"I'll go pack."

"I'll look forward to working with you."

And Kib goes and comes back with a walking golem chair carrying him and all his stuff.

And Aitim passes on to Shasali that Kib says welcome.

"I feel very welcome," she says.

Aitim goes and bothers goatherds and farmers about baby drop rates.

Goatherds and farmers are generally willing to tell him how many babies they have found, but cannot vouch for exactness on timing.

He barely remembers any statistics and doesn't think he can reconstruct it. He diligently notes it all anyway.

Have they invented gears, gears are useful. How about steel.

They have gears and steel.

Aitim brings the numbers home and tries drawing graphs.

There are maybe more babies now? Maybe?

He shows it to Shasali. "Should I not involve you in this topic, is it too upsetting."

"In the abstract it's not intolerable."

"If the number of babies scales with the population then it seems unwise to rescue them all until this world reaches its magic- and technology-aided carrying capacity."

She nods.

"As a general principle, if increasing the population would be bad, it's a bit odd to conclude it's at the exact right level presently; maybe a gradual slight decrease is the best thing."

"I don't think they're at a point where increasing the population is bad yet."

"No?"

"No. They're not having trouble taking care of the kids, they're not having wars over space, there are people who need social services but not people with jobs going hungry or homeless. There's maybe one really big city's worth of people on the entire planet. They might not be desperate for children but there are other benefits to density and numbers."

"They could probably end up with a society where no one needs to work, once they learn how to automate more things. And more people might help with that, real cities - the Internet - but if the babies scale with the population, and we decide to try to stabilize at a hundred million, we're killing a lot more kids than if we try to stabilize lower than that."

"How are you going to find out for sure if it does that or not without letting the population go up?"

"The population is currently going up. I'm not going to try to design competing death storks now - we'll have more information in a year."

"A local year?"

"Probably?" He squints at his graphs. "It might be conclusive in a year. Or - conclusive enough that at that point death stork designs are a good idea, even if I'm not confident we'd end up using them."

"- Eugenics per se aren't a factor but it may matter that some of the babies come in dehydrated and injured and hungry and some are found sooner. But it stops being as much about preventing them from suffering if they selectively kill the ones who are already almost dead."