Translation State

by Ann Leckie

I won’t tell you to stay away from any causes—you’ll have to make your own choices.

most people around here wouldn’t be suspicious of Hikipi.”

Why? Question

Just be careful. And no matter what, you don’t have to be what they want you to be.” But what if I am anyway? he thought.

no one with any kind of sense spends much time very near children

Haha creepy

I think you learn quickly. It’s no surprise, really. The clade that produced you has always been among our best.” Their tone suggested to me that they shared that clade with me, though such relationships weren’t supposed to matter to us.

“They’re already thinking of a match for you,”

what would it be like? Would it be like eating someone? Or like being eaten?

I’d never thought much, as a Little or a Small or even a Middle, about what I was eating when I ate one of my fellows.

Ewww chilling

Never the whole of who it was, but feelings and thoughts that might drift up while I was eating, or for a while after.

Teachers told us that we did sex because we were partly human, and some humans like it better than others, and some don’t like it at all.

humans often talk about doing sex in a way that makes it sound like matching, which it’s not.

Haha

Normally a strange creature with an unknown inside to be investigated would make me hungry,

“They must have hidden it, that they were ready. Or one was ready and the other… wasn’t.”

thinking,

I realized, too, very suddenly, why I might not have been as hungry as the other Edges.

Humans didn’t do much of anything without having tea at some point in the process,

Haha. Enae and Reet like coffee.

I wanted to sit somewhere alone and try to understand

And all the while I thought.

Thinking

there was no avoiding it, or so I understood. Even if there were, it meant failing, it meant never serving your purpose.

we none of us would exist if there wasn’t a need to talk to humans.

one way or another a match would be my fate. The thought filled me with horror.

Tzam.

The funny thing about having a name

Translator Dlar,

I know how to leave here without being caught. It’s been done before.”

sleep, eat, read,

Haha - my life in retirement. How old is Enae? 56?

And think.

Haha - that’s what humans do.

What was wrong with hir? Sie’d loved Grandmaman, and now she was dead, sie felt free of some pressing weight sie’d never noticed.

Sie had hated Grandmaman, and had been too weak, too cowardly to leave and strike out on hir own,

Haha

Enae had choices. Sie wasn’t used to having choices. What did you do, with so many choices in front of you?

Anything I want, sie thought. What did sie want?

Sie could actually try to find this person, this fugitive.

Sixewa,

Keroxane.

the Phen had ongoing difficulties with an ethnic group called the Hikipi,

Deputy Envoy Buren,

Watch his hand-wringing acquiescence (and even defense) when speaking atrocities.

There was an incident in Hikipi space a few days ago.

that area has been unsettled for a while, and the conclave is only making things worse.

she assumed you were speaking Hikipi, which is illegal.”

“Many of the Hikipi—even some of the better-educated ones—believe the Presger don’t actually exist.”

No weapon, no strategy, nothing could stop the Presger from doing whatever they wanted.

Only the treaty kept them from killing any (or every) human they met.

Why? Plot device? Mcguffin? Question.

Buren raised both hands, a gesture of helpless surrender.

“I know! But you have to understand, they still hold a grudge over security restrictions from before the treaty was finalized.

They believe those restrictions were used as an excuse for the Phen to take control of whole stations, and they led to the arrest and even ...

they’re not entirely wrong. I’m sympat...