Challenge #02148-E319: Mutual Flailing With Shouting

"Good news Commander, there is a settlement with enough material to repair our ship, the inhabitant seems more curious than afraid, and they are more than willing to trade the needed materials for help with theirs infrastructure. Mainly a water purifying station and a basic energy production facilities."
"Do they understand GalStand ?"
"That's the tricky part... That's a Vorax settlement..." -- Anon Guest

Can you imagine a surprise bigger than that? The Vorax have castes, and the most widely-known is the warrior caste. This settlement was the more peaceful farming caste, who worked with the trading caste to get technology from the tinkering caste. Members of the medical caste were scattered through all castes but the warriors, who believed in the nobility of battle.

They were, of course, more than a little speciesist, but that sort of reaction was natural in a group who literally never saw any other kind of creature but their own. Fortunately, they didn't even think of Galactics as a threat and allowed negotiations via a convenient trader vessel. Naturally, both sides of the negotiations table thought the other side had a terrible way of organising things and believed that their way was the only true way to keep things on an even keel.

All societies believed that, of course. It's just that some were more forcibly insistent than others. Fortunately for both sides, they were willing to lay aside the insistence part of things so they could sort out the trading side of things. One good thing about caste societies was that the fractions understood that others' way of doing things made sense to them.

The other problem in the room was communication, which involved a certain amount of noun exchange with the occasional verb on a 'Me Tarzan' level. 'Water' was pretty solid. Explaining the adjectives like 'bad' and 'good' was something of a stumbling block. 'Make' was another. Apparently, the tinkering caste had fifteen words for kinds of creation and few for transforming. The farming caste, on the other hand, had twenty kinds of transformation.

This lead to a room full of science experiments and exchanges like, "Seeing this? Wanting this. Wanting bigger this."

Communication is often difficult between species without the same concept space. The movement for 'scale this up' can also mean 'I want a hug' and 'make more' at the same time. It took two hours and some printed toys to understand the concept of 'scale this up' in a mutual way. It took four days for the farmer-Vorax to understand, through the trader-Vorax, that the crew wanted means to obtain clean food and water as a replacement to their broken systems.

It was almost like dealing with the Vikingr during the middle ages, if the Vikingr side viewed the other as not a 'properly' cogniscent being and a rather amusing barbarian attempting higher math. One expects a certain amount of a superiority complex from isolated monocultures.

Item printing technology was an interest to the trader Vorax. The ability to create items on demand may wreak hob with Vorax society in general. This was viewed as potentially a good thing, but the Captain at the time made the executive decision to only include tech and item patterns that the Vorax were already familiar with. If they wanted to black-box galactic technology based on a description from someone who barely understood what someone else was explaining about it... then good luck to them.

This is widely endorsed as a good trade policy with species and societies outside of the Galactic Alliance. It's only a pity that Humans seemed to be unnervingly good at doing that.

All the same, when the ship was ready to return to the relative safety of the Edge Territories, they did so with a little more speed than strictly necessary. After all, some warrior Vorax could logically turn up at any moment for raid supplies.

[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / lineartestpilot]

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