"Interesting. The article seems interesting but I don't know whether it would be productive to look at that now – I'm no physicist."

Damin gestures in the air with both hands and aftendrils. "My language install gave me some idea of what a 'moirail' is, but I'm not sure if we have a congruent concept. We have the concept of committed sexual partners, and coparents, and of friends and allies. Yes, my species reproduces sexually, but also asexually. I was produced sexually. My workers were produced asexually.

Hm. I wasn't really prepared to become a celebrity. My two parents were popular but I deliberately shunned pursuing the same line of work as them in favor of running a farm, because I don't want to be forced to interact with people I don't feel like. But like, being an alien necessarily means lots of attention being put on you. That was an aside – I should give you my answer."

Thoughtful silence for a dozen seconds.

"I don't mind you doing the interview. You getting to ask me questions was what you wanted in exchange for helping me, right, at least until I manage to acquire money. Which I suppose I'll have to do soon, given that all of my knowledge of agriculture and psychotherapy wouldn't transfer."

"I'm no economist, but my naive expectation would be that your knowledge of agriculture and psychotherapy will better than transfer, seeing as how they're miraculous second data points for how those things work in general as opposed to just on Byway. But . . . that sort of implicit nonverbal knowledge isn't the kind of thing people usually pay money for directly, so you might be right about having to earn money some other way.   . . . But surely you'd pull huge consulting commissions with - well, with just about anybody!

Moirails are - yeah, a sort of crossfade between coparents and allies. Somewhere in human evolution - actually, I should be recording this. One hour, please.*"

Naxi disappears into his room and emerges two minutes later holding a little silvery recording device. "Is it alright if I just - start now? Or - your workers, fuck, I completely forgot! I don't have extra airbeds - anyway, yeah, we should probably figure out their sleeping arrangements before we start this . . . ?" It occurs to Naxi how strange it's been that Damin's workers have expressed no apparent curiosity, or any kind of independent desire.

*Polite-idiomatic requests for patience on Byway come prepared for the planning fallacy.

"I suppose."

Damin is surprised at it taking one hour, but he doesn't feel upset about it – he doesn't have any calibration as to whether this is a long or short time with regard to preparing recording Bywayean recording equipment.

He's surprised again when Naxi arrives after only two minutes.

"You haven't said yet whether this interview would be kept by you only, or whether you plan on sharing it. I'll be much more reticent in answering questions in the latter case.

My workers can just sleep on the floor, it's fine. Better if they have bunks or beddings, but it's not necessary."

Oh, right. Naxi'd heard that question, just, it got lost in the shuffle.

"Right, sorry." Naxi wonders why there are ways Damin might be reticent to answer an ethology-interview question to an alien society, that he wouldn't be reticent to an alien he doesn't even know. Naxi was definitely planning on distributing the interview transcript to some extent, because that's just what you do with momentous interview transcripts, but Naxi is a pretty private person and if Damin will elaborate more in a private interview and this gives Naxi an excuse not to go to the trouble of distributing and just have secret private knowledge about Damin's species forever, well.

Naxi is in and out of his room, hastily setting up three pillows-and-blanket-piles beside the air mattress.

"I'll make a reasonable effort to keep the records private - not an effort you can actually rely on one gross per gross, though, just because I don't have the resources. The main thing in that case will be being careful not to let people know the record exists, because if any decent number of people finds out, someone will hack it out of sheer burning curiosity, and then it'll be everywhere."

"What does reasonable effort here mean? Hack...oh, acquire by electronic means. We can have my...workers write a transcript of our interview instead, if you want. It seems that our language install also have us literacy, although they won't know Bywayean shorthand the way they do Imperial shorthand. Hm. I could have Ders and Rend write out your and my words respectively, to divide the work, and then you can review the pages to ensure that they wrote things accurately.

It's not that – right, I should assume that the cultural gap between us is very wide, and that I should explain things as though you have no context. It's not exactly that I don't want it to be made public, but that doing that...touches on basal instincts regarding feeling exposed and vulnerable and out in the open? If you share the interview with close friends of yours, I wouldn't mind that. I don't think I would share with you what I wanted to keep truly private, since we just met, even if you were to take very careful precautions not to let that information get out."

