" - I mean, she also did not do that."

"That's horrible! How are you alive?"

"It's - a complicated situation, lots of people didn't do all the things they ought to. My mother got sick when I was eight, and didn't really get better, and died when I was ten; my father had another household, but they were not wealthy, and didn't have the money to feed six extra small children they hadn't planned for. So I worked, and Abadar gave us what we needed."

"If we had a man who wasn't feeding his first wife's children, then the community elders would give her children to someone who would. I guess we don't pay for our food, but - still."

" - I mean, in Osirion it also speaks very poorly of a man who isn't feeding his first wife's children, but there are not a lot of people who will just decide to feed those children for him. It's a lot of hard work to feed children and not very many people will do that for a stranger."

" - we don't have any children who are strangers to everyone who isn't their parent. I'm imagining - if we had a father who had remarried a woman with children and who wasn't feeding his first wife's children anymore, all of us would share space with the other children, all of us would hear them crying as they went to bed hungry, all of us would see them walking around hoping for pieces of other people's food during meal times. And if nobody stepped up to unofficially adopt the child right away, the leaders would give the father two days to fix it and, if he didn't, would take the children away and declare them someone else's, because - you can't live in a space with starving children, it's untenable."

"That makes sense. In Osirion a household might have parents and grandparents and greatgrandparents and aunts and uncles, but it might be like the one I grew up in and have only a few people who are healthy and working-age, and no leaders to call them to account when they don't do what they ought to."

"Well, that sounds bad. I hope we keep having work crews and crew leaders after we we're free, sounds like horrible things'd happen without them."

"I think it might be pretty hard, once food for other people costs a full day of work, to make sure everyone still wants to do it. It'll help a lot that you have a preexisting structure for holding people accountable for what they do."

"Alteri don't let their children starve either, and I think they care about them less than we do about ours. I don't - really see why having to work all day at growing food instead of at fixing spaceships would make us less likely to feed our people."

"Some people are not responsible about having children and they have more children than they can feed no matter how hard they work. In most parts of our world there are a lot of children no one wants to care for, so many that caring for all the children no one else cares for would be a completely unmanageable task for anyone short of a god. This might not come up in your world because it sounds like you don't conceive children in the same way that we do."

" - that does not happen to us, no. That - mostly sounds like you need contraception. But - the Alteri can't stop themselves from having children except by having Monsters, and they still never let their children starve. Not unless they're being - cruel and abusive and horrible, anyway. Although I guess some of that is probably having slaves to do a lot of the work."

"I think people who have slaves don't usually have a hard time feeding their children, yeah."

"Well, maybe it's harder, if you don't have slaves, and in that case I guess we'll probably have fewer children."

"That sounds like a good plan if people are disciplined enough to follow it."

"...why would it particularly take discipline? Especially if people didn't want to care for more kids anyway?"

" - well, most people really like to be intimate with their husband or wife, and if they don't want children they have to avoid that, and some people are not responsible about this. Good people are, to be clear, there are lots of good people who are disciplined and careful and only have as many children as they can support, I don't want you to think everything is horrible, but societies will always have some people in them who are not responsible."

" - oh! We have medicine and implants that let us do that without having children. That's why I said it sounded like you needed contraception, if you were having more babies than you could feed."

"Oh! That would help, then. And it'll help even more in the northern countries."

"Mhmm. I'll see about getting your people someone who knows how to make it, I'm sure we must have someone on my ship who knows how the science works."

"Thank you!"

"Sure thing.

"I think - a lot of your sense of marriage makes sense for the conditions you describe, but it seems like it might be - shaped by your people missing a lot of technology that we have, maybe, in the same way that a lot of my sense of marriage is shaped by slavery, and so maybe it's not an ideal model for what my Liars should do when they're free."

"It makes sense that being able to control when you have children would change a lot of things."

"Yeah. I'm also still kind of confused about how your women ended up much less educated than your men, but I assume there's more context there somewhere that makes sense of it."

"Well, for a long time no one was educated, and then families would scrounge and save to earn enough to send their most promising sons to school, because if they did well they could support the whole family, and then the country grew richer, and the church could afford to offer more things to help people, so they started offering free school to the most promising boys, and this was good for society and eventually there was enough money to offer school to all the boys, and some people send their girls to school too but you have to be quite rich for this to be an appealing proposition since it's not in so much demand that they're unmarriageable without it or anything."