“Sorry, a what, dear?”

 

“A lawyer. Someone who studies the law and advocates for laypeople within the legal system.”

 

“But why would you need that? Everything’s explained in the paperwork.”

 

“Yes, but suppose the paperwork were in Affini and you couldn’t read Affini?”

 

“Affini is very complicated, little one. You don’t need to worry about it. All of our regulations are for the benefit of all sophonts. You don’t need someone to advocate for you and in any case, I can’t imagine anyone would be willing to actively advocate against your best interests.”

 

“But I don’t agree that being domesticated is in my best interest!”

 

 

 

“Why can’t I see Aprevalii? You said he’s still here.” The start of another argument he consistently lost.

 

“He is, dear. But he’s not taking visitors. Poor thing’s a bit catatonic.”

 

 

 

 

 

“You don’t ‘think’?”

 

“I’m not an expert in such matters. Give me a cute xeno and I can tell you exactly what the rules are, but I try not to work too much with affini medical problems, in all honesty we’re a kind of boring species.”

 

“So basically domestication is your preferred treatment for all xeno mental illnesses and, let me guess, your preferred treatment for affini mental illnesses is that you’ve already solved psychology so they don’t happen anymore?” He wouldn’t shout. He was pretty sure he wasn’t shouting.

 

“Again little one, not my field. There’s really no need for you to be so distressed. It’s not healthy for you to worry about things. You’ll find life much easier once you’re domesticated.”

 

 

 

“I really can’t say no when you’re that cute. You’re going to make someone very happy you know?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I thought you’d hate me.” Aprevalii’s comment was sudden, unprompted, at least as far as Simeon could tell.

 

“Because you injected me with hrevl ichor? I know you didn’t do it on purpose.” He was mad at Marigold for insisting domestication was the only appropriate response to his newfound condition, but his feelings towards Aprevalii were… he didn’t have a word for it. Not exactly pity or sympathy, not exactly anger, not exactly relief. Some combination that he’d never needed a word for until now. But he didn’t hate Aprevalii. As far as he knew, he didn’t hate anyone.

 

 

“Probisium said that you’re going to be domesticated, I know you don’t want that.”

 

 

 

“I haven’t had a floret since Sephal. They tried to foist some on me when I was rescued, said they’d be good for me, but I couldn’t do it. It hurt too much.”

 

 

“For a long time I could barely take care of myself, let alone someone else. And I didn’t want to risk hurting some cute sophont by adopting them and then not knowing what to do. And even now…”

 

“Even now you don’t know that you’d be up to it? Do you want a floret?” He knew Aprevalii hadn’t before the accident. The vines began to hold him tighter again.

 

“Simeon, I…. If I had a floret it would need to be one that understood me, that didn’t need someone to brush their teeth for them, that didn’t need constant affection from me, who could… could support me when I need it.”

 

 

“If I had a floret, they’d need to be able to support me just as much I supported them. Maybe moreso. It wouldn’t be a one-way street with me caring for them and providing an idyllic life without challenges or problems in exchange. I am a challenge, often.

 

“I don’t want ‘a floret,’ Simeon. I want you.”

 

 

 

“Liliac, can you… wake him up? Or take him out of whatever he’s in?”

 

“Oh, yes,” Liliac clasped her hands. “The trigger phrase is ‘my esteemed colleague—and frequent critic.’ ”

 

 

 

 

 

“Nerys, Mats, I’ve told you both. There is no ‘best pet’ trophy,” Liliac sighed. “And if there were you’d both get one.”

 

“But Nerys has a trophy!” Mats whined.

 

“From the cute pet pageant, which you refused to enter.” This appeared to be a recurrent argument.

 

“I was busy and pageants are dumb!”

 

“Mats, Nerys. Good pets don’t repeat fights they had last week.”

 

“Yes, Mistress.”

 

“Yes, Liliac.”

 

 

“Anyway, Mats, Simeon’s here to talk about your translation of Aprevalii’s book.”

 

 

“Sorry, what?”

 

“Oh, so I’m sure you know that Affini isn’t so much a language as a family of languages.”

 

 

“And that means that an ordinary document written ‘in Affini’ won’t necessarily be intelligible to a sophont from a different galaxy, or even solar system or planet, in the Compact. This was a problem terran academics had on Earth as well, on a much smaller scale. In ancient Terra they solved this by using a dead language.”

 

 

“Affini academics do something similar. Academic texts are generally written Post-Traditional Affini Aleph, but even though PTA-A is technically a dead language, there are still regional differences in how it gets used as you move through Affini space. So we compensate by writing the same text directly underneath it in Post-Traditional Affini Beth. And while you might expect PTA-A and PTA-B to be closely related languages, it’s something of a misnomer. PTA-A stems from Coriv domestication while PTA-B was first used during the Sleshak domestication, and obviously at that point you’re talking about an extremely large divergence.”

 

“Obviously.” He was pretty sure he understood what Mats had just said.

 

“But even then, there’s a potential for meaning to be lost, since no one speaks PTA of any variety as their vernacular. So we further compensate by writing the same text in whatever the local Affini vernacular is. Then you bracket the lines of text together to indicate that they should be read in parallel rather than one after the other. Affini can read multiple lines of text simultaneously and synthesize the meaning, which most other sophonts can’t.” Mats smirked. “I can.”

 

 

“Yeah, but most sophonts couldn’t do it even with the xenodrugs.

