He tells his roommate he's found someone who might be able to invent mining who had some good ideas for looking into baby drop rates.

"That's good."

"I want to fund it. What does our budget look like? Is your boyfriend likely to move in and help with bills?"

"I could inquire but it hasn't come up yet on its own. We're comfortably making rent and groceries and water, although we'd be more comfortably making water if you took a reasonable number of baths. There's some extra, I don't know how much funding this calls for..."

"Enough that someone who takes fewer baths than me could live on it - that's not you, incidentally, it's all of the everything."

"Live here or live alone?"

"Could we squeeze in another person? I, uh, had six bedrooms and an interior courtyard at home, I might have poor instincts about how many people reasonably live in places."

"We don't have another room, but you and I could just sleep in shifts more formally than we already do. Kalatha should have one but not necessarily soon, we could move at that point."

"I can run it by him." He beams at Kalatha. "What age do you think she should have one -"

"When she's - four or five in local years, I think -"

"She'll probably have a sibling or two by then."

"It's possible to co-sleep with a set of twins."

"I know, my parents had twins last spring. Two sounds good, especially if you're going to be as possessive of them as you are of her."

"They do have houses with a lot of bedrooms here reasonably affordably. For professionals with apprentices." She shakes her head.

"I'm glad they're the way they are, imagine trying to impose population controls on a pre-industrial society that wasn't completely insane."

"They're not at the point of needing them. I suppose they might be if they weren't randomly-appearing-people."

"They have vaccines. I think they'd be at that point, if they weren't randomly-appearing - and it's better to start early, get people accustomed when it's something like four-apiece and then scale down, rather than have a bunch of awful wars with tens of millions of people routinely slaughtered and then impose them from scratch. If we'd landed on a pre-industrial Amenta I'd be trying to think how to pull it off. But it'd be horrible."

"They don't even like children. The people who work at the creche like them more than anyone and they think we're bizarre."

"My candidate for mining robots, Kib, was very sympathetic about population controls until I clarified that the problem was not that you had to avoid sex lest you have a child, at which point he was completely baffled."

Shasali kisses Kalatha's head.

Beautiful good soft baby. "I miss everybody so much."

"I like it here."

"Anitam may have treated us differently."

"Seems plausible."

He figures out how much money they can manage and writes Kib with the sum and the offer of a shared room.