"I think I'll pass, all the same. We were - going through your brother's slave - to avoid the payments thing."

"That seems unkind."

"Where I'm from, slavery is considered unkind."

"They're staying here overnight at her request, and he's paying for it."

"I don't know what that means."

"Humans need a lot of food to survive a night. She and her son wanted to spend the night in our court, with that food provided by emergency expeditions organized by us. This is very expensive. She can't afford it. She wanted to do it anyway, because she was having trouble feeding her baby. He hates spending the night in our court, but he agreed, and he's spent more than half his time paying for it rather than have us take it out of her."

"I recognize there's a baseline relative to which that's reassuring but where I'm from you just take in starving mothers and give them whatever they need and no one takes it out of anyone."

"That sounds impossible. Resources come from places, and require effort to extract and store and make available. If you feed all the starving mothers that wander by, someone's taking it out of someone."

"In some places food is, like sunlight, too plentiful to bother accounting for; in others, everyone pays their society to provide a set of things that includes policing and firefighting and food for starving mothers; in this place, the bar will gladly make food for anyone who asks for it, and seems to think that that girl is still starving."

"What interesting systems. I suppose if she'd landed in one of them she'd have been provided for some other way. Here, it costs something, and he's paying it."

"So that she'll owe him?"

"So that she'll like him. She won't live to pay it back."

"We might be able to do something about that."

"That was the first thing my brother told me."

...he nods.

Okay I think I followed maybe half that.

He says his brother loves her.

See, that there, that was in the half I did not follow.

"I'd like us to sit down and see what we can productively do for one another but I'm concerned about incurring debts that I don't understand."

"It's not generally desirable to have strangers outside your control indebted to you in the long term. If we end uneven, you can produce some of this food that's free as sunlight and we'll be all set."

"All right. Then there are some people I'd like to introduce you to -"

"Not by name."

"Yes, I've been told."

They go upstairs.

"Did that go well?" she asks Rána.

" - well, we came out of it ahead, but I'm not sure that's very impressive, when he didn't know what he was doing. I don't - I don't super know what everything meant."