So he takes her up to bed. "Which one?"

She grabs one of the Baby Princess series.

Aitim will happily read her Baby Princess Greets Her People.

Sleepy little blue.

Pat pat. 

Sigh.

Parents sleep also.

Lintalai gets corn and applesauce for breakfast and waits by her dads' bedroom door so she is not forgotten on their way to work.

She is not forgotten! She is scooped. "Ready to save questions for later?"

"I can't type my language yet but I can write them in Anitami."

"That sounds like a great idea."

Nod nod.

Aitim and Kan work in a dramatic towering building which is easier to appreciate than most of the dramatic towering buildings because of a long reflecting pool in front of it and a plaza with statues. People are mostly blue or yellow, though the ones watching the metal detectors visitors step through (Aitim and Kan and Lintalai do not have to) are grey. There is a spacious ampitheatre and elevators and Aitim and Kan go separate ways. Aitim snuggles Lintalai. Some people look longingly at Lintalai.

She waves at them.

And Aitim takes her to a lovely wood-panelled office with bookshelves and introduces her to his secretary and sets her down on the carpet. "I'm going to have some meetings. If you get bored you may step outside, okay?"

"Yeah. Can you open the window so the sunshine will be right?" she asks, scooting into the sunpatch on the floor.

"Is it wrong right now?" He opens the window.

"That's better."

"Oh good!"

And Aitim has meetings. Aitim meets with a yellow who's trying to figure out the economic impact of restrictions on imports from Orvara; they disagree about how likely anyone is to consider this an Anitami bid for protectionism in general, which affects the numbers substantially, and eventually he says that his assumptions should be used for the working paper and she makes a little bit of a face and then numbers are agreed on. Aitim meets with a blue who does something ambassadorial in Orvara. Aitim meets with a blue who does something ambassadorial in Arva; they discuss whether Arva has a complaint on account of having had to step up their border security. Aitim meets with a journalist and repeats the exact same eight sentences in response to all his questions. 

Aitim meets with more blues who get announced as Something-or-other Neli by the secretary. "You think this is a good idea?" one of them asks him.

"The visas? Yes, on two counts; firstly we really are short them for work, it'll be a problem if there's a war or a natural disaster or just if we need to clear out a district for making trouble. They get up to more trouble when they think we'll hesitate to shoot them for it, and we will if we're short. Secondly they're all rattled right now and this'll calm them down -"

       "Why will it calm them down -"

"Well, if we were taking in clean refugees that'd be a nice humanitarian thing to do, right, everyone would think it was very good of us, it'll seem sort of like that, and if they riot right after we went out of our way for them then no one else'll do it."

       "No one else is even considering it."

"I know that, they don't. Look, they behave themselves when they think it's getting them what they want, they want to save their friends, we want more reds and accordingly more flexibility in handling reds, the only reason not to do this is that it's so unpleasant to think about and at this point we've already paid that cost."

     "If we agree to it there's more thinking about - transport and announcements and things -"

"Why announce it? No one else wants to think about it either. If anyone asks 'did you import some' we say 'yes, we were short' -"

      "Why are we even short -"

"Little bit the war but mostly the storm. The idiots didn't have heating, they all froze."

      "I hadn't even heard about shortages."

"It would have been insulting to waste your time with it, it's not like we should up the credits when there'll plausibly be robots by the time this year's batch turns four. Another advantage of doing this is that we will have to think about it - and it'll make the news - if the shortage gets acute."

     "Ah huh."

"Give her visas for two hundred plus their immediate families and tell her you don't want to hear about it again."

     "Two hundred and families is a bit much, did that many die?"

"I don't know. If there's too many then they'll starve, it's self-correcting."

      "Hmm. Why does your sister-in-law want to handle this -"

"She's just been dwelling on the question of what we're going to do with them and decided she doesn't mind being disinvited from parties if it means having a plan for when robots or whatever." Shrug. "Someone's got to do it and I certainly wasn't going to."

      "But surely she listens to you."

"She doesn't even listen to Kan. If I wanted to do something about her I would appeal to my grandfather to cut her off but I don't want to do something about it, I do think it's a job someone has to do and maybe she'll come out of it looking brilliant, like whoever interfaced closely enough with Orvara's reds to figure out how to pull this off bloodlessly. Obviously we'd shut her down if she were being careless or stupid."

     "I don't think it needs to be two hundred but if she can document that losses this year were higher than average -"

"I'll let her know."

Lintalai takes a lot of notes and maybe makes faces but no noise.

Important blues do not seem to think much of faces made by small children. At lunchtime someone brings Aitim lunch and he closes the door to his office to eat it. "Are you bored, honey?"

"No."

"Is this what you would like to do this afternoon also?"

Nod.

"Have you seen any jobs that might be what you want to do when you grow up?"

"I don't know yet."

"Mmhmm." Snuggle. "Want some edamame?"