So Isabella says, "With any luck they'll let me turn right around after I've reassured my family," and climbs the ladder after Matthew.

She's back half an hour later.

"Well?"

"They blew a lot of budget on the long-range precog. They want me to stretch my telepathy to work interworld - apparently I'm almost there - but at least for the time being since I have rapport and have gotten started on the language and have had exploratory neurological magery done and they don't happen to have any exploratory neurologist mages on the payroll already I get to keep being the point person."

"Oh good! Point person for what, is there like a procedure - will we be able to get through if we haven't had exploratory neurology done on us -"

"They did in fact come up with a first contact procedure before aggressively studying portals to other planets but it was designed for really alien aliens, not Elves, because why would we expect Elves; and it involved psion telepaths and linguists and the military and stuff. They're rejiggering now. You will not be able to traverse this portal until and unless a mage neurologist who has had mage neurology done to them comes through and does mage neurology to you; I get the sense my end thinks of this as a plus because they're concerned you might decide suddenly to invade them with something other than beautiful music. Fortunately, recording devices are small enough that I can just bring your sister one, it'll just inhibit her ability to give live concerts."

"I can understand why they'd think that was a plus but we haven't invented electricity yet and would be invading you with bows and arrows. If not for the Valar it'd be far more reasonable to worry about an invasion in the opposite direction. ...that's not in the works, is it, I'd be hard pressed to stop the Valar from just murdering people -"

"It is not to my knowledge in the works. It's not bows and arrows that worry them, it's the foreign magic."

"Well, they can rejigger and we can plot to make lots of money and maybe set up our own empire in Endorë and accept immigrants though I guess they'd need experimental magery done to them and that'll inhibit getting really poor people help."

"Once you have enough money to hire one full time mage you're all set. Exploratory neurology isn't as I understand it particularly difficult to pick up, just not very useful until just now."

"What'd you get done?"

"Control training which doesn't consist of starving in the wilderness instead consists of lying around, inert, being fed nutritionally complete liquid and having a shared hallucination which convinces our magic to try to act on it instead of on the real world where it could hurt somebody. Every now and then they stop feeding the kids for two days so they're safe outside of virtuality and make them exercise. I don't move around that well when I'm not out of condition and fasting; under those conditions I could barely crawl. They were responsible for my health and if I'd wasted away that would have been a problem, so they got me a mage - better to patch up my clumsiness than have to have a more advanced biokineticist put muscle on my bones after two years of barely twitching - but he couldn't get anywhere. They tried a psion too, same results. I suggested installing a swimming pool but they were afraid I'd drown. Eventually I wound up having appointments with a physical therapist during exercise periods and still needed a lot of biokinesis patching by the time I was safe to release."

"That's kind of horrifying. ...how much to hire a long range psion to guess whether the Valar will react nicely and offer to, like, make your world better -"

"Kind of a lot. Not out of reach, but out of prompt reach. It wasn't as unpleasant as it sounds, I spent most of my time comfortably in virtuality totally unaware of my body reading books and having lucid dreams and talking to my brother once I learned those tricks."

"Can kids refuse, or is that too dangerous?"

"Most eclipsed refuse. They can get locked down when they first eclipse, they can drop out of training. I really really wanted to be a psion."

"I am really glad you're a psion. But that still sounds horrible."

"It's better than starving in the wilderness! If I'd been born ten, fifteen years earlier, my options would be barely eating at all until one of the much-rarer-back-then psions was available to lock me down, or going out in the middle of nowhere too far to hurt anybody and slightly more than barely eating from whatever people scraped together to leave at a dropoff point. There are cultures that have tended to just make a habit of killing anybody who eclipsed, if they couldn't keep around a psion for lockdowns."

Shudder.

Shrug. "If you're a tribe of fifty people hunting and gathering somewhere, there's no way you happen to have a psion around, only one in two thousand even can be and we don't live that long, you're not likely to have overlap - humans can't survive indefinitely on magic-suppression diets - if you don't have some good empty wilderness and a food surplus and a way to keep wild animals out of it what are you gonna do? But now we've got virtuality and it's downright tolerable."

"I'll grant it's not the most urgent priority."

"Yup."

"What is that, do you think? Now that we've got reliable travel up."

"Funnily enough, possibly your sister's musical career - I think it establishes a good precedent and public opinion and it means you have the money sooner. It'll be easier once I can talk to people across worlds, I'll hire my brother away from his internship and have him run my errands."

"I will tell her. She'll be delighted."

Isabella laughs. "They want me to make a trip across once an Earth day to keep them posted till I can make reports by telepathy."