"Your medicine is also probably a lot more advanced than ours, if you can stop people from getting pregnant. It'd be good to talk with a doctor and see what we can help with."

"That makes sense. We had a Liar doctor on the ship, if the Quendi did get everybody off then she should be able to talk to you."

" - huh. All right."

"What?"

"Oh, I hadn't thought about how it'd make sense to have women as doctors if they didn't have many children and were all literate but it makes sense."

"Oh! I guess so. She has children, she just leaves them with the rest of her crew when she's on duty, I think."

"Cheliax has a thing where there are public places that take care of children so their mothers can work, and it's awful because it's Cheliax but if it were your community it seems like it'd be a lot better."

"That makes sense. I wouldn't want to leave a kid with strangers, just because they wouldn't know the kids, but it seems fine if you send them to people who spend lots of time with them anyway."

"Yeah. And if those people don't all have eight kids themselves then there's - extra energy to go around."

"That makes sense! Some people have more children than others but we don't get assigned more than the community as a whole can watch."

"Most women, if they marry when they're twenty and don't die or have their husband die, will have between six and twelve, but some people are infertile, and some die."

"Huh. I think how many we have mostly depends on whether our owners are trying to increase or maintain or phase out work forces."

Nod. "In other countries they have fewer and raise even fewer than that since people are much less likely to marry and they kill children they aren't ready for."

" - well that sounds... also awful. I guess maybe that would go away if they had better contraception."

"I think so. It's a great evil but they're not willing to reserve sex for marriage so you mostly can't get them to stop without a way to stop getting pregnant."

- nod.

"I don't know if any of that answered your original question."

"I think it was helpful! I probably also want to talk to some other people, but it's good to know how your people do things. And I'm really curious about what your storytelling's missing. Maybe I should do it for you sometime. Or for Verita where you can hear it, maybe that'd make it clearer what we do."

"It sounds really useful. And if it got more people into Axis the church would fund it."

"Well, I dunno anything about Axis, but I'd think you could use it for teaching most things that could be taught. Probably not the best way to teach math."

"I would expect you could teach lawfulness through stories, if they were the right stories."

"That makes sense."

"And maybe you could teach most of what Abadar does, if you had a culture of doing that and people had models to work off."

"Maybe so! I don't know anything about Abadar, but I'm sure people could adapt things if they had the right skills."

"There are other gods that are good to teach people about too but the church of Abadar does the most in my country."