"Days! Four, at the most fuel-efficient speed accounting for supply requirements at various durations."

Impassivity training saves his jaw from dropping.

"In the early days of Amentans settling here and vice versa, we will probably have to make ad-hoc adjustments to laws. However, it would be good to have a head start on the sort of things the Imperium should do differently when interacting with Amentans as supposed to Imperials, and likewise, which laws should be managed and enforced by us, or enforced on your own side. We will follow Tapa's laws – after negotiation to account for inherent differences – when in Tapa, and of course we will expect Amentans to follow Imperial laws after the appropriate adjustments have been made.

As an example, we do not do child credits because we take a lot of time in having Keeper children – no one has them before they reach two dozen and get their allotment – and the majority of people only have Keeper children after reaching a gross years in age. People usually would have had a few drone children before then, though. The Imperium would have to have an arrangement to manage Amentan child credits once people here have settled enough to be comfortable with having children – preferably way before then, so that prospective parents know what to expect."

"I agree that figuring that out in advance is smart. If something goes wrong in the early days we'd like the ability to take all our settlers back and have room for them, so we'll need to throttle the growth here anyway to fit within Tapa's allowable growth rate at least until we find an uninhabited seasonable planet to settle. Meanwhile, our population laws are not remotely designed with a view toward the possibility - and popularity! - of sterile offspring."

"Indeed. An additional complication is that we do not senesce – there is no guarantee that a remna will die after a set time, whereas presumably this is the linchpin of Amentan child credit calculations: each person must produce at least a little more than one offspring in their lifetime, or the population will decrease. 

There was, long ago, a proposal in the Imperial Senate to introduce a poll tax on drones, so as to encourage people to use drones more productively and refrain from having any more if their labor would be insufficient to pay for the tax they would incur on their Keepers. A similar scheme could be implemented on Tapa to discourage Keepers from having excess drones – perhaps a progressive tax rate? With it being adjusted every so often in response to population numbers. This does not solve the problem of Keeper children, however. In any case, that was me simply thinking out loud – I was not intending to make formal proposals just yet.

Oh, a related question: are all castes people? For us, drones are not legally people and can be owned by Keepers."

"We're not biologically distinct like that and don't own other Amentans of any caste in the present day."

Restem nods, then adds a second later, "This is sign language for acknowledgement."

"It has been less than a day since you arrived, and I am sure we will be able to come up with better solutions in time."

Okay. Time to make the implicit explicit.

"Earlier, you mentioned that part of Amentan diplomacy had to do with rules during war. Could you elaborate on that?"

"For example: we have rules against instigating biological warfare - the deliberate release of pathogens. Non-greys are always noncombatants. It's illegal to give a false surrender. It's illegal to attack medical personnel even in a warzone."

Having to ask these questions is mortifying.

"I am confused. Laws are enforced using force, but in war, you are pitting the force of your polity against another. How can these 'rules of war' be enforced?"

"This might not be a concept you have because you're the only sophisticated state on your planet! On ours, all the major countries have signed all the major international rules of war treaties. If one is broken the other countries are all committed to punish whoever broke it."

"Hm, no, we do understand what you mean, it's just that for us, war is...war is definitionally refusing to care about the other person's desires, and choosing to act antisocially for your own benefit. Otherwise, you would just talk, make agreements, and trade. I am confused why your major countries haven't made treaties simply agreeing to stop any aggressing country from doing any aggressive action, rather than merely limiting the types of aggression they can do."

"In principle that might be possible one day! We haven't gotten there yet. It's much easier for everyone to agree that no one should unleash engineered plagues on their neighbors than that the borders of every country should stand as they are now."

"That is indeed a better equilibrium than the natural one.

We would like to take a break for us to review our conversation thus far, and think about how to integrate Imperials into Amentan law and society, and vice versa. In the meantime, we have Imperial scientists and artists here who interested in potential exchanges of science and art."

"Wonderful! We brought scientists and not artists, but can show you images of Amentan art."

"That would be lovely. Thank you for your time."

Restem leaves and are replaced with a bunch of Keepers. There are strenuous conversations about who should get to speak to the Amentans first, but they die down quickly.

They do have artists but they're much fewer in number than scientists. The artists are kind of going to get pushed out by the scientists given that learning about Alien Technology is of a much higher priority than art. Art can come later, and besides, think of all the ART you can do with SCREENS. Clearly you have to do science first.

