We Hire Humans, Chapter 5

Things smoothed out with Starlight Basker after that. We had meals together, talked about our home planets, and generally got to know each other—at least, as much as we were able, given the differences in our cultures.

People Four Hundred Ninety were, like humanity, very recently admitted into the Oxygen Union, and like Humanity, struggling to make a place for themselves. They had evolved in the lowlands of a planet where new land masses appeared and disappeared regularly, at least on a geological timescale. This caused many creatures to follow diverging and re-converging evolutionary pathways, and their species was not immune. Their culture had begun when four small continents re-combined, giving four different populations of their people contact with each other after a long separation. That’s how their unusual gender construction came about. I wasn’t sure evolution actually worked that way, but I took him at his word.

We talked about art and music, politics and sports, explaining as much culture to each other as we could. I was particularly interested in how their weird (to me) reproductive system affected their families. He said that in ancient times, successful males would assemble a full set of the four females, and defend them against interlopers. Later, groups of up to four males would form coalitions to share fatherly duties, with each male bearing children by each of the females in the group. In modern times that’s considered old-fashioned, but there are still a few who form families that way.

“How about...