"Three-year-old Amentans cannot have babies. How do they avoid young people in Canada having babies if they are too committed to bodily autonomy to require abortions?"

"Surrogacy is illegal under the age of 21, paid adoptions are illegal, long-acting reversible contraception without the teenager's consent is legal, and there's no particular infrastructure to help teenagers with their babies-- in Cascadia, we have day cares in every high school. To a first approximation humans don't have babies unless you make it a good choice for them to have babies."

"I see, that's interesting."

"If there's nothing more to talk about, I need to go talk to the interdimensional bar that has books from every universe."

"Be my guest."

Lev goes up to the bar. "This piece of paper has the information for a bunch of bank accounts and lines of credit on it, I don't know how many of them you can use but please drain as many as you can. This piece of paper has our preferences about books. We'd like the books on an ereader or ereaders that uses a file format compatible with Cascadian technology and can be charged in Cascadia. --Also, if you could throw in the twenty most popular books in Voan about reds among both reds and non-reds, that would be great."

The bank accounts and lines of credit belong to a few dozen different people and add up to a little more than ten million dollars. The book preferences paper says that the books should be in one of the two hundred most common languages on Earth; if that is not possible, the books should all be in one language to make the process of learning to translate it simpler, and should contain books of this-and-such sort to help them learn to translate it. It should be 50% fiction considered well-written and representative of its culture and 50% comprehensive history books and anthropology and economics books generally recognized as accurate among the societies they describe. The Bar should include books from many different universes selected for being representative. The Bar should purchase cheap books whenever possible so they can get as many books as possible for their money. There are various other specifications. It was a document worked out by a committee. 

I'm unable to perform format conversion or to use the lines of credit that don't belong to you, which will limit your results.

"Goddammit. The most important thing is that the ereaders are chargeable in Cascadia, if our computers can't make heads or tails of the files we can hire data entry people to handle it."

All right. Do you wish to fetch the people associated with these forms of payment?

"They're unfortunately all in Cascadia and there are many difficulties involved with getting dozens of Cascadians with high-level security clearances to fly to Gilead."

Do you wish to make any prioritization adjustments given the reduced spending power?

"God, no. The process of getting that paper worked out in the first place was hellish enough and I'm not going to touch it."

She provides a Kindle.

Lev returns to the table clutching the Kindle like it is the most precious thing in the world.

"That's a clever idea," remarks Avalor.

"If we'd been really clever we would have figured out how to get the Cascadian government to pay for it. But it'd be arts funding and no one in the art part of the Cascadian government has a security clearance high enough to know about aliens and we couldn't get it figured out before I had to get here. So I'm like two hundred thousand dollars in debt and don't have a retirement account anymore."

He does not seem particularly unhappy about this state of affairs.

Greens.

"I don't believe our existence will be secret for long."

"Gilead doesn't like us, we don't know when or if they'll let us at the interdimensional bar again, and we think their choice in interdimensional bar books is going to be bad."

"I see, that makes sense."

Lev looks at the Kindle, discovers that some of the books are in English, and proceeds to completely ignore anything else that happens. 

Greens.

Indeed greens. "Is there anyone else on my end you'd like to talk to? I have my theologian on call, for instance, if you want to know more about castes," Avalor says to the ambassador.

"We might be interested in learning more about castes." 'Especially reds' goes unstated.

Avalor summons Sadrin. Sadrin trots up and blinks at the ambassador's purple hair.

Lev decides that meeting the new alien is probably more important than reading about the universe where Scandinavia is a world power.

"Hello, I'm Chloe Shumaker, the Cascadian ambassador to Gilead, and this is Lev Aarons, a forecaster who advises the Cascadian government on policy. Within your caste system, he can best be understood as a green."