"I guess so," she says, and then takes her hand. "Let's take a walk, okay?"

" - okay."

And she walks her over towards the rain forest, keeping well away from Rana and Cecelia's house. 

"So - I'm kind of worried about you. Mostly for the obvious reasons. But I want to - everyone here has slightly different ideas about how babies should be cared for and people should enter and maintain relationships, and - they all mean well but I don't want you to get lost in them, you know? So - I was thinking maybe you could tell me, like, say that your owners had told you on schedule what was happening, like they were supposed to, what - what would you have wanted to happen? And if you can think about it, it - might also be good to think about how you'd want things to be in a world where nobody owned you at all."

"Well, uh - normally, at least with Spacers, at least in my House, what's supposed to happen is that your owners inform you that you're going to be impregnated, maybe several times until it takes, and then if you're not already seeing anybody - I wasn't - you talk to your work crew leader and float ideas, and talk to some of your friends, and someone who doesn't mind marrying you steps up and agrees to stay with you and help you parent your children. And - of course it's a big change, but it's not very sudden, not the way it might be on a planet, or with a forced marriage, because you kind of know everybody in your work crew already, and so probably you're picking somebody you're already think pretty well of and trying to sort of transform your feelings to be more marriage-shaped."

"That makes sense."

"And - they don't tell us who the biological fathers are, often it's someone on another planet, so - that doesn't factor into anything. - that's just how we do it, you understand, I'm not - the Quendi have said that a lot of things we think are normal are actually very bad, and they're right, and - I don't want to assume that I know how things ought to be."

Nodnodnod. "And if nobody owned you?"

"...I dunno. I guess we'd - probably marry when we found someone we liked. And have kids when the community was ready for them."

"You ever found someone you liked?"

" - well not enough to have anybody I was expecting to marry, no. My work crew leader would have found someone all right for me, probably. I - guess now I'll probably end up marrying the biological father, if that's what the Quendi think is - better."

" - you don't have to marry someone because someone else stole their sperm and put it in you."

"Well, not normally, but - they think that he should parent his child, and that means - having a relationship. Of some kind."

"I just - we can talk to him, okay, and see what he thinks, but - you don't have to marry anyone just because some super powerful alien thinks it would be better if you did. Let's at least just see what he thinks about all of this, if we can even find him, all right?"

"Probably can't unless I immediately try to stop the Alteri anyway. But I guess I should be working on that anyway."

"It's possible Elizabeth can bring him here, I think. So - I think we should talk to him but I want you to be really clear that this is talking about stuff and seeing if there are any easy solutions, not - demanding that you marry someone right away."

- nod.

"Anyway. We should get you some lunch or something."

"That sounds good."

So she gets her some lunch and then properly introduces her to Asmodia and Verita and makes sure that she knows where. Starfarer's father is, and then she heads over to Korva and Hagan.

"She would prefer to get married. Possibly not to anyone new; she has a group back home, and doesn't particularly like any of them, but seems to feel that picking from among them would be - bearable. She's kind of under the impression that if we bring the biological father here to help parent the kid then she will have to marry the biological father. I tried to convince her that she doesn't have to but she did not seem very convinced."

"Yeesh. 

- if we had a me for her I'd be happy about it but I think making or finding one would be really bad, under those circumstances, it just adds to the - what do the aliens expect me to do -"

Nodnodnodnod. "She's making a lot of decisions based on - she does partly actually think that the elves have a better sense of ethics than she does, partly just because they objected to slavery, and to - the other things. But I think she's also spending a lot of effort on making sure she's - looking really responsible and sympathetic to everyone all the time. Because she's a slave, and it's - that's what she's used to doing. I kind of worry that people are not accounting enough for this."

"The Elves are - I think the baby thing ran into some enormous cultural taboo of theirs or something. You can probably convince them to not lecture her about it but they're not going to give up on telling the guy."

"They don't have to give up on telling the guy. Just - we should let Imrainai know that we're not all of one mind about this, and that nobody particularly wants her to go marrying someone she doesn't want to marry."

Nod. 

"I guess the person to talk to about assuring her on that front is probably Starfarer's dad."