Necessity by Jo Walton Read Free Book Online

Most people had heard already, but there were a few gasps.
    â€œWhat does that mean, for a god?” Halius asked.
    Crocus raised his arm and I acknowledged him gratefully. “It means he’s a proper god again, and has his powers back,” Crocus said. “We have often talked about it.”
    â€œBut he’s the only person serving in the Senate with any experience of other human cultures,” Diotima said, frowning. “Was, I mean. Do you think this coincidence of events is significant?”
    â€œWho can tell?” Crocus asked.
    Makalla spoke up from close beside him. “All of us Children have some childhood experience of other human cultures,” she said. “I don’t know what use it might be.”
    â€œPerhaps we should set up a committee to extract knowledge of variant human cultures from the remaining Children,” I said.
    â€œIt’s probably too late,” Androkles said. “There are so few of them left and they are all old; and besides, they have spent the majority of their lives in Platonic cultures. That was Plato’s whole reason for starting with ten-year-olds. Also, a committee would take too long to get the information. The new humans are here now. We should have done it years ago if we had wanted to.”
    â€œOf course, many of us have written autobiographies, and many of the Masters did too, and they had spent a large part of their lives in other cultures. The knowledge is probably in the library if we need it,” Makalla said.
    â€œBut it isn’t available immediately. And who can tell what kind of culture these new humans might have come from? The seventy years of the Republic have brought about huge changes. These people are hundreds of years separated from the latest human culture we knew anything about,” Androkles said. “Pytheas might have known, but he’s gone. Perhaps Porphyry knows, but Porphyry is oracular at the best of times and never seems to want to say anything definite about anything.”
    I recognized Crocus. “A committee on re-examination of the issues seems like a good idea. But we need to react without delay. Should we let the humans land?”
    â€œWe should follow the plan,” Martinus said. He was from Psyche, and usually one of the most difficult members of the Council, implacably opposed to almost everything I wanted. Now I was grateful to him.
    â€œWe should vote on whether to follow the plan,” I said. “And I endorse following it for the time being in the absence of a better specific immediate strategy.”
    At that moment, Parmenion came back with Aroo. Aroo was a paler green than Hilfa, with pinker swirls on her skin. She wore a grey kiton with blue edging, fastened with her gold pin. “I apologize, nobody told me the time of the meeting was changed,” she said, going at once to her proper place, which Diotima yielded to her immediately, moving to the side.
    â€œIt wasn’t changed, this is an emergency session,” I explained. Aroo blinked, which was especially noticeable on Saeli with their multicolored triple eyelid. “Are you aware that a human spaceship is in orbit?” I asked.
    â€œYes,” she said at once. The Saeli have been in contact with us for twenty years. They have a fascination with Plato, and have been closely allied with us. Lots of them live here, and many of them have, like Aroo, taken oaths of citizenship. I like them, and have put effort into studying them, especially recently, because of Hilfa. But sometimes they’re infuriating.
    â€œWe know the human spaceship has been in contact with the Saeli ship in orbit,” I said.
    â€œYes,” Aroo said again, but this time to my relief she kept talking. “They seem highly surprised. They have not met Saeli before. The only language we have in common is Amarathi, which is slow and uncomfortable. We have asked to learn their language. They seem to be hesitating