"...what if this goes on a very long time?"

"Then we can agree on a temporary solution while the permanent one continues to be discussed."

"What if you can't agree on that either?"

"That hasn't happened. I would be very surprised if it did. The current laws are in place until there's agreement on new ones, in any event."

"This sounds like it might lead to a lot of someone's life being taken up by arguing until they pretended to agree."

"That isn't really a problem we have had since we do not die of being forty."

"We do. If we come here..."

"Then we could impose time limits. If discussions are lasting endlessly, which is not typical."

"I think you might be - agreeable."

"It seems like the people of your world are behaving in a way that'd make it harder to come to conclusions agreeably with them."

"Well, yes."

"You think you're not likely to agreeably come to conclusions even without that problem?"

"I think it's more complicated than that."

"How do you do it?"

"The organizers make decisions for red communities. And we deal with whatever the cleans tell us we have to do."

"How do you decide who is an organizer? What happens if one does their job badly?"

"The organizers have assistants and assistants who more people trust and who think they can do the job better take over when the organizer stops working."

"Are people happy with how that works?"

"Mostly, yes. Not everybody agrees."

"What do they want to do?"

"Uh, organizers arrange to keep the price of child credits down and anybody who bids more than they're supposed to gets in trouble from all directions when the organizer says so, and I imagine they wish they could instead do what they liked without consequences."

"So if we had some places that were run like your neighborhoods, or people could come live in our cities, that would work?"

"I think so."

"Why don't we start with that as a plan, then, and we can always adapt it around whatever problems arise."

Nelen nods.