She will put up with five minute baths as often as he feels like setting them up.

He tries to mostly do this when Shasali is out and about but Shasali does not leave Kalatha much at all. Baby will be as clean as she can be.

Storks sometimes bring babies in. Babies of various shades of beige and brown with this limited local range of hair colors. Babies who've been out in the woods way too long and need a lot of careful hydration and feeding; healthy just-appeared babies.

Poor babies. They will get careful care. 

Does anyone have statistics on the rate of baby appearances over time?

Well, there's more now, but that could just be storks.

Yeah, that's not the thing he's interested in. Are babies evenly distributed? Do they know if any land in the ocean?

They don't think any land in the ocean because they don't wash up on the shore but it's hard to be sure. They seem to appear in wilderness areas more often, though sometimes on farms; virtually never in a town.

...so maybe when the whole place is populated the appearance rate will slow, or maybe the farms will be full of them.

Does anyone want to buy notes on railroads.

Oh, they have those as an idea, but they're expensive to implement and it's not that much harder to come up with servants that can traverse regular roads.

Yes, the ideal trial location would be between two places that don't already have a road between them, because they're not more expensive to implement or maintain than building a road in the first place and they're a lot faster and easier to scale up for more traffic.

...roads are lots cheaper.

...they really shouldn't be. Laying new roads involves moving a lot more earth than laying new rails. What are they doing exactly?

Tromping along till there is a path. Removing rocks. You have to do that for rail too. Metal's expensive.

...so the roads are all just dirt with the possible addition of wagon ruts? And impassable every time it rains?

Well, in towns they put cobblestones, as he has seen, but between cities it's mostly earth, yes. They're not impassable in the rain.

...does this continent just not get that much rain? Railroads are vastly more efficient and cheaper than dirt roads and he's unsure what factors are different making this non-obvious.

They're not sure where he's getting his information. They get rain on a regular basis.

Two hundred other countries that industrialized. If anything, he'd expect it to work better here, because you don't need coal to run the trains, while road-going automata seem comparable in up-front cost and maintenance costs to mules which graze along the way. It's possible metal is vastly scarcer here, but mining is another thing they should be better at, what with it automatable. ...is mining largely automated?

No.

Aitim tries to figure out who to talk to about automating mining. 

Some servantmakers are working on it. It's just hard. Not the sort of thing automata are good at, and golems take more dev time.

He knows approximately nothing about metalworking. He's also not sure if you can use anything other than metal for railroad rails. Fine, what about some chemists who can check whether Amenta and this place have the same elements and chemistry?

How would he like the comparison made exactly?

So these are the elements in Amenta; you can tell by purifying them and checking their relative weights, and maybe there are other ways of checking he can't think of.

That's interesting, is he a chemist? They aren't very advanced in chemistry but they'll look. No obvious contradictions.