"What do you mean by it being very hard?"

" - you have to be a very powerful ...inventor and very good at research."

"Why can't... just one person be very good at research?"

"I don't think the gods would let someone invent a general version of immortality. They want us to die since this world is kind of mostly a sorting mechanism for them to allocate souls across the afterlives and it wouldn't be a very good sorting mechanism if everyone got to stick around."

Kyeo isn't sure people are in fact supposed to be immortal, philosophically speaking, but if they aren't he is pretty sure it's not because the entire point of being alive is to let an alien put you in a box, because that's stupid.

Kyeo sure thinks that most features of reality are fake or stupid. She wonders if people from atheist countries are always like this. "Can you tell me more about planet-empires? How are they administered? How hard is it to travel between planets?"

"It's not very hard within a system. A ship that can jump is more complicated, and it takes days to get between systems depending on how far apart they are."

"Only days? To go by ship between entire worlds? That's - faster than we can go from one city to another by sea -"

Well, yes, they have... swords, which probably means no airplanes or helicopters. "Yes. It takes about eighteen hours to go between Ibyabek and the other inhabited planet in our system, about a week to get to the nearest other inhabited system. Though that's after you've already gotten into orbit above the planet, in the first case, and out of the way of the planets, in the second, both of which steps add travel time."

"Do you know anything about how your people go so fast?"

"Not much, I'm not an engineer," and Ibyabek does not have an alliance with this planet. "I could do some limited emergency repairs on the Five Virtues if a common engine problem happened but that doesn't tell me how to build it."

She is not exactly trained in getting people to desert but it seems probably possible, when they're entirely stranded. "Are the engines made of stone? Metal?"

"Mostly metal and some weird stuff but I don't think any of it is rock."

Nod. "Ibyabek must be a really wonderful place."

"It is! Best in the galaxy."

Oh good, an angle. "What makes it better than other places in the galaxy?"

"The others so far as I know all still make people pay for things, even things they need to live. Their people are weaker and softer and decadent, and they have gender roles that won't produce a strong next generation."

"What gender roles produce a strong next generation."

"Well, so far we don't know how to make babies grow outside of women, so they mostly need to be focusing on that and not being careerist or frivolous instead. Can magic do that? I think it might be good if magic could do that."

"Magic cannot do that but it doesn't require, uh, focusing on? It doesn't even benefit from it. The babies will kind of grow no matter what else you are doing with your life."

"Well, if you can think of a way to have a career in nine months that you spend feeling sick I guess that's fine but I'm not a philosopher."

"Do you have the women immediately get pregnant again once they're done? I guess filling a whole planet with people would take a lot of work."

"I'm not married but my understanding is it doesn't always happen right away? They have to be ready for it, though."

"So they can't have any careers ever in case at some point they get pregnant and turn out to be one of the people who is too sick to do things while pregnant?"

"Something like that, I assume the girls' schools have more detail but I obviously didn't go to one."