"Well, that's good," she says. "I think 'okay now' is the important part."

Elspeth nods. "Man, it would be weird if he met you, he would have no idea what to do about it."

"Would it be easier just to save him the confusion? I can be your grandma without being his mom."

"Yeah, he never comes here anyway. I'm not sure if he's ever even seen a door."

"There you go then."

"What're you going to tell your version of Mama when you go back?"

"I'm really not sure," she says. "Any advice?"

"Well, I don't know. Do you want her to like you, or do you want to maintain your strategic caginess?"

"I take it I can't do both? I mean, if possible I'd like to get away without mentioning Milliways because it's bizarre and unverifiable. But since I'm planning to install her as ruler of the world, she has much higher access to my secrets than she did half an hour ago."

"Well, if she's having coffee with you she must find you personally tolerable, so you have a leg up over, say, Addy the Imperial Factotum who she personally can barely stand and who has to stay within Dad's mindreading range eighty percent of always and top me up with all her new memories once a month to make sure she's not hiding anything in the other twenty percent. You won't have to do that if she likes you and you can convince her you're on her side, which you probably can if you actually want to make her empress of the world. But if you don't tell Mama stuff she'd want to know that's relevant to her, if you even delay much, she will figure it's because you don't trust her to behave appropriately with the information and she will think it's likely that you'd think that because you have information suggesting your goals don't match. And then she has to consider you maybe-an-opponent." Pause. "You haven't attacked anyone she likes, have you?"

"I don't know if she considers me to have attacked anyone she likes," says Libby. "I did briefly kidnap someone out of the middle of a conversation with her, in the interest of preserving one of those secrets I'm going to end up telling her anyway. Actually, while I'm here, what's your assessment of how your mother would behave if she knew how to dodge the otherwise heinous consequences of using the most powerful magic in the world?"

"She'd... do that and then use it? Probably in quantity if she could get it? Mama has R&D working on scaling space colonization in ways that take advantage of vampires not needing spacesuits, and reproducing our anesthetist's magic so we can turn more people, and defensive anti-weapon technology of various forms so we don't need to worry so much about governments deciding to nuke us, and she throws money at charities that are doing things like getting clean water to Third World villages so more people can live long enough for us to get around to them. Also she's got people working on this stuff," Elspeth hefts her glass, takes a swig, "but yours probably will not find that a necessary project. In our case it's taking the place of a truly staggering amount of animal slaughter, but at least we're now working in conjunction with slaughterhouses that can use the meat and not just the blood so we're not hunting wild megafauna and damaging ecosystems."

"That sounds... potentially interesting," says Libby. "Quantity is a problem; bigger wishes require more pain. Even her hypothetical productive mint is probably not keen on churning out sevens."

"Would it take many to accomplish goals like that?" Elspeth asks.

"It depends just how good you are at wishing," she says. "And how ambitiously you can imagine your goals. It sounds like that one is not going to be a problem for Bella."

"She wants to fill the universe with a society of vampires and hybrids and some werewolves, although she's not taking any personal interest in managing the werewolf population," Elspeth says chattily. "Well, mine does, yours probably just wants to soup up humans and send them every which way. She wants everyone to be immortal and safe and do interesting things."

"You know, I really think we're going to get along," says Libby.

"You and your instance of Mama? I sure hope so," says Elspeth.

"Me too!"

"Anyway. Can mint magic do lie detection? Even temporarily? Because then she'd believe you about Milliways, if she can do that and you offer to let her. And then you can just tell her everything and offer to help her take over the world and tell her what you want."

"It can, yeah. And I think I will do just that."

Elspeth traipses out the door, Jacob at her heels gazing at her adoringly.