"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."

"That's really weird," she says. "Like, coming from a place where there's bitoxiphosphene. I haven't put Catherine down since she was born except when people here borrowed her so I could sleep, 'cause people kept telling me it would be better to give her up for adoption so she could have two parents, and stuff."

"But she's your baby!"

"That's what I said!"

"I promise you, no one here is going to take your baby."

"Good!" She snuggles Catherine, who has fallen asleep. "Also everyone here seems super invested in me getting enough sleep."

"People who don't get enough sleep tend to bliss. Eros takes sleep very seriously. You can talk to the other moms about cycling baby care so you get eight uninterrupted hours every night."

"Awesome."

"Do you have any more questions?"

"Um, where do we stay and how do I get stuff we need and who do I talk to if I think of something I need to know?"