Our wilderness areas are safer, I guess? I don't go hiking much for obvious reasons but I'm pretty sure it's commoner to find a live baby than a dead one.

He shudders. Now that the Enemy's dead no one dies. I have never seen a dead person, let alone a dead abandoned baby, let alone - a whole world full of them - what if you want to have children? You go out and find one? Wouldn't they not be anything like you?

I can't think of any earthly reason I'd want a baby around. I don't think I could stand to have an apprentice younger than four and it'd have to be a precocious four. Some people like babies and take them off the hands of overloaded creches, but that's not common at all, usually it's creches up until the kid's ready to eat with utensils and not throw rocks indoors and learn something. Some kids don't even get apprenticed, they just stay in the creche until they feel like striking off on their own.

Children are reared collectively, not adopted, if they don't slowly die in the woods? None of you have any families? I mean, that one sounds like a cultural difference not an ongoing atrocity and I'm willing to be open-minded but - seems terribly lonely.

I found my creche way too crowded, honestly. Skipped out with the first servantmaking teacher who came by. People make friends! The well-organized creches make sure there's some adult responsible for giving any given kid individual attention!

Most of the time the two people who decide to make a child together quit most of their other work so that during her childhood they can devote their full energy to raising and tutoring and loving and caring for her.

Well, that sounds really laborious.

If one were the sort of person who found it so, they wouldn't have children.

I guess. Creches have perpetual problems getting enough people to work at them, the staff are usually really dedicated but most people have other things they want to be doing with their lives...

I certainly don't think anyone would want child-raising to be the thing they do with their lives. But a thing you do, if you've decided to do it at all, wholeheartedly for the short time the child is young and can benefit from devoted attention.

Well, like switching from money to a communalist reputation economy, this would not be a readily accomplished transition on my world.

No, I think what I'm tempted to do about your world is bring the babies here but I don't know if the Valar'd agree or how many of them there are...

...what, and let my civilization die out?

No, of course not, send them off to go apprentice when they're ready just as you apparently do anyway.

Oh, you just want to supplant the creches or supplement them, gotcha. Although they'd wind up not speaking the language and stuff.

If one child could be prevented from starving to death or growing up parentless by the whole population of Tirion learning your language we'd all be fluent by the end of the month.

Children dying is really really bad!

Okay, but a ton of languages are spoken on my world; I know the one that's common to city-states in a certain region of the largest continent but there are dozens and dozens more. If the Valar can rescue all the babies as they appear I'm all for it but arranging that they're suitable to repatriate will be a complicated project.

Okay. What's the population of your world, are there estimates of how many babies awaken annually?

Hundred million give or take, and I don't have a formal estimate but say two thirds of babies are found these days and one percent of people are at any given time babies, so million and a half a year, worldwide, about.

How many of you are there?

About four hundred thousand in the whole world.

...yeah. Maybe you could take some of them but you cannot completely solve the problem like that. At least not on a parents-as-opposed-to-creche model.