"I don't know... anything about magic, so you may have to explain a little more what it would do."

"Right. A scry is a spell that lets you look at a target over a great distance. Sometimes you can do simple magic through the scry, in which case you can talk to them. It lets you talk for significantly longer than Sending, so it's probably the best way to get in touch with your ship. However, it has a long casting time; if I start now I'll be done in an hour. It might make sense to talk for ten minutes first. It's up to you, though."

"The reply didn't sound like he'd be ready in ten minutes."

"No, I mean, it might make sense to talk for ten minutes about magic and what you're doing here and what Ibyabek is like, before I start a spell that takes an hour. In case we think of some other plan that makes more sense. Your world doesn't have magic at all?"

"Right."

"Do you know how you got here?"

"No. I hit my head at some point."

Sympathetic nod. "What's Ibyabek like?"

"It's the second planet in the Ibyatok system. It's governed by Glorious Leader Lut Naar Am."

"Wow. Is it mostly humans?"

"It's all humans. Humans evolved on a planet called Earth and colonized the galaxy from there. I have no idea where you came from."

"...I guess probably Earth if that's where all the other humans in the galaxy come from? How do you know that? How long ago was it?"

"Humans first left Earth hundreds but not thousands of years ago."

"...then that doesn't explain anything, we've been here much longer than that. What is Ibyabek like? What are your gods?"

Why does everyone expect Ibyabek to have gods?? "We don't have gods."

"....what, none of them? Huh. Okay. What's that like - that's not a very helpful question? Who organizes, uh, courts, and aid to the poor, and banks, and orphanages and so on?"

"The state handles that class of thing except we don't need banks and don't have poor people, having progressed beyond the use of money."

"- you ...don't have poor people?"

"...no, because we don't use money." Kyeo is pretty sure that poor people are people who have less money than everyone else, so.

"But do you have, uh, people who are hungry sometimes, people who are sick and can't get a healer to come heal them because they don't have anything to trade in exchange, people whose house is too small for all of them to live in..."

"Nobody has to pay for food or medicine," Kyeo says. "Although we don't have any magic healing. I think people's houses are generally the right size."

"I guess most people could just grow their own food," she says, but she sounds slightly confused. "Are there not cities or armies? Is everyone a farmer?"

"There are cities and armies and we don't all grow our own food," he says. "I'm in the military."

"How do the people in the cities get food? Do they trade city goods for it?"

"No. People on less civilized planets have to make exchanges to get things they need but on Ibyabek they don't. The farmers grow food, and the truckers bring it to the city, and then everyone gets food, because otherwise people might starve. The farmers do also get things that are made in cities when they need them but it's not a purchase."