[Doesn't matter, it sounds like.  I apply black pigment around my eyes to make my face look slightly less human and more tired and less pretty, in order to preserve a coordinated public good that it doesn't sound like your civilization cares about.  There's no point in my trying to preserve that good on my own, since it's fragile against even a few defectors - so never mind, I guess?  And I definitely won't walk naked in the streets if your society does coordinate against that.]  She's sure not going to trash whatever tiny little scraps of coordinated good this society has managed to create for itself.  [Out of curiosity, though, does your society have any great number of people who feel awfully out of place, like other people are doing much better than them and there's no hope for themselves, like lots of exciting things are happening elsewhere but never to them, who can't find any mate who turns them on despite there being many other members of the opposite sex who also can't find a mate who turns them on?  Because if none of that is happening, either the lunar eclipse thing has further consequences I haven't foreseen, or this world is out of equilibrium for other reasons,] like this whole experience just being an internally incoherent post-death generalized dream, [or possibly my society was just wrong about what would happen if people blindly followed their local impulses of profit-seeking and pleasure-seeking in an uncoordinated unforesightful fashion.  Not asking for an extended explanation if you're busy, maybe just... on a scale of 1 to 12, how true did that grim prediction ring?]

[I'm actually not busy at all today because I'm in the hospital waiting for the decent healing mage to be freed up from more life-threatening cases. Uh, I don't think most people are picky about their mates being the opposite sex, but apart from that, sure, some people are unsuccessful in various ways and depressed about it, it just doesn't actually seem to me like anything you've described would prevent people from being unsuccessful and depressed about it. Let alone prevent them from being depressed for other reasons.]

"You're in the hospital?  Are you okay?" Thellim does not ask.

"Around 5% of our population goes to a Quiet City and only a quarter of those still end up unhappy enough to retire to cryonic suspension," Thellim does not argue back, "and if the connection between our carefully designed systemic properties and that number were obvious to your version of Civilization, it would have already fixed its problems."

She's just heard something much more attention-grabbing than that.

[I... I'm sorry.  I'm starting to think that I might have traveled MUCH further between worlds, to a much stranger place, than I realized,] and I'm having to spend more of my effort on not just deciding this is a dream and trying to wake up.  [Where I come from, entire species, in general, including the human species, have their shapes and forms encoded by genetic information in tiny DNA strands.  The content of these DNA strands was shaped entirely by a multi-hundred-million-year process in which copying errors over the genetic information would occasionally give rise to variant sections of information, genes, that produced organisms that replicated and reproduced faster than others.  In the human species, reproduction occurs when a male penis emits lots of tiny DNA-carrying cells into a female vagina, one of which combines with a larger cell from the woman, each of which carries half the genetic information to form the child.  I can talk later about why the female doesn't just use all of her own genetic information to construct the child, if that part seems counterintuitive; or our tentative theory about why there would be differentiated men and women, instead of just women sharing genetic information with each other, though I agree that it otherwise sounds like a hole in the theory and we probably wouldn't have predicted it a priori either.  On our world's view of things, it doesn't make sense to talk about any particular part of an organism being specially for reproduction, like the genitals; hands are equally organs made for reproduction, they're for using tools to get the resources needed to feed babies.  People on my world care about finding opposite-sex mates and having children with them because it's literally the only thing that every cell in their bodies is designed to do, and if that's not true here then even though the people are shaped like me and even though the houses look like houses in my world, I don't understand any of the forces that this world is an equilibrium of, and people turn into psions or mages at a lunar eclipse and need to not eat any food with calories but it apparently doesn't matter if there's reserves in their liver keeping their blood sugar up and I, I, I'm sorry, I won't have a breakdown now because it won't be useful but I need a lot of native textbooks and I need to be able to read them.  I'll take out a loan if that's what's required to get the language faster.  I don't know where I am inside reality anymore.  The part where there was gravity and breathable atmosphere fooled me.]

[I appreciate that you are trying to make fewer assumptions but I did not actually need Evolution 101, we have that here, it just doesn't... make everyone monosexual, any more than it prevents, uh, dogs trying to mate with furniture, say, or... the entire concept of masturbation. Historically people tended to assume women were all subs and men were all doms strongly enough that most people paired up in opposite-sex pairs with the occasional oddball who couldn't make it work but now we don't, so people like Jackson and his dom can pair off and it's fine. I'm not actually sure you can get a loan because you don't have, like, a legal existence, but I did actually find a language installation psion who lives in Sweden but can work remotely and will work for payment in kind from me.]

