"That makes sense. I'm still - learning. I don't know what I'll do if I get a regular job."

"Well, you can always wait and see what your community needs, that's what I did. Or - I suppose I don't know that it works that way for humans, actually, does it?"

"Oh, um. No, not really. Humans have, uh, big communities, and no one can afford to wait if they're done learning. How do you know what your community needs?"

"You just kind of wait and see? We're, uh - I'm kind of curious if humans work like this at all - we get assigned to bands pretty early, usually from the same batch of babies but sometimes someone will be bigger or smaller and the elders will swap them around, it's more important to transition at the same time as your band than to be the same age exactly, and the band will figure out together how they want to specialize - mine picked bookmaking, a couple of us are writers and you can't exactly do that outside but it's close - and then different members of the band will pick up the different parts of that, so like we have some who make paper and some who do leather for book covers and some who know how to make book presses and some who do carving for the letters for them and some who run the presses, like that. And every band needs ranchers and gatherers and things, so when I wasn't that interested in any of the other jobs I ended up with this one."

"Oh, wow. Humans don't raise kids communally like that- well, some cultures do, and even more did, in the past, but now you usually get raised by one or two parents, and maybe a grandparent. And everyone picks their own job that will be good for the life they want when they grow up, but sometimes you have to do something you're good at but don't like, or something that anyone could do- more general, I guess."

"I'm really not sure what you mean when you say your parents raise you. I guess if you don't metamorphose that could be pretty different?"

"We start out as babies- they look like us but smaller, with bigger heads? Our parents take care of us until we can stand and walk on our own and know how to speak and do all the other things we'll need to do. We still have to learn enough to do our jobs, even after that. I think humans have one of the longest childhoods of all mammals, besides maybe elephants. I can ask the bartender if they have a book about it back there, but he won't give it to me unless I'll leave it there later."

"You could say that about us, too, but I think the details must be different - our fathers and brothers take care of us by bringing us resources, our mothers provide food? When we're babies it's our siblings who look after us personally, though, that's why I've got Zvi." It gestures at the much smaller tagma on its back.

"Our mothers can feed us and our fathers can provide other resources...but things are different now that we, um, invented society? It used to be more communal like that, with siblings and aunts and uncles helping more, I think? Now most families won't live together like that- just one mother, one father, and however many kids they have. There are still some families where they have more people involved, but not as many as before. Do tagmata have houses?"

"...oh, if you don't metamorphose you must do something else for living space, that makes sense. We do build, but we live in our mothers until our adult transition, so we only have our siblings to work with."

"In your mothers?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, um, that's insensitive. I'm not judging- not that there's anything, not that it would matter, if- um. How does that- work? If that's okay to ask."

"-uh, they grow a lot when they metamorphose? And we're already pretty big by the end of the male phase. I'm not sure what other problems you expect us to have."

"What...happens to the mothers? How do they feel about it?"

"They aren't, uh, people, by that point, to have opinions about it? That happens with the transition to male phase."

"-sorry, could you go through the phases in order? We just have child and then adult- maybe teenager in between, but since we don't have metamorphosis, it's not obvious. Adults are parents to children."

"We start as babies, like Zvi, and spend a couple of years like that, and then when the second brain develops enough to let us move around well we transition to children, like me, and live about fifty years like this, and then when we outgrow our first brains we lose them and triple in size and transition to males, and we're not really sure how long males live since they usually wander off eventually but that's at least a couple hundred years, but when they get big enough they metamorphose into females and live a couple thousand years like that. Most species work that way, more or less. I mean, quicker, usually, Klasata only live about six years total, and plenty of species have mobile females or external children, but..." it gestures vaguely. "Oh, and except elders, elders don't transition past childhood and they live just about forever."

"Oh. Is it hard to keep track of males who wander off?"

"We don't really have a way to, yeah. I'm not sure it'd help anything even if we did, though."

"No? Why? Does it help with population growth, or gathering resources? Do you have- oh wow, I don't even know how this will translate if you don't! Um, do you have mass manufacturing of things?"

"Even if we knew where they were we'd have no way of getting them back. It's fine, though, other males wander in and they're almost as good, they still bring us things. I'm not sure quite what you mean by mass manufacturing but probably what we have counts? We have machines to make things, anyway."

"That sounds like it's on the right track, yeah. Humans make a lot of things using machines instead of by hand: clothes, toys, books, um...I guess I don't know how factories work with food, and I kind of don't want to know. It sounds like," oh gosh this is so weird to say, "males are really helpful for trading between different communities! How big is a- band, you said?"

"About twelve, twelve to eighteen. That other thing didn't translate - we don't do much between communities at all, it's not easy and it's not that safe to try, either."

"Why wouldn't it be safe? Is it dangerous to travel, if you're a child?"

What a sentence. Kira isn't sure- no, she's sure. They'll only do something horrible if she tells them about this place. They're always so suspicious of anything new- she still doesn't know if she'll see a cell phone again in the next decade.

"Yeah - I don't know a lot about it, I've never been out, that's elder work. -uh-" it turns around, extending an eyestalk beyond the doorframe. "One minute."

A much smaller tagma clicks its way into view; this one is darker, with more of the brown mottling, and about the size of a large dog.

"Elder Ty - I didn't do anything, I promise - I just opened the door and this was here - there's a weird time thing if it closes again, they said, I didn't catch the details - this is called a human, they're a person, they don't metamorphose, I'm not even sure they transition at all, they're pretty weird? They were trying to poach me a few minutes ago but I think they changed their mind."

    "Huh." The smaller tagma gestures with a feeler and the larger one crouches to let it climb onto its back for a better view of the alien. "What's your story?"