the interests of their bureau before that of their race and maintain strict neutrality; however, this does not always happen. The civilization of the Five Galaxies is made up solely of oxygen-breathing species. This civilization is aware of, but by tradition rarely if ever interacts with, the other orders of sapient life, which include those which are hydrogen-breathing, transcendent, mechanical, memetic, and quantum. There is also a special designation for hypothetical orders of life which could also exist but have not been discovered. Technology Unlike most other races, humans and their clients regard creativity as very desirable – the others take the view that everything useful has already been discovered, so it would be more efficient to search the Galactic Library for whatever they need. EarthClan are also considered odd for using archaic technology in addition to the more advanced Galactic technology, or sometimes preferring primitive technologies that they understand to more advanced ones that they don't yet understand. Most notably, EarthClan utilizes calculus, which is unknown and mistrusted by galactic society. All other races simply apply brute-force, finite-element analysis to any problem due to their ability to apply as much computing power as may be needed to model all phenomena. Social behavior Most Galactic "clans" are rather feudal and sometimes exploitative, and place strong emphasis on etiquette and especially on deferential behavior by members of "subordinate" races towards members of "superior" races. Hence they often regard EarthClan's informal speech as insulting and the humans' egalitarian treatment of their Neo-Chimp and Neo-Dolphin clients as foolish, if not outright offensive. Languages In the uplift world, the uplifted clients speak Anglic, a uniform language that replaced all previous human languages, and all EarthClan schools also teach GalSeven, a widely used galactic language. Dolphins are portrayed as adept with languages, and have two of their own: Trinary, a whistling language in which they speak in haiku, and Primal Dolphin, the "dream language", which is a song-like language they can use to communicate with each other and with whales. Uplifted animals can lose their power to speak when stressed, as a temporary de-evolution Galactics have several specialized languages, including mathematical, tonal, sonar-based and "bridging" languages. Some languages are more sophisticated than others: in one novel, an alien called Alvin, who is a “Hoon” (alien species), notes that only some languages are good enough to describe highly technical processes, and notes how some people switch