"A sentient language," gasps Spree. "How is that possible?"

"I think it works by skipping past the translating bit of a brain right to the 'facts about how the lang-uage works' and 'what that means' bits of the brain sorta, but I don't know how. My idea is that it's a localized ideo-graphicly stable form of anti-entropy but it's hard to test that."

"There's only one of it? What happens if speaking populations are lightyears apart?"

"It's localized, also least informationally, so they need to be able to comm-unicate with each other, otherwise the bits of the brain that are saying 'this is a language and this is how it works' stop responding to it and the sounds just sound like non-sense."

"Fascinating - so it could be multiply located provide there were open channels of FTL communications? Do you have that, or only travel?"

"We have FTL comm-un-ication but it's not always fast enough for Cryptophasia to be in two places at once."

Vira is a bit fidgety about this subject.

"Huh, what do you do when it can't cover a conversation? Is there an ordinary lingua franca?"

"Oh, we can set-up translation later that uses machines. Cryptophasia just helps when we're first meeting. There isn't really a comm-on language cause of all the translating being easy."

"That makes sense! You should let us know if you need more of a corpus for the Amentan languages."

"We don't, but I'd be happy to have more things that you all wrote!"

Meanwhile, in another part of the room, Captain Sierra is discussing what sort of help might impact the lives of everyday Amentans.

Amentans live very densely, but would like more room to spread out! At the moment there's some tightness in the food supply due to a problem with unverifiable exports from a major producer (Voa) but that's not a typical problem, normally they have their population controlled to the point that nobody needs to go hungry.

"Hm. Could you elaborate on how the food is unverifiable exactly? Also on what is the preventing you from having more people on Amenta."

"A bad actor in Voa decided to contaminate unspecified food production bottlenecks," Pahatun explains. "Any given product from Voa is almost certainly fine, but we can't tell, and neither can the Voans - or if they can they're keeping it quiet. There isn't a current limiting factor - if we suddenly discovered a lost colony of Amentans living in an undersea city and their undersea city was then destroyed, there would be space and food for millions of refugees, though there'd be arguing about who had to take them. But right now we're aiming for a low, sustainable growth rate, rather than pushing to the point where a natural disaster or some such problem could push carrying capacity to the breaking point."

"How would it break exactly? I'm wondering if we can help your carrying capacity be higher on Amenta."

"Also, would you like some of our scientists and medical personnel to see if we can help with the contaminated food?"

"I think most projections suggest that food would be the first thing to be a problem, though some extractive industries would also wind up with issues - we do have some asteroid mining but it's not cost-effective yet, it's purely R&D budget at this point.

"I'm not sure your scientists and medical personnel will be able to help; it's not a conventional microbe or chemical, it's just polluted."

Sierra thinks she should probably focus on one thing at a time, and helping more people live there seems like a thing Pahatun is more excited about. She can figure out what pollution is later.

"We can definitely help with the asteroid mining, and help with food replicators that can do fairly efficient food crea-tion from raw materials, I think. We don't have them set-up ourselves because we don't need to eat enough for it to be worth it. And our cooks are great, though I'm told there's some really neat food you can make with the repli-cators."

"Wow, if the replicators have enough throughput that would be a particularly timely intervention for Tapa, everyone is already fed up with the rationing system."

"We don't actually have any here. We might be able to import a few from other planets. I think we can help you learn how to build them but it'll take a while to do that and then make a bunch."

"Do you eat less frequently than an Amentan adult your size?" asks Lanut Kei.

"My guess is we eat just as often but not as large portions. We're an out-lier among humanoids in that way."

"Huh! Well, we'd love to know how to build replicators even if we won't have them in time to cut it out with the rationing till midsummer."

"I'll put our scientists on it! We'll reach out to you soon, I'm sure."

A waiter tries to add a new soupey dish to the table but accidentally spills a bunch of it on Pahatun.

"Oh no!"

"Whoops! Have you got a place I can wash off and a spare outfit that'll fit me - big cloth rectangle'll do, I know how to tie those on twelve ways -"