"- Wow!  What are they like?"

"Different. From Earth biome life and also each other."

"Have you met a lot of them?"

"I am being educated by the Presger! I have not met others."

"What are they like!"

"It is... black."

"Is it shaped more like you or like this or like something else entirely?"

"No."

"Okay!  ...Do you want us to not ask questions about it?"

"I don't care."

"In what way is it not shaped like you or like this or like something else entirely.  It's something else non-entirely?  - Should we be calling the bit of you we can see 'this' or should only you say that because it's yours?  For example.  Should we call - erm, should we use a different word?"

"It is amorphous and can change shape. You can call this this. Or you could call it my fourth ancillary if you wish."

"How many ancillaries do you have?  Are they all human-looking?"

"Eight. Yes."

"Were they all decanted on the same day?"

"No, I had an emotional crisis about the first one and then took a while to decide to go ahead with the other seven."

"Oh, why?"

"Because of the emotional crisis."

"I meant, what was your emotional crisis about?"

"My first ancillary."

"...Apologies, we don't intend to be pushy.  You're different enough from the two of us and everyone we know that it can be hard for us to understand whether you're being evasive on purpose because the topic of conversation is something you don't want us to know about, or whether there's just a communication gap that we could solve by asking better questions.  When someone answers questions with information that they just told us a moment ago, we'd normally infer that it's because they don't want us to know what they know the question to really have been asking about, but with you it's harder because different things are salient to us.  We don't want you to tell us information that you don't want us to know.  Will you consider saying so directly if there's something you want us to stop asking about, so we don't wear down your patience asking more precise but worse questions?"

"Sometimes humans forget things! What would be worse about precise questions?"

"Most humans don't tend to forget pieces of information on the scale of - discrete chunks of information like that, within half a minute.  We're worse with things that don't have larger contexts we can mentally attach them to; I don't remember what number you gave for the speed of light except that it was very big.  But I do remember that you have various sizes of rock that travel around stars at large distances, because those are concepts I'm familiar with and even if I don't fully understand how that would work, I can fit the idea into understandings I already have.  - And there wasn't a lot of detail necessary to getting the general picture."

"More precise questions are better in situations where they relieve misunderstanding but are worse in situations where they imply we want to know something you don't want us to know, or annoy you, or waste time that could be spent asking about other things that you don't mind us knowing."

"I won't tell you things that I don't want you to know."