This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
She is slower than the mirror-faced snake, and for some reason it is choosing to chase her, and she is not in dense enough forest to lose it by going up a tree or between a couple too narrowly spaced for it. So it catches her before emergency services can turn up.
And then she is somewhere else, in a not particularly attractive room next to a person who looks sort of off somehow.
"Excuse me," she says, taking a step out of his personal space.
"No. Couldn't really afford it, or at least we'd have to rejuggle lots of other things to be able to afford it, and it's economically inefficient since they mostly won't be working anyway."
" - seems hard on men, if they have to support the household and can't help much with taking care of their children?"
"- oh! Uncivilized humans often draw a really sharp distinction between their men and their women, and have different rules about them. Because the women will spend their adulthood pregnant and nursing, and the men won't. The Radch doesn't. You don't either?"
"Around here we call 'uncivilized' the humans who don't make any effort to protect their women and accordingly have them having babies they can't feed all the time, a problem they solve by killing them."
"I mean, if you have a baby and you didn't mean to and you've a job and no one to watch it and no savings and no food and there're no temples near you that take babies, you might smother it."
"I don't know that they'll be capable of manufacturing them on this presumed lack of an industrial base but I'll do my best."
"They have magic, maybe that can close the gap, I don't know, I haven't had a chance to study it yet because people keep landing on us."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
