"...Why Senators want?"

"- oh, that's how you secure a future for your children and grandchildren, you accomplish things, but it's all very zero-sum."

"..."

"Just means you can't go running around meeting the entire Senate," he says. "It's extremely lucky you landed with the Adaros."

"Accomplishment zero-sum, other Senators want you not accomplishment?"

"The rewards are zero-sum," he says. "There's only so much room. Everyone wants kids - I'm sure aliens want kids too, right, or where would new aliens come from? - but we can't sustain people having too many, so we have to earn permissions. Most castes earn their own - place in contests or something - purples have applications they can fill out for first children, there's too many to do it directly for every single one - but blues wind up in positions like the Senate past the time when we can still have children so we wind up paying it forward a few generations instead. I've got three kids and four grandkids to look out for and only one of those grandkids is shared with another senator so we've only got so much shared interest."

"Hm."

"So since you landed with the Adaros, they told me privately and I had Cadra fetch you and now nobody's running around like a maniac trying to make sure they don't miss the opportunity."

"Senators running around like a maniac, I not do."

"Even if you decided that was the time to fly over the nearest international border that wouldn't stop them from doing it."

Nod.

"I'm explaining all this because I think we can accomplish excellent things working together and I'm happy to accommodate whatever you need to do that but it's going to collapse if anybody who's not extremely loyal to this office finds out. Almost anyone would have an incentive to tell someone else. Cadra is probably thinking about telling her grandfather."

"No sir."

"She's thought about it but decided against," he says. "It's all right, Cadra."

"...Want understand permissions."

"The blue ones are the most complicated - the Adaros, one of them has worked for me for a while. I'm authorized to give out some yellow permissions and have given her some. She had one of her daughters call me about you - a bit transparent, but she'll get what she wants, new grandkid in the spring. Yellows who want a lot of kids mostly do it through politics but they can also win programming or journalism or architecture awards or just work usefully at some job that has them available long enough, doing health and safety inspection or translation or personnel management or whatever. People who don't contribute anything don't get children unless they marry someone useful, that's the only rational way to do it when there isn't enough to go around."

"...Want understand isn't enough to go around."

"There's not enough space. If everyone had three kids, let alone fifteen, we'd eventually overwhelm the space we have to live in - even the places like the equator and poles and moons where we could live but don't want to because of seasons."

"...Fifteen?"

"That's as many as an Amentan can have. Well, a woman, occasionally a man will pull off more than that."

She seems inarticulately puzzled by this.

"...and Amentans want children, that being why we are still around as a species after having invented birth control," adds Cadra helpfully.

"Fifteen children?"

"A lot of people would stop at five, and a lot of people who wouldn't stop at five would stop at eight, but that's because they get expensive to feed and you can get a lot of the same mileage out of grandchildren..." Cadra says. "...do aliens not like children very much? Or stop wanting them after you have them?"

"...Don't permissions, don't know aliens five children, don't know aliens six seven eight...aliens can sixteen seventeen eighteen..." she waves a hand to indicate that eighteen is not the highest possible number of children an alien can have.

"We didn't use to have population controls on Amenta either. The Emperor of Oahk made sure that everyone instituted them because if someone's population is growing out of control it's everyone else's problem."

"Illia Odette sister. No else sister, no--other, not-sister--"