"I didn't particularly mean hacking by electronic means, the word is for all sorts of deliberate access to secrets, although I can see why your language install - one of the freakiest part of this to me - gave it those connotations. I was planning on just keeping this recorder in the mini safe I carry around with me."

Naxi is confused about what exactly Damin means by the exposure stuff - there are things he wouldn't share with anyone except his moirails, lots of things, actually - but they're not the sort of thing he'd say in an interview about Bywayean culture after isekaiing to an alien world, or be comfortable saying at all to someone he'd just met. Naxi wonders if Damin will ever be okay with people wanting him to make some sort of public-record interview for the general populace. He keeps all that to himself, though - it serves no interest of Naxi's to prompt Damin to think about that stuff right now, and it's not Naxi's business anyway.

"The recorder seems fine to me. My world does have audio recording equipment but we only use it for music. Transcripts are easier to search and quote.

I suppose I shouldn't be too concerned about the fact that I exist leaking, since that's going to be inevitable, given the alien biology and all."

"Right, okay then, if you don't have any remaining objections" - Naxi turns the recorder on and picks up where he left off.

"Moiraillegiance mainly draws on instincts that originally evolved to help humans' ancestors conduct long-term coparenthood, but early on in human evolution, most of those instincts were also stretched to cover close non-coparent allies of either sex - essentially, someone with whom your interactions are net-positive-sum. All coparents are moirails, but not all moirails are even potential coparents, seeing as you might be of the same sex, or one of you a postmenopausal female or something."

Damin looks abashed.

"Ah, I forgot to ask you whether you want the style of interview where I only answer direct questions posed to me, or the more conversational style where you want me to comment on anything in particular I find interesting."

Naxi looks similarly abashed!

"I was assuming this would be less of a dialogue-between-an-important-person-and-a-skilled-interviewer and more of a dialogue-between-two-important-people, at least in terms of the rhythm - just because we're both aliens to each other and I assumed it'd flow that way most naturally, not least because you'd be curious. But it's low-friction for me to switch to just interrogating you if that's easier for you for whatever reason."

"I wouldn't call myself an important person." And Damin doesn't think Naxi is a particularly important person either, but he's not going to say that. "I am fine with either format, and besides, I'm agreeing to do this formal interview as payment for you helping me get set up in this world. Which do you prefer?"

"I weakly prefer the dialogue-between-two-important-people format - if your language install is telling you two people have to be important in order to have a dialogue-between-two-important-people, it's wrong! It's a part of childhood development, making little dialogues-between-two-important-people with your friends, even though everything you say is horribly cringily misguided. Well. Most of it. How do kids where you're from learn to congeal their ideas and express themselves, if not in that way?"

"Alright. In that case we can have that. I'm mildly confused about what it means to be an important-person if being important doesn't factor into it. 

Hm. I'm not sure exactly. Just by existing, I suppose? Consuming content and introspecting and writing and telling...employees what to do. I very rarely meet children."

"I don't frequently meet children either - at least, not in a get-to-know-each-other context. I just remember my own childhood and have osmosed a sense of which parts of it are considered standard. Children where you're from regularly have employees?" Naxi acquires a fear that Damin's species may partially consume their own brains as they sexually mature, thus resulting in a norm of the young working in supervisory positions over the old!

"The style of dialogue is so named because you're talking as if you were an important person, and important co-podcasters actually do talk that way, but so does everyone else, from time to time, about what they feel like they're an expert in."

"We have children rarely – the vast majority don't have any before twelve dozen years of age. Our years, anyway.

Yes, everyone does. I've employees since I was born. I inherited them from my parents.

I'm – so – I'm confused about that? How does speaking as though I was an important person be different from me speaking as though I was a person of average importance? Also wouldn't that constitute misrepresenting yourself? I don't want to present myself as something that I'm not, unless it's LARP or a hypothetical-thought-experiment or something."

"Twelve dozen - Vaxi. Humans can in principle have kids at a dozen and three, earlier for females, and females can't have kids at all after age four dozen or so, and it's considered unwise for multiple reasons but primarily genetic deterioration of the gametes for either sex to try after about three dozen. Lots of people do it anyway though, especially with recent genetech, and fair enough. Baseline humans senesce to death around seven dozen, but recently we've pushed that out quite a bit. Not to mention we started preserving our dead as glass statues in tanks of liquid nitrogen a while ago, so maybe dead they are not.

