"- well, it's different for different people, since people like different things. I have a sword because I like swordfighting for fun and was on my way home from a swordfighting for fun event, but my girlfriend mostly watches, uh, people acting out stories but you don't have the exact word I want, and trains her horse to do tricks? And my friend Proster is a - he's not really in charge of anything if you are very strict about what that means, but if you are not very strict about what that means he is in charge of a piece of Mars and likes to pretend to be evil and sometimes we swordfight as part of a story... and there are people who do totally different stuff from all that."

"Are there still - people who won't sell to you because you were born on the wrong side of the river - I assume there isn't torture but is there crime at all, are people still cruel to each other however they can be...?"

"We don't use money for most things because money is for - when there are only a few things, people trade money to be one of the people to get the things, but we have lots of things. There's... people who are into weird stuff...? I have never personally met anyone who cares what side of the river I was born on but they might exist somewhere and just not run into anyone from the wrong side of the river, I guess. Sometimes there's... there's stuff but there's little, tiny, baby stuff, just what's left when all the real problems are gone..."

"Debt but not slavery? Heartbreak but not rape?" she guesses.

"It's more complicated than that. Mostly not any of those things and... Uh, if somebody from home told me they'd gotten raped, they would be about to tell me about how it turned out they liked it a lot and the only reason they were on that part of the planet in the first place was because it was thrilling to imagine and also they got to meet the person who raped them and that was really cool and they're going to take a week or two to think about it and then probably go back and see if it happens again. Sing is smart enough that it doesn't need rules that are usually right, it can just be always right."

She hears this one out and then sits, sipping from her ever-replenishing cup of water, deep in thought, for a full minute as she absorbs the idea and its implications.

Finally she says, "A far stranger world than I could have imagined."

"Yeah, it's kind of wild for people who are just from before the Quiet War, let alone here."

"I'll do it," she decides. "Tomorrow morning, after the boats go out." It's late afternoon now, heading into evening. "You can sleep in here tonight if you like."

"Thank you very much!"

She sighs, then offers a small, tired smile. "You're welcome, I suppose. It's... worth doing."

"Is there anything I can do to help with this that doesn't, uh, make it kind of pointless -"

She shakes her head. "No, but I thank you for the thought."

"Okay. Where am I sleeping?"

"In my bed, if you like; I can comfortably spend the night at sea."

"That sounds fun even though I don't know how you do it! Thank you."

She smiles.

"I'll go see what my daughter's made for dinner."

Dinner turns out to be, somewhat unsurprisingly, fish. There are local herbs and vegetables involved. Tarinda is welcome to partake.

"I don't know if food's at all hard to come by around here, I normally eat more than a person who doesn't have any of my stuff but I can go without and go hunting or something if that would be easier on you guys."

"We have enough to feed a few guests with no trouble," says Viasarae. "As long as you don't eat more than, oh, four or five girls your size, you needn't worry."

"Not that many, no." Om nom fish.

The fish is pretty tasty! Ebasi chats with her mother about village gossip over dinner; Kioh, bored by this, pesters Tarinda with questions about her world—how big is a sky ship and how fast do they fly and how do they know which way is down and is Mars pretty and does it have oceans and if so do people fish in them and if so how do they build their boats.

Sky ships come in lots of sizes but hers was small! They fly SO FAST, once they're up high enough, like fast enough to go around the whole world a couple of times in less than a minute except it would slow them down to go in a circle like that. A basic sky ship does not in fact know which way is down, but good ones know how to pretend a way is down to make it more comfortable to ride in them. Mars is beautiful and she will draw it for him if he likes and it has an ocean and fish and she has never built a boat but she's sure people do it all kinds of different ways, some that would look familiar to him and many that would not.

Kioh boggles about how incredibly fast that is and then intermittently throughout the rest of the conversation has to pause to re-boggle about it. He oohs and ahhs at her drawing of Mars and has opinions about ways to build boats.

And then eventually the food is gone and the dishes are cleared and Kioh's last wondering whisper of "so faaaaast..." recedes into the distance as Ebasi leads him away by the hand, and Viasarae checks that the contents of her cozy little bedroom are to Tarinda's liking, and if Tarinda follows Viasarae outside to watch her go out to sea for the night, she will see her wade out into the river and duck under the surface and disappear.

Interesting. Tarinda, for all her otherworldliness, will sleep in an entirely conventional fashion in the offered bed.

In the morning, the boats set out around dawn. Viasarae is there to watch them go. The village is much quieter afterward, although not completely deserted.

She finds Tarinda. "Did you sleep well?"

"I slept great, thanks!"