[You're using a number of words that my planet doesn't have and which don't explain why - the evolutionary equilibrium - I know one female-female couple, I set them up with a book series they really liked, they were rich enough to get in the highest bid on adopting an orphan, but from an evolutionary standpoint that's not the same as - I'm sorry, I just ended up in a different world and I feel like I'm trying to understand too much, too fast, I'd probably feel much more enthusiastic if I'd got here by spaceship as part of a formal science-inquisition but the way I got here was by being in a plane crash and thinking I was going to die forever no cryonic suspension and then just being here instead.  I think I need to not think about this a little, maybe sleep if I can.  Is this conversation something that can continue while I do things like shower and go the bathroom, or do you get unpleasant side-channel telepathic info when I do that?  And - do you have any questions about my world?  I can answer those without having to think as hard.  You've been so nice to me and I haven't been nearly grateful enough about that, unless this whole conversation is putting me deeper and deeper into formal or informal debt in which case I really need to know.]

[I do not get unpleasant side-channel telepathic info and am not particularly considering you as accumulating debt. Does which words you don't know count as something about your world?]

[The first word you said that didn't translate at all, a while ago, was 'Twitter', but I... might not want to hear it described right now in case it's some kind of enormous incomprehensible bizarre thing that drives people from my dimension mad unless we think about it very cautiously.  You mentioned 'Langford basilisk' in the context of infohazards which implies I might never want to hear about it at all.  Most recently 'sub' and 'dom' and 'Sweden' but it sounded like Sweden was just a region-a-faction-gathers-to.]

[Uh, subs and doms are roles - subs like being bossed around, doms like bossing them?]

[We've also got employers and employees on our world, yeah.  I'm not sure why anyone would think that was male-female correlated, but whatever belief your world had about that, it sounds like your world got past it already.]

[...not in a professional context, just in general.]

[Of course, lots of human interactions can be understood in an economical context even if there aren't explicit financial transfers going on.]

[You didn't want to be explained more things so I'm just going to note that you have a deep misunderstanding here and move on. How many people are there on your planet? Is it just the one planet?]

[Nine hundred ninety-eight million, four hundred sixty-something thousand as of yesterday afternoon!  Just the one planet, do you have MORE??]

[Not at this time, but in some ways magic's a young field and some people are working on terraforming-relevant powers - if you ask me questions I'm going to answer them, incidentally.]

[So noted!  Hearing about a Civilization that's scaling up to terraforming sounds like something that might make me feel a bit more cheerful about - all the strangeness of this place being for something, ultimately - and I think it might do me good to hear it.  I'll stop you if you say anything that starts overloading my brain again.]

[If you say so. Uh, so, since uncontrolled magic is dangerous the state of the art is for magic kids who don't want their powers locked down to spend their time in virtual reality till they have it figured out. But virtual reality is new, I'm about the same age as Jackson and we weren't the first cohort to go through virtual control training but we were close. So before that there weren't many magic people, but now there are lots, it's just we're mostly young and don't have any really complicated powers that take decades to develop. But there are several organizations that hire mages to work on things like teleporting interplanetary distances, adding atmosphere, probably fiddling with the magnetosphere - there's a good candidate planet, we're the third one and the fourth one is about the right size and stuff.]

[Reddish-colored, extremely light but not nonexistent atmosphere, 1/10th your planet's mass and 38% of the gravity?  Because if so it sounds like we come from analogous Solar Systems!  That's really interesting, we always thought our own first colony would be at the poles of the first planet, but maybe the fourth planet is easier if you've got magic people!]

[You've got it, yep. I'm not sure what the advantage of Mercury is supposed to be but we can probably do that too with enough magic if people wanna live there.]

[There's permanent ice deposits at the poles!  A colony built in underground tunnels near the poles of Mercury wouldn't bake in the Sun and would have very easy access to solar power and water.]

[Cool, I guess that's a good reason. You mentioned you were lower-tech?]

[We do not have the handheld blinky-flashy things!  I'm guessing those are computers with wireless Network connections?  It's been predicted our society will get there but not for another thirty years - computing progress slowed down a lot after the first years when everything seemed so easy.  Mages would change everything though!  I'm guessing that interdimensional trade is not really possible because the trade networks would be all over both our planets already, but if we could actually open a portal between your planet and my planet, everybody involved would be very very very rich.  Do you have the concept of Comparative Advantage