How would you inherit an employee?

To talk as if you're important is - to talk as if you have something to say, something of substance, not just a request for clarification or a status report, that you think your audience should listen to, as if they were your apprentice, or your child. It's an awful look if you end up doing it out loud in a context where the other person actually knows better, but in private, no one gets hurt - except for possibly you, if you're unnecessarily deceiving yourself about how much you know."

Surely Damin will go 'Ohhhhh, that's what you're talking about!' any minute now, about what Naxi's saying about importantness.

"I'm sorry to hear that. We do not senesce and do not lose fertility as time passes. We become capable of having children between a dozen and two to a dozen and four of our years old, but no one has children that early.

Were I to have children, I would assign some of my employees to work for the child. That's part of why no one has children that early – you want to make sure your child has enough employees to sustain themselves. I inherited three dozen from my parents.

...I think I'm just going to speak normally and let others decide whether they think I'm worth listening to or not. In my world people talk in the same manner to apprentices and children as they do to experts and adults – it's just that the content is different. Well, I suppose that the manner of speaking would be different for young children, since their minds aren't fully grown yet, but that only lasts a short while."

"My return condolences, it sounds very boring for everyone to talk the same way to everyone else! Although, yeah, not a tenth as bad as senescing to death at seven dozen."

Naxi thinks for a long moment.

". . . If people on your world don't have the prospect of earning more respect from other people, then why does anyone ever do anything difficult or counterintuitive? Also, why do children need so many employees?" Naxi is now imagining that they're born adult-intelligent but physically frail.

Damin doesn't think it's boring but he's not Naxi, so.

"Some people do desire to earn the respect of other people and so will do difficult things to earn it. Not many, though. Other people do difficult things for the material reward, such as money. For example, venturing money and effort into research in the hopes of finding something economically profitable. Many people are like that. Alternatively, they may simply like testing themselves and pitting themselves against challenges, and feeling good when they defeat them. Fewer people like this compared to the second desire, but more than the first. People generally have a higher opinion of people who have successfully surmounted challenges, or at least tried but failed, but only by a little bit, or those who failed but whose failure-analysis and notes allowed other people to succeed.

Babies need many employees because like, they kind of can't do anything themselves? Children also need lots of time to study to do anything economically worthwhile, which can take a dozen to a few dozen years depending on the type of work, which can only begin at one dozen years old because before then their minds haven't developed enough for them to understand more complex concepts. You need employees to tutor them, to feed them and clean them and do this and that for them. It's also important to introduce them to the basics of employee management at a young age so that they can manage their own businesses or companies when they come of age at two dozen years old."

Naxi ignores Damin's description of his peoples' motivations, as it doesn't make any sense.

He tries a line of inquiry where he does know where to start, even if he suspects that he won't like the answer.

"Where do the employees come from?"

"I'm...confused by your question? What do you mean by 'come from'? Like, are you asking about our biology or evolution? Or asking about how our world came to be?"

"Like - logically, if all kids start life with employees and then become bosses of those employees right away once they mature, that implies that they must be deteriorating into those employees later in life - sorry if that's offensive - anyway, Bywayeans don't do that. We start adulthood as employees, and then some of us acquire employees of our own later on, but many don't."

"No, it doesn't? Employees remain employees forever." Ah, their word for 'Keeper' is 'boss'. 

"Bosses are bosses and employees are employees. Can your people transition seamlessly between the two? We don't work like that."

Wow. So Naxi was an employee before he became a Keeper, er, boss?

"Do you have employees now? Are you a boss?"

"No, thank money. I can't stand having to worry about what other people are doing. 

'Boss' and 'employee' are natally separated castes in your species?" It's a lot better than what Naxi was thinking, but a little worse.

"Yes. We call bosses 'Keepers' and employees 'drones' in our world." He says the other words in Standard Imperial. "Given your question, I assume that with you you can switch between the two states at will? For us we cannot.

Hm. Are you a boss without any employees, then? My boyfriend is – was – one too. I don't think you're an employee because your behavior is very far outside the employee behavior expected-range-of-variance."