Giggle.

"I found this lovely little fried-things food cart on the other side of town, apparently here only for a month while his wife sells rugs. Do you want to get dinner?"

"Are you asking me out?"

"Yes."

"Sure. Fried things."

Fried things!

Fried things are yummy. "I assume colorful people have invented not only the fried thing but other culinary wonders unbeknownst to humanity."

"We got pretty good at food, yeah. You can breed plants for all kinds of things - seedlessness, better flavor, invulnerability to parasites, and less water requirements are all popular - and once you can keep things cold and ship them overnight you're not restricted to what's locally in season. That I bet we'll have here soon enough - refrigeration and shipping, that is, not genetic modification."

"How does refrigeration work?"

Hair-tug. "I wish I knew. It uses electricity and creates heat on net - all things that use electricity do that - and pushes coolant liquids which might just be water or might be something fancier through coils of some sort."

"...are we close to the level of development where colorful people invented it?"

"Not very far. I think there's a key insight and if I told it to you you could do it with current capabilities, but I could be wrong."

"Huh. Well, it's not coming to me within two minutes, apparently." Chomp fried thing.

"I would be rather knocked off my feet if it did, I've been straining to remember for months now. Refrigeration helps with vaccines, too, lots of things you might want to vaccinate for you've got to keep the vaccine cold and I bet that's impeding developing them now."

"We do have iceboxes."

"I don't know how picky unstable vaccine ingredients are. You're doing really really well for the tech level, honestly, we definitely hadn't invented democracy yet and the creches are nice considering how disinterested in kids your species is and you've got peace and order and rule of law...when Shasali and I first got here and we were assuming babies did not magically appear on hillsides we determined right away that the place we'd been dropped had a pretty functional government though we were confused how it was doing population control."

"Where'd you land? And we have to have creches, any culture that didn't invent the creche would die out."

"We landed in Atwa. And you could have - more coercive creches, that consider the children in debt for ten years or something. Or hit them for discipline or make them compete for food - the creches are nice. No one here seems worse off for the absence of loving parents."

"Maybe some places have creches like that. Are parents useful for non-inheritance things?"

"Yes, they pay you lots of individual attention and advocate for you until you're old enough to do it yourself and are the backbone of a sort of - social safety net for if you're suddenly severely injured or need a place to go on short notice or aren't able to find work..."

"I can see how that would be useful. And you're not letting arbitrary people have kids anyway, you can make sure it's nice people?"

"Oh, yeah, some people shouldn't be parents and we aren't perfect at catching them but we certainly try."

"Teachers once people are on apprenticeships sort of work that way but some people never get picked for apprenticeships. Or have to share their teacher with a bunch of people."

Nod. "And in Amenta your parents' other children, and your parents' parents, and their other children, are all usually mentor-type people in your life and can help you if you have a bad parent or if something goes wrong and your parent can't help."

"Co-prenticeships have an element of that. Not teacher's teachers or farther out."