First contact with the Tyrian Court

What is now called first contact with the Tyrian Court was, in 2155, a meeting that the Conservancy did not yet have a name for. The site was an observation marker at saturation depth. The Pelagine party was three figures. The human party was four, two of them in ADS suits. The encounter lasted slightly more than an hour. Almost nothing was said.

What was exchanged

A series of formal gestures whose meaning was, at the time, partially understood; an object the Pelagine party left at the marker, which the Conservancy retrieved and which has since been catalogued; a recording, on the human side, of the meeting itself, which has been reviewed in every year since.

What was not

Speech, in any sense the surface would call speech. The Pelagine envoy did not vocalise in any band the Conservancy's recording instruments captured cleanly. Whether the absence was a feature of the protocol, or a feature of the bands the Conservancy was capable of recording, is the question that would, the following year, drive the conditions of the Treaty of Marker I.

On the name

Tyrian was not the Court's word. The translator who chose it has, by her own account, regretted the choice — though without proposing a replacement.