 

“So, sometimes if an academic is worried about their work being misinterpreted or just thinks it’s really really important that they get things wrong, they might do a fourth line in some other Affini dialect, maybe a fifth.” He traced a bracket on the page. “Aprevalii was so concerned with making sure sophonts understood him that he used twelve. In one chapter he uses twenty. He didn’t want the hrevl to be forgotten, but it may have backfired. Even for an affini, synthesizing twelve lines of text at once is a challenge.

 

“And you might be thinking, because I know I did, ‘Maybe the convention in ethnography is different.’ But I checked and ethnographers use the same three-language convention as everyone else, even in his other papers Aprevalii almost never even uses four lines. This was different. This mattered to him in a way nothing else he wrote did, not even his thesis. Which by the way was brilliant and I need to show Heyacith.

 

“And this,” he pointed to the book, his voice growing more somber and less excited, “is almost all that’s left of the hrevl. The ketalec burned their libraries and all the literature, all the poetry, all the plays are lost forever. It’s horrible. They didn’t just wipe out the species, they wiped out the possibility of remembering them properly. All we have is Aprevalii’s book, and as he says in his introduction, that doesn’t even capture one-tenth of one percent of what the hrevl were, and nothing of what they might have been.

 

“So once we print it out, my translation will look considerably shorter than this,” he hefted the tome “and some of the nuance is lost, but you’ll know the basics of what he went through. It’s not floret-safe, but I don’t think you’re on that restriction like most florets are.”

 

“I’m not a floret!” Simeon protested. “I’m considering becoming Aprevalii’s floret. Maybe. And what’s ‘floret-safe’?”

 

 

“Cuter?”

 

 

 

 

“You volunteered for domestication, right?” Simeon asked.

 

 

 

 

“And?”

 

“That’s all. I’m very cute and Liliac cuddles me and takes care of me and I get to write my papers and books and she tells me I’m very cute and very smart.”

 

 

Nerys used to tie him up whenever they cuddled so he’d remember that she decided when cuddles happened; she got to set the terms for them. Sometimes he might have an arm free, his mouth might or might not be gagged, he might or might not be blindfolded. He never knew exactly what cuddles would entail beyond that Nerys would keep him safe while she held him.

 

But it also reaffirmed what he’d heard from other florets and affini. They didn’t exactly need their florets; a floret’s “job” was to be cute (ugh) and guided by a loving caretaker into the best version of themselves. Aprevalii, of course, would need quite a bit more than that from him and respected that he didn’t like to be called “cute.” If he agreed. If he didn’t…

 

Actually, Liliac might know the answer to that question. He turned to her. “Liliac, if I refuse voluntary domestication, can they make me do it anyway?”

 

She considered. “Probably not, if you can prove you can keep yourself monitored. But it really would be difficult to do that. Domestication is a much better arrangement. Besides, with you being so cute I can’t imagine you not eventually becoming a pet.”

 

Simeon didn’t find that particularly reassuring.

 

“Why does everyone keep saying I’m cute?”

 

Mats spoke up. “Because they think you’d be a good pet. It’s a compliment.”

 

“And pets have to be cute?”

 

This clearly caught Mats’s interest. “I mean, yes? So let’s take Valesh Affini as our example, but it proves true in most dialects. The word for ‘pet’ in Valesh Affini, if we’re talking about the modern dialect and not the original form used during the domestication, is ‘akjeć’ (or ‘akjech’ if you’re using the double-masculine form). ‘Cute’ is ‘takjeć,’ ‘makjeć,’ or ‘sakjjech’ where the t- prefix for double-feminine, the m- prefix for most genders, and the s- prefix for double-masculine indicates the transition of a noun to adjective or verb to adverb (although of course with double-masculine the j doubles unless it’s used as an object in a sentence in past perfect). The literal translation would be something along the lines of ‘petlike.’ And like I said, that tends to be the case in most dialects: the word translated as ‘cute’ is just the adjectival form of the word translated as ‘pet.’

 

“Now, obviously there are exceptions. In Gaeoi Affini the word for ‘pet’ is ‘lish’ while the word for ‘cute’ is ‘avé.’ Totally unrelated unless you accept Solialis’s theory that ‘avé’ is a loanword from Thatic Affini, but Solialis’s theory was significantly challenged by Reed’s argument that the Thatic domestication actually postdates the Gaeoi domestication, which admittedly sounds like a stretch until you remember that time dilation…”

 

 

The contract was in Affini because of course it was. Parts of it were translated, but significant sections were “not really that important, little one. The basics are all laid out for you and you don’t need to worry about every detail.” Simeon had actually managed to win the argument this time; the Affini respected the idea of informed consent, although possibly only because they thought it was adorable that a xeno—which meant “pet” which meant “cute”—would think he needed to actually try to understand the full domestication contract.

 

He still wasn’t sure about domestication; that was why he wanted to read the contract, but Aprevalii did need him, or at least someone like him.

 

 

 

 

 

But now he had the contract, fully translated. A gazillion references to being “cute,” of course (he’d methodically crossed each one out); a very clear revocation of citizenship; an acknowledgment Aprevalii would have full control over, and responsibility for, his physiological and psychological needs and well-being; some amendments to the “standard” contract emphasizing that while he wasn’t required to perform his own basic self-care, he was expected to; a very long section on Aprevalii’s needs and Simeon’s own responsibilities in relation to them; a sub-clause where Aprevalii promised not to call him “cute” unless he did something “exceptionally petlike” (Simeon had scowled but left it in); an appendix on the effects hrvel ichor had on humans (mostly incomprehensible to Simeon even after being translated) and the necessary changes to the hausteric implant to accommodate its effects on affini biology (entirely incomprehensible); and then two spaces for his signatures. The first as Simeon Guilder, the second as Simeon Phores, Seventeenth Floret.