The Imperial tech level is industrial, but their state of theoretical science is further along that what surface level appearances would imply. Every Keeper is independently wealthy, so they have the time to do science, but this along with free drone labor means that they have less incentive to apply what they've learned, and engineer economically profitable products. The gap between knowledge and exploitation is much bigger.

The state of the art with data storage and display is teletype or telex, and regular printing and microfilm. The screens are very cool! None of them dare to touch any, of course, unless it's explicitly offered. They won't even get closer than an arm's breadth.

The Amentans are curious about how far their theory has gotten! They can explain the screens and let the locals poke them some.

They will happily poke at it. Gingerly and with much apprehension. Obviously the aliens would not have given them permission to touch it if it was fragile but just the possibility of potentially breaking the Priceless Technologically Advanced Alien Artifact is mortifying.

They have the concept of converting analog signals to digital, and of encoding data digitally through binary codes, via differences in frequency and amplitude. They also have computer science and the concept of complex programming even though their computers are still relying on punched cards. 

They will happily send over textbooks they have – both standard books and microfilm. Generally, they have mid to late-20th century Earth level theoretical knowledge, but only early-20th century engineering.

Wow. Punchcards.

They will get going on scanning in the textbooks and OCRing them for language enrichment and also information on the state of the art.

OCR! Amazing – who needs drones when your machines are that smart.

All of the books are written in Standard Imperial, and are written in the newer if not latest versions. Standard Imperial is managed by the Imperial Standards Authority. They'll learn words for their more uncommon concepts, but the grammar will be very stable.

Notably, there are many taste and smell qualia words which do not have Amentan equivalents, probably because Amentans do not have the level of sense of taste and smell remna have.

Maybe they'll have the chemists come up with chemistry-derived Tapap words for the taste and smell words. It's interesting that their language has a managed standard; Tapap doesn't.

Yes, the Imperial Standards Authority has many standards on many things. The Imperial government will only accept products from private sellers, for example, automobiles, which follow specific standards it sets. Likewise, all Imperial government publications are in Standard Imperial, and Imperials have to speak it in order to talk with government officials. It does also publish standards on very mundane things, like how domestic spaces should be cleaned and arranged.

People don't have to follow these standards – mostly they don't, except for speaking Standard Imperial – but they are very useful points for coordination, such as businesses wanting to standardize parts, and for regular people: if you don't know the specific preferences of someone, it's always safe to default to what the ISA says. 

Interesting! Amenta has international cleanliness standards for imported products, travelers, being out in public, and stuff like that, but people can arrange their homes however they want.

Likewise! The cleanliness standard is for drone training. Basically every Keeper has drones do housework, and in the case where you want to buy a drone to clean your house, well, it wouldn't know how exactly you wanted it to be arranged. Having the ISA-standard means that you're starting from a predictable and stable baseline, before you instruct it to arrange things more specifically to your tastes.

Funnily enough, it is our cleanliness standards which are distributed. People who own land have the right not to have it be interfered with by others. For example, people are permitted to use violent force against someone who they want to leave their property, and who did not obey a verbal command to leave immediately. Likewise, people may sue if their land is polluted or befouled in some way. 

The Imperium places no restrictions on what goods can be bought or sold, but companies which choose to have their products bear the ISA's seal, and notarize this, can be sued if their labeling is inaccurate or if they make claims which are misleading. There is no restriction on buying or selling goods which don't undergo notarization and seal-display – it's just that most shops won't stock them and customers won't buy them. The Imperial government is very interested in preventing fraud, but it doesn't really care about what exactly people choose to buy.

As a matter of public health Amenta considers it a pretty big deal if someone's spreading anything unclean around and that's definitely something they'll have to hammer out before any Imperials come to live on Tapai pineapple farms.

In the Imperium, it is assumed that people will handle their health themselves. The Imperial government probably does less than Amentan governments, because each Imperial citizen is assumed to have a bunch of drones under them and can delegate work, whereas Amentans don't. 

They will definitely tell Restem and the Legislators that.

They have the concept of quarantines and such, but they are always voluntary – Imperials will definitely comply, because they don't want to die of disease, but trying to mandate it would cause uproar, because imprisonment is only something the government can do for criminals. It breaks the fundamental contract between the Imperial government and its citizens.

The Imperials say that many of them would be fine with mandatory quarantines and cleanliness standards if they came to live on Tapa, though, because anyone who didn't like that can just move back. And of course, anyone who didn't like that wouldn't move in in the first place.