The first chapter of `Farther and Alien' begins with the words,
The alien took more than six dozen years to reach the Ulterius star. ... as expected, the planet was dead! Not only did it fail to possess any of the large, living islands like those that floated in his own atmosphere, the atmosphere lacked life-suggesting out-of-balance characteristics. ... Neither Gell [the alien] nor his computer ever noticed the small, non-natural movements near a rocky, low gravity, low magnetic field planet much closer to the central star.
The premise of this novel is that two species can cooperate over resources, so long as neither are too greedy.
In this novel, Djem, Leestel, and others act to influence their societies by deciding what to do with the alien. Everyone sins -- they fight each other -- because of excesses of their virtues, not because of vices.
We have met Djem, Leestel, and the rest in earlier volumes, although reading those books is not necessary
The inner, rocky planet is being terraformed. The humans' computer network perceives the alien.
Adkel Ivden, a computer, an artificial intelligence, wakes Djem, Leestel, and the others a little while before they would regularly have been wakened. He (as he prefers to refer to himself, not `it') explains to Djem that the alien space ship headed towards the system's Jovian planet and says "Indeed, the aliens do not appear to have noticed us."
The first issue is whether the alien should be allowed to signal home. It is building a radio and antennas to do that.
Djaeds Summervil argues against permitting the aliens to signal. He has too much of his own self control and pushes it on others. Tuppak Nassik is for the aliens. He was too generous; he wants too little. (This is because of an experience recounted at the end of the first volume, in which a plan of his goes awry. But we do not explain that.) Leestel settles the matter. She points out that the aliens will impact humans and says, "It is better for us that they enjoy good rather than bad first memories ... We need to prepare for the future."
So the human side makes contact, starting with numbers and going on from there.
The second issue is argued by an AI who loves humanity. Will the alien learn too much? In contrast, Telren Dowwen is full of zeal; he wants to continue learning. Djaeds Summervil settles the matter. He as been impressed by Leestel's argument and points out that over the next few years, the alien will learn a bit, willy nilly. For example, the alien will learn where the humans come from by watching for interstellar space craft.
This leads the human side to decide to speed up learning by sending the aliens a dictionary. The information is sent via radio -- the book details how frequency and speed is agreed.
The dictionary is illustrated. It contains pointed to and pantomimed definitions.
Unfortunately, the dictionary fails a fundamental part of human language, metaphorical extensions,
For example, aliens lack roads and do not run, so it makes no sense to them to say `the road runs into the forest'. The aliens can give the proper concrete definition for road, run, and forest, but have difficulty with the metaphor. The aliens can understand a `road for peace' meaning a sequence of actions, since they can map the notion of `road' onto a `landscape' of actions.
Metaphors are the way humans extend notions. They make use of only some features of a concept and go from `concrete' to `abstract', to `exemplar', to `more encompassing' notions.
Often enough, the aliens cannot make the jump because they lack the initial understanding; the environment they grew up in has been too different.
There is more -- the alien goes to human planets, murder is attempted -- that is the beginning.