Kyeo is running his hand up and down Sarham's back, as though counting scars he can't feel, and then there is something, in the room, something enormous, and he sees his own face and Sarham's mirrored in an incoming oval and then -
- they aren't sitting on Kyeo's bed in Crane Mountain any more.
". . . Either mine or Sairai's, presumably? I couldn't like, see him trying; it didn't work . . ."
"Oh, he was looking, I thought it was obvious. What... did we ask for that you didn't have last night."
"Do I need to assume that Sarham could also have been replaced while we slept?"
"It depends on how paranoid you think it's smart to be! It's really quite safe here, and Chraida is less so but not by very much - but also you're aliens and might have more people trying to do - um, exciting but in a bad way - things to you, than a regular person would. But I can see that you both can't lièv, so if you trust me enough to take my word for it then I can vouch. But possibly you shouldn't get in the habit of trusting that."
"I suppose we'll work something out. How should we figure out breakfast - I think Sarham's more disconcerted by the - transition - than I am and I'd like to have it sorted out for him before he's quite awake."
"I didn't know what you liked or what was safe so I bought you guys a bunch of different food! Um, I'd expect it to be mostly the same, since I do think we might be the same species underneath everything, but if you want I could - try and copy your digestion, and eat things myself, and then that would be less bad if it was poison for you and you had it. I picked up a citrelièse with more finesse so I could do that if you want, but I didn't want to do it without asking while you were sleeping."
"You're welcome. - You say thank you a lot." They set their book on the floor, flip off of the bar, and take the candle to a kitchen area, where they start chopping various unfamiliar greens. "Like, it made sense that time, and - when you did for the thing with the cart, because those were . . . ideas I had? But you keep saying it for things that anyone would do."
"I guess that makes sense. But everyone here is helpful and you don't have to thank them for base amounts of helpfulness. - I'm not upset by it, just. Trying to help you calibrate."
They nod. Continue chopping unfamiliar greens. "If you had any more miscellaneous questions about how things work here, this is as good a time as any."
"Do you use money here - I had been going to learn how anyway and Sarham grew up with it, but I have no practice."
"We do! How do you . . . not . . . have money; is it just that you don't need it because you have fewer people in general or - huh, you wouldn't trend towards big cities as much as we do, would you, if you don't benefit from having more people around to copy from . . ."
"There are cities on most planets, I think. This one doesn't look obviously bigger than the one I grew up in, though I don't know that I could tell from what I've seen. My planet's advanced beyond the need for money. Ibyabek has hundreds of millions of people on it and some planets have several billion."
"Oh wow! I guess it would make sense that - money is a technology, and moving past it would be too, and since you're more advanced than us . . . I think there's some tens of millions of people on Citrelia, but other countries aren't well-run enough to have as good of censuses as we do. Creta has five or six million, though, and we're the second-biggest, so I guess that's probably about the right order of magnitude. - Creta knows exactly how many people it has, just I don't without asking."
"Well sure, everybody running a country has a very important job. But some places are better or worse at it, by - a lot."
"I wonder if that's more true when people can all change en masse very suddenly?"
"It might be - you couldn't really have something like Bloudel, it would either be - either everyone would just be dead and then it wouldn't be a country anymore or it - wouldn't relevantly be the bad thing . . ."
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