"What else-- oh, if fish swim through the air near the lake that's normal and it doesn't mean you're seeing things. If you're ever trapped somewhere and need to escape, you'll always be able to find a way out, even if you've been there before and you know there's no way to escape. And strange cats are often powerful and will try to protect you from harm."

"How... will I know there's no way to escape... if there's always a way to escape?"

"I mean, if you've been in this room before and you know there's just a wall, and someone is threatening you and you need to get out, the wall will suddenly have a door in it."

"Oh, okay. Cool."

"It comes in handy."

"Yeah, it sounds useful." Sigh. "So like - you don't have money but do people have to work, here -"

"Yes, everyone has to work. Fifty hours a week is pretty normal. Of course, you'll have less, because you're a mother."

"Well, that's good. I assume I can't just... teach piano."

"We don't have a piano, and even if we did teaching it is not really very important for the survival of Eros. If you can sing or play an instrument we have or can get, you can play at night or while people work."

"I sing too, yeah. Piano's the only instrument I've picked up but I could learn something else!"

"That sounds good. You can garden also, or make something. We have enough three- to five-year-olds now that we've been thinking of splitting them off into their own classroom, if you think you'd do better as a teacher."

"Gardening's okay but I'm not great at it. My only teaching experience is piano but I like that pretty well and I don't know that much stuff but I probably know enough for kindergarteners. - if all this happened seven years ago how come you have so many kids?"

"Our list of contraceptive methods is the pullout method, the rhythm method, homosexuality, not having penis-in-vagina sex, poisoning yourself in the hopes the fetus dies before you do, and natural family planning which no one can do because it requires so much paper to chart. All of these are unlikely to work for many people."

".........bi...toxi...phosphene?"

"What's that?"

"A chemical that makes women infertile? We have a lot of it and it's everywhere and most people can't have kids, or can't have kids who're born alive anyway, especially not past their teens."

"Not a thing in our world. --If you can't have babies you're going to be very popular among a certain subset of the good Catholic boys of Eros."

"I mean, I had this one and she's healthy. I might be good for another five or I might never have another one or they might all come out with half a head."

"Even so, some guys will like their chances better with that than with the ten babies they'll have with a girl born in this universe."

"Lucky me then."

"It's unfortunate if you want kids, though."

"I've got this one, that's more than some people get."

"And you can adopt, it's not like we have any shortage of parentless children."

"...yeah I guess if their parents are dead I can do that. I have like, weird feelings about adopting kids if their parents are not dead."

"I don't know why we'd let you do that, there aren't enough parents to begin with."