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There are a lot of Amentan countries. Vanda Nossëo representatives are dispatched to all of them. These Elves (two with black hair, one with silver) take a shuttle down from the lightleaper to a country called Calado, and radio ahead to request permission to land at a elegant modern spaceport.
okay by comparison Voa and Tapa look like thriving modern democracies
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"Scarcity," she says. "And mortality. People are way better to each other when they know that no matter what nothing really bad can actually happen. Like - you can't die now, you understand that? And your kids can't die, and your grandkids, and anyone else you care about - if something happens in the course of getting membership, when we have guaranteed you security, we will put them right back whether you can afford a resurrection or not. Everyone's gonna be safe. And once people get used to that, then they can go 'oh. okay, what else do I care about? And often enough they care about - passing it on, making more people safe. Or making their country prosperous and happy and thriving and a place that people are desperate to immigrate to, or learning things, or inventing them - all this thought and energy and effort that was getting spent on zero-sum games..."
"They're better than constantly slaughtering each other to take each other's land. But they're bad."
"And they just mean - everybody's feeling horrible a lot of the time. Even if you have fifteen kids you can't arrange for them all to have fifteen kids, nobody can sustain that, so then you have sad kids."
"Luster humans hadn't even invented birth control yet when Mîr came to say hi. With it people average, like, two. Orcs are like you but they're not evolved, this asshole designed them that way so he'd have more slaves. Some species don't have high investment in their offspring and don't actually care whether they have any - Yeerks literally disintegrate to make their kids and I think are happy enough to not do that -"
"...I think until recently they didn't really get a choice about it, if their superiors said 'I want a million more Yeerks' then, well, you're dead either way, right? But also I guess some are suicidal? Or really want kids of theirs to exist even if they won't get to see them."
"I mean, once you have one, you'd die to save them, if you had to, but you wouldn't die to have them."
"Makes sense. Well, luckily for you all most places don't want kids as much as you and if you end up chewing through disproportionately many colony planets that'll be fine. It's too bad you're not near Mîr, by now they'd have wished on some sort of infinite-space solution for you all."
"I guess. I was born into it, I can't really imagine what it was like for the people who went from a normal life to a - safe and vast and magic one."
"Oh, most of the day to day is delegated and aliens landing is a good excuse to put off anything else."
Shrug. "People stuff? More magic? The screening for wishes? I'm kind of curious what kind of plot people would suspect this of being, it doesn't seem spectacularly conducive to any plots but I might not have the cultural upbringing to be properly imaginative."