Chapter III — The Other Country

Between three hundred and seven hundred metres the working depth ends and another country begins. The Pelagines have been in their seats since long before the migration; the meeting protocols are theirs, not ours, and we are admitted to them on terms we do not entirely understand.

Two journal entries — one that turns on a translator's absence, one that registers a Court's lights at four kilometres — and the architecture of contact: a marker station, a singing place, the two polities that have agreed, for now, to meet us. Two organisms that may not be organisms in any sense the survey is allowed to confirm.