In a few weeks - with the exact timing subject to change with the weather but the weather is almost never a problem - they'll go sit around outside having a potluck and stargazing and talking about what they're glad of, in the past year, and what they hope to achieve next.

Oh, that sounds like fun! The purples would love to attend.

Excellent! There are half a dozen of their Sesati coworkers at the party, and four Sesati women who might or might not in some combination be the mothers of the eight children present, and an old man with a pronounced limp. Several of them have cooperated in bringing a big pot of lentil soup and someone's brought some bread and cheese and someone else has brought figs and several people have brought wine or beer or both.

One purple brought a big custard trifle and the other brought a rack of lamb. They feel the culinary equivalent of overdressed but hopefully the locals appreciate it??

They do! Those are very popular! Someone makes sure the children and elderly get some of each. Several people compliment the lamb. (They might feel less overdressed when they try the soup. It’s creamy and thick and seasoned with cinnamon and cumin and nutmeg, though it sure does look boring.)

One of their coworkers is happy about his language-learning progress. The old man did something cool and innovative with his pottery this year. One of the kids learned to swim on his back! People seem to be congratulating them and offering toasts.

The Amentans are happy about having discovered aliens, and one of them got engaged last week and the other recently got her engineering certification!

There are toasts to all these things. One of the women and several of the kids chime in that meeting aliens is great. One of their coworkers asks excited questions about the engineering certification. One of the women cautiously ventures that if they want to talk about their engagement they're welcome to, though of course only if they want to.

"I passed the test just in time to get my application in to work here! I was fifteenth out of a hundred people sitting the exam, and now I'm on another planet, how cool is that?"

"My fiancée is one of the cooks here! We met on the trip over, it was a few days with nothing to do, and she and I like all the same music and wound up dancing around the cafeteria and it's gone from there. She asked me to marry her just five days ago!" says the other purple. "We're planning to have the wedding in eight months when we have enough vacation days saved up to go back to Amenta for it so more of our families can come, it's a long expensive trip."

The consensus is that this is very cool. Some of the kids want to know all about engineering.

One of the Sesatis is curious about Amentan weddings.

Amentan weddings vary but the specific kind this couple is planning involves all the guests who are related to the principals putting a gift for their future children in a basket and explaining what they hope they will inherit from their side of the family - it's often baby clothes and toys but sometimes it's things intended for when the kids are older like tools, the fiancée has a nice cast iron pan she came by this way - and the unrelated guests, friends of the couple, will write letters to one or both halves of the couple, sealed up with things like 'when you're fighting' or 'when he's away for weeks' or 'when you're both sick in quarantine together', to open under the relevant circumstances.

Some of them find the basket thing really intriguing! The letters thing just seems strange. (Most of these people are illiterate.)

It didn't happen this year but one of their coworkers ventures that he also got married and is very happy about how that worked out because his wife is clever and thrifty and very quiet. But they didn't have a basket. They just gave each other their oaths in front of her family and told their lord once there was a baby.

Is that so the lord can give them baby themed presents or something?

The presents are not that baby-themed but yes! Whenever you have a baby you take the baby to the lord and the lord writes down who the baby's parents are and gives them a pound of dry lentils or rice and - work arrangements aren't the same way in Sesat, exactly, but in practice they can think of it as a couple of weeks of paid time off. Since having children is good for Sesat and should be rewarded, and tends to leave the new parents badly in need of rest, and since it's bad for babies if the mother is hungry.

...a pound of lentils or rice won't feed them for weeks, will it?

No, they keep farming their own food. But they can take a break from also working for their lord. And separately from that also get the lentils. Actually this guy is totally going to explain how feudalism works in Sesat in as much detail as won't make their eyes glaze over.

What a weird org chart, but these purples certainly don't know how they did it at this tech level.

"What's weird about it?" this same guy whose name happens to be Dira asks.

Meanwhile another Sesati is telling some of the other people present that he plans to learn how to go to space and then do that.

It just seems really complicated. Probably theirs would seem really complicated to someone who wasn't used to it too though.

"You don't have to learn much if you just want to travel," volunteers Recently Engaged Purple. "It's just piloting that's complicated and one pilot can move thousands of people."

"What does it cost?"

"I don't know, right now no humans are going anywhere! For us it's mostly covered under our employment contracts how often they'll comp us travel."

Sigh. "And I'd need to figure out how to travel anyway. But I want to. I will."

"Do you know," someone else says, "looking at the stars is supposed to be a metaphor for how there's nothing keeping us down. We always said we'd reach all the way up there. Meant it as - like - just - something you say that means you can do anything."

"We had sayings like that too! They sound kinda different now... Our sun is that one over there, the bottom one in that triangle."

"Oh, part of the goat. - Do you collect the stars into pictures like that?"

"Yeah but they look different from Amenta so we don't have any for here."

Well, the Sesatis can point out the constellations - there's the goat, and the field of barley, and the waterfall which only arguably counts as a constellation, and the ladle, and the hunter, and the lovers. And you can find the cardinal directions by looking at them.

Some of them would like to know what constellation Sesat's sun is in as seen from Amenta.