"This part I'm hoping can exponentiate," he says. "Even if more daeva can't be summoned, more people can be trained to do resurrections and then I just need to make bodies."

"It would have to be treated very carefully--I wonder if your conjurations could specify between someone resurrected correctly and one who craves human flesh." 

"That doesn't naively seem like a conjurable parameter. How'd - oh, there's probably footnotes about the historical forensics in some of your books."

"Indeed. Honestly, everything about your world is incredibly interesting." 

"I'm glad you think so!"

"I find myself tempted to simply get lost in a sea of books! But that's best left at least until all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked on bringing this one up to par." 

"I mean, mine's a really useful case study. For instance, we have time to intervene before World War II!"

"Time to intervene before what?" 

"They rename the Great War to World War I and then there's a II and it's worse."

"I suppose I only got the summary of the American atrocities." 

"Oh, the Japanese internment thing was a World War II thing."

"...Ah." 

"But the big ticket items lifesaving-wise in that vicinity are mostly going on in Europe and Russia and China. I think it can be done, but there's enough I want to destabilize before then - were you all aware Communism's a bad idea? It requires real delicate conditions to work at all and nobody right now has them - that there's no way to be sure everything'll be where it's expected by then."

"It didn't exist when I was alive the first time, and I hadn't read enough about it yet to have a firm opinion." 

"It's a bad idea. So many people die. Best angle on it is probably ending material scarcity with daeva summoning and a tech jump."

"That sounds much more straightforward than questionable political philosophy." 

"Yes. But testing whether it can be done without stranding daeva here will be delicate. I've written home for a volunteer but haven't gotten any replies yet."

"What kind of person would you expect to volunteer?"

"Oh, history nerds? Altruists? Some demon who wants kids and would bet on being able to adopt some here?"

"Demons can't have children?" 

"Daeva can't reproduce. Demons are the ones I can write to from here."

"Daeva can't have children," he corrects himself agreeably, "why not?"

"The oversimplified answer is we don't have the necessary ingredients, but that's not the real problem, since demons at least could make them - daeva are indestructible. I could go fly into the sun, and while I would have a hard time getting out again without harming the sun I wouldn't be more than moderately uncomfortable in the process. The way this works has to do with our concept of the boundaries of our bodies: I can cut my hair if I want, but you can't cut my hair if I don't want. If you decide out of an impulse to mad science to graft an appendage onto a consenting daeva subject who then agrees to be knocked unconscious so you don't have to worry about them deciding that actually they like the new appendage and want to keep it, the appendage dies, because it's not incorporated into the thing that's holding us together. Demon women who've tried just sticking a zygote where it would naively belong have had one of two things happen - they incorporate the zygote into their self-concept and it stops growing, or they don't and it dies."

"Bizarre...but in an oddly sensible way." 

"Yup!"