"That does affect life outcomes for Amentans, yeah. I wonder if you could get stork coverage up high enough that it doesn't come up at all - I wish there was a way to contact the stork-makers..."

"Why are they hiding?"

"Presumably so someone can't use the rather extraordinary leverage that placing all the babies in the world gives you."

"Not all of them. There aren't so many storks that they found Kalatha first."

"They're releasing them faster than they break down, I assume 'all of them' is the eventual goal. It's - a really good goal, if only the appearance rates turn out to stay steady."

"If it scaled with population does this suggest how much growth rate - even Amenta allows a growth rate -"

"I forget most of my statistics, I took a look through the textbook and decided I'd hire people for that, but I don't think we can guess from this. We allow a growth rate because we're not actually at carrying capacity, we'd have had to stop eventually."

She nods.

"If people on other planets and moons and so forth don't count we can keep the population planetside that replaces the whole civilization and arrange for most people to live on the moon and in space stations. But I'm not sure we can get that far in my lifetime."

"How old are you?"

"Twelve. Space is hard and they might not be as smart on average, without any selection for it."

"Unless the babies' traits adjust the way you think number does."

"That'd be weirder, suggest a mechanism tracking which people are the most would-be-reproductively-successful and giving them more children even though they have no interest in children. Can't rule it out, given how weird everything is, but I'm not sure what it'd even mean for it to be true. 

They do obviously have smart people but, well, everyone knows eugenic effects are pretty weak over short timescales."

"Not necessarily reproductively successful, just alive."

" - sure, but that wouldn't be correlated with intelligence."

"It would if they get into stupid childhood accidents or fights. There are fewer safeties on things here."

" - I guess weakly correlated. Most kids who die die of disease, though, and they evidently have not pseudo-evolved a sanitation instinct."

"They don't have the technology for it. They do prefer being clean, they bathe, they just don't do it four times a day."

"Amentans at a comparable tech level were putting much more of our resources into it. I'm, uh, glad they didn't take the specific tack on it we did, but the most desperate Amentan in the world wouldn't tolerate conditions that they seem unbothered by."

"The most desperate clean Amentan."

"We've been selecting reds for hyposensitivity - among other things - and the first city bothered you too. But people still live there, even though indoor plumbing has been invented and they could leave, and they're not desperately saving up to install it either."

"I'm not a plumber and I know germ theory, which seems new here. People get used to things."

"I still think if there were selection pressure they'd have more of a pollution instinct."

"We don't know exactly how long they've existed and there may not have been much of one to work with in the starting population either."

"Maybe. Anyway, I don't think I can get them to modern technology in my lifetime."