"And they - bother to put them in daycare - or whatever that place is -"

"Well you do have to keep the species going. Maybe no one's conquered them because no one needs the space."

"And Kalatha - someone just lost interest, set her down rather than carry her -" She looks sick.

"And they thought we were dropping her off at the daycare - the driver of the cart we rode on thought it was odd we had named her -"

Shasali holds out her arms for the baby.

Baby. He's not careful about not touching Shasali.

She snuggles the baby and kisses her head. "It's okay, little lovely, we got you," she coos.

"Aaaa," says Kalatha.

"We can adopt a hundred if we want, doubt the daycare would mind."

"Once we have somewhere with running water."

"I suppose robots-exporter probably has a more mature way of arranging it - a place for you to take the kids - or maybe not, maybe you don't want to try too hard to get everyone to take them to a daycare because then you would have population growth -"

"Do they pick them up again the next spring? You said nobody has kids. But they were all different ages at the daycare -"

"They were. No one is currently pregnant, and no one currently has a kid with them, but the daycare they were spread out like this place is equatorial - maybe springs are longer, maybe one just concluded but most of those kids were born this spring - or maybe they don't permaspring -

- if they do permaspring you'd think some people would prefer - prefer continuing to care about their kids -"

"This doesn't make any sense."

"I noticed!"

"And even if you were going to abandon a baby shouldn't she have been wearing a diaper, they've invented those -"

"Maybe the parent wanted to save it to sew into a pillowcase because these people are terrible."

"Even if - even if you didn't care, it would have taken so little effort to - they can't have been expecting us to come along and want her, why hadn't they killed her outright, instead of just leaving her there to die slowly - were they expecting her to be raised by sapient antelopes or whatever insane thing -"

"Could be a religion? Primitive people had all kinds of strange religions, animal sacrifices and so on -"

"Maybe..."

"You're right that it doesn't make any sense but I can't think what could possibly make sense of it."

"Maybe it is the sapient animal thing, there's something going on with the animals."

Sigh. "I'm going to get some sleep, knowing the language won't hurt."

"Are we all three going to share the bed?"

"There's only the one, right? I suppose we could sleep in shifts."

"One of us could put a pillow on the floor."