"So", he says to Cam, "I've been thinking about pacing. It should take, hmm, ten summoners and their assorted daeva and a hundred people who can teach new medical and engineering tech to fix up a preindustrial world, probably one in ten of those is complicated enough to require personal attention of someone competent I trust? If no one wants to work and I've just got the people I've currently got, I can fix up eighteen thousand worlds at a time."

"The ones that are complicated enough to require the personal attention of someone competent you trust might be complicated enough to draw other resources."

"Yep. It might be worth just doing worlds that aren't complicated, honestly, it's not like we'll run out..."

"Possibly, yeah. Maybe with particularly force-multipliery complicated worlds being an exception."

"Yep. So - fifteen thousand simple worlds and some ones that get extra attention, though I don't know if it's unwise to move that fast just on some general principle, even if we can do it..."

"It probably isn't, in case baseline complication is greater than you expect."

"Or in case we run into something we can't handle which has interdimensional transit and can go fuck up everywhere we've granted it accidental access to. I don't know what appropriate caution looks like compared to just excessive conservativism."

"Yeah, tricky. I suppose to ward off the class of things that can travel but only to places they know about, and things that can travel but only by co-opting our portals, you can operate under strict infosec and have a way to shut the portals down..."

"And do all the portals to new worlds from an empty dimension - or a Limbo really far from its inhabited parts if we can't find empty dimensions -and lightyears apart from each other, until a world has been cleared as not containing things in that class."

"Oh, good idea."

"Magic version of my father ask you about rings of power yet? He said he was going to work on it after immortality but I don't know if he went for the notes sooner than that."

"Hasn't come up, might be he asked Edie."

"Apparently my nephew Tyelpe invents something that - well, the lesser ones are merely very nifty and the greatest one makes the bearer effectively a magic Vala. Except for the difficulty of killing them. This is less thrilling than it sounds because Vala magic is slow and tedious, but - there's still a lot to say for it. And one thing magic Valar can do is shut down other kinds of magic. In theory with a ring a person can make all unfamiliar magic not work within ten, twenty miles of them. If my father can reconstruct them it'll be much safer to go greet new worlds."

"I'm familiar with the 'shutting down magic' feature. If it's sufficiently broad-spectrum, yeah, good thing to have in the collection of things."

"We don't have the Tyelpe or, I think, any way to go fetch him. No one knows where the Valinor in Ozymandias is anymore."

"And a forkable Space one even if we presumed they'd want to be forked wouldn't have the magic expertise... inconvenient."

"Mirror has one but we're assuming non-me people from Mirror might still be evil."

Nod.

"You don't get anywhere by conjuring up models of Ozymandias's Valinor, do you?"

"Fails presumably on account of magic."

"Scale models of people in it, does that work?"

Tries it - "Goes."

"Thirty thousand years, I don't even know who to check for."

Matt is reading a newspaper at the Bar again. "If Cam has time to waste conjuring things out of sheer curiosity, I am curious if my cousin is all right."

Tiny basement dweller magic Ozymandian Findekáno?