Presumably that will be reflected in bidding if you have a halfway reasonable bidding system. Yeerks will pay more for hosts with expertise that's relevant to what they're trying to do, and for hosts that are interested in doing shared work on the problems of interest, and prices will end up reflecting how valuable the expertise or cognitive work is. He's pretty sure it should work elegantly enough as long as people have accurate information on each other's capabilities - maybe you could have a system for leaving reviews...

Mhalir has quite a lot of ideas about this, actually, at various points (usually on long hyperspace trips where he'd run out of other work) he would draft plans for what they could do after the war, and it would be really satisfying to spend a day telling Merenre all his ideas -

- but on reflection now is probably not the time, the purpose of this was for Mhalir to trust that the church of Abadar is genuinely willing to work with the Yeerks, and he's feeling a lot more convinced. 

They can work on that later, maybe. Merenre's not really paying much attention to the politics but he knows that wars are time-sensitive.

He would be delighted to work on it later. He's grateful to Merenre for being willing to do this, and - does Merenre have any questions before Mhalir leaves his head? It'll be easier to have conversations like this. Higher bandwidth. 

Merenre is curious how Yeerk society is structured internally and whether they have money.

Yeerks have money! They didn't before Seerow arrived - he was the Andalite who shared technology before the war - but he explained the concept. They have a very top-down command economy right now, because of the war and the fact that they don't really have a civilian sector at all, everything that would've been that is on the blockaded home planet which they've been out of contact with for decades. 

(Mhalir thinks for a moment about Matirin pointing out that the Andalites could have destroyed the Yeerk homeworld if they actually wanted all Yeerks dead, and - well, it's not like they were letting message traffic through, or providing updates, for all the Council knew they might well have killed everyone on the surface without any word getting out, though he remembers thinking they probably would have informed the Yeerks of it if they had, as a threat. Also his model of Andalites is apparently very off so all his thoughts here are uncertain.) 

Yeerk society is obviously influenced by Yeerk biology; Yeerks like to spend most of their time in hosts, but need to return to a pool every three days to absorb a nutrient called kandrona, otherwise they starve. Yeerks in the pool have less of themselves, in some sense, but are also in more direct contact with other Yeerks, communicating via rapid electrical signals - a different use of the same system that lets them interface with arbitrary brains. Also Yeerk reproduction involves three Yeerks merging into a single entity, which then breaks apart into hundreds of separate grubs; obviously this destroys the original 'parents', as a result Yeerks don't have families in the same sense that humans and Andalites do, though birthing groups are a vaguely family-like unit and different pools are sort of analogous to clans or tribes. 

Huh. ....why would any Yeerk have children, given that.

Honestly Mhalir is not the person to ask about this! He finds the idea of ceasing to exist incredibly horrifying and does not intend to ever involve himself in the process of making more baby Yeerks. Evidently there are enough Yeerks who will choose passing on bits of themselves to hundreds of children over their own continued existence. Also it's a lot of grubs that come out of one fusion, so now that Yeerks aren't living in the wild where lots of them get eaten, not that high a fraction of adults even need to do it in order to maintain a stable population. (In practice the Yeerks have been rapidly increasing their population over the course of the war.) 

Merenre thinks even the human kind of childbearing sounds unpleasant, you would have to pay him a lot of money to do it. He has expressed to his wife the concern that she's not being adequately compensated for it and she felt that it was worth spending money making it less unpleasant but not really worth transferring money internally about it, which would be a bit of a fiction anyway. 

...Now Mhalir is wondering if the topic of how Andalites used to conceive children before they invented artificial insemination has come up with his alt, although it's possible Merenre prefers not to know. 

Yes, they explained! It seems even worse than the human version though the Andalites thought the human version sounded pretty bad too. Really ideally you'd be able to bud off versions of yourself to pursue different lines of research.

Carissa is sitting silently across from them, very tense.

Mhalir wants to be back in her head, and they're not really talking about critical war matters anymore, so he thanks Merenre again, asks him to let Carissa know they're done rather than taking over to do it - it seems more polite - and then slips out of Merenre's head. 

A few seconds later Carissa takes him back.

He makes himself comfortable in her head with relief. <Merenre is very clever and interesting! Certainly he does not speak for everyone in Golarion, but he is a cleric of Abadar and I expect he speaks for Him, and - I am feeling reassured. He is very excited about trading with us. Are you all right?>

She is fine. She talked to the servant (slave? seemed rude to ask) a bit and apparently the servant is here because otherwise it'd make her unmarriageable that she was in the same room as the Prince for ten minutes and she doesn't like Osirion but she is fine. And it's good news that Abadar is sincere about mediating here.

<Should we go back to the ship? I may want to exchange some messages with the Andalites here before I return to talk to the Council again, to make sure we are on the same page about what I am telling them, but I do not think we need to be in Osirion longer, unless there is something I have forgotten.> 

That sounds good.

Mhalir isn't sure if protocol requires that they ask the pharaoh's permission to leave or something, so he asks Merenre.

"No, you're free to leave. Did you want to do the Andalites on another trip? I know they're prickly about it but I can tell the one who is me to let you do it and he will."

"I want to give them time to think about it. It would definitely be valuable to us, but - less so if they feel coerced into doing it? And it is time sensitive but not that much of a rush." 

"All right. I hope your endeavors go well. Someone can show you out." And he gestures vaguely for a servant to do so.

"I look forward to speaking again when the war is over." 

Mhalir lets Carissa take the lead in following the servant out of the Dome; he's tired. 

It is maybe worrying how much of the last few days neither of them have wanted to pilot her body through the next step whatever it is. 

They leave the Dome and can call the ship for their ride home.

Mhalir can take over again for that. 

He's also been wondering if that's worrying. Normally this isn't a problem Yeerks have! He's had a really unreasonable last few weeks, though. And - maybe the fact that he can sometimes let Carissa run things makes it more tempting to do that.