak by using correspondences with the Song. The character for a Draak kind of 'looks' like a Draak does.

"That'll make it harder to use casually but just that much more interesting and informative!" says a green.

It's pretty interesting, yep. He starts explaining! It uses characters to represent nouns and adjectives, and those are mostly blocky or circular. Verbs are smaller and more like lines with things added on. Multiple nouns and adjectives can be written on top of each other rotated or shrunk or transformed in thus and such ways.

Verbs can connect to as many nounadjectives as they want and these little curves and dots indicate things like time order and what is doing a verb versus what is having a verb done to it. 'I bite rock and tree' is just 'I bite rock' with an extra bit pointing to 'tree'.

Every character has an associated color: Red green, blue, white, black, infrared, copper, silver, gold. This character means fire if it's red but steam if it's blue and lightning if it's white! He uses the plastic flimsies to write out simple thoughts as examples.