"The parents can come too as long as our net population change isn't positive - that is to say, the more Voans who move to Earth, the more families we can admit to Voa."

"Different problem-- Gilead is designed, as a society, to keep people from committing sins. In Voa, all their peers will be genderless atheists who have premarital sex, they'll be taught about evolution and homosexuality in schools, they might have to identify with a caste..."

"But apparently humans sin dozens of times a day?" Secretary Bar has also been notetaking.

"That doesn't mean their parents want them to commit more sins!"

"Perhaps we could set up human-only communities, provided they can follow national law in addition to whatever restrictions humans require," Avalor says. "If humans don't season the way we do, northerly parts of Voa that are too undesirable to Amentans to develop might be habitable for you."

"That ought to work fine, especially if you don't count surrogacy for the purpose of adoption in Gilead as a violation of population controls."

"At that point I'd be speculating on how overtures abroad would land. Population control is an international matter, it's not me deciding to count it or not. If anyone is concerned that I will lose the ability to enforce my population cap, they will intervene to stop me from flirting with that risk sooner than later. Establishing settlements above the arctic circle helps, but if they think that this -" she gestures around the bar, "mode of access might fail unexpectedly, or that humans might sneak off and reproduce elsewhere in Voa, or try to cross international borders..."

"We could only allow infertile women to go to Voa, which seems like it would solve most of those concerns."

"But the girls growing up there to avoid chemical exposure will presumably not be infertile once they grow up."

"That's true. We don't have a religious objection to birth control, fortunately, just a practical one... it would be worse if you had stumbled across Catholics."

"- Catholics?"

"A group of people who are wrong about God wants. Most relevantly, they believe God doesn't want them to use any form of birth control other than refraining from sex during fertile times."

"How do people make mistakes like this in general? This is the second group of people wrong about what God wants that you've mentioned."

"Many people will reorient their entire lives around doing what God wants, so there's an incentive to lie. People who sincerely believe the lie can carry it forward even without the active intervention of the liars. And of course Satan is constantly trying to interfere with our relationships with God."

"I see. How does one make sure that one hasn't fallen for such a lie, and what is Satan's involvement like?"

"Well, there are miracles of course, and God speaking to you in your own heart, and the historical evidence of His presence on Earth... Satan tempts people to commit sins, mostly."

"Why don't those methods work for Catholics and Muslims and anyone else?"

"People sometimes believe wrong things on Amenta, don't they?"

"Yes, there are conspiracy theorists who think we only have one moon and the like, but they tend not to accumulate great size or notability."

"No one believes wrong things about, oh, tax policy or raising children or whether you should vaccinate..."

"There are reasonable disagreements on tax policy. I don't think anyone has ever been really curious what tax policy an individual person supports, trying to find out via methods you'd expect to work, and coming up with the wrong results, unless the person in question was being deliberately obfuscatory."

"I mean, it's not like you can talk to God the same way you can talk to a human being."

"- it's not?"

"It used to be, thousands of years ago when the Bible was being written, and of course people talked to God all the time when He was a human. But now we learn about God through studying the Bible and through, you know, warm feelings in one's heart and a sense of peace."

Avalor stares at him, just a little. Then smiles. "I see. That recontextualizes a lot of what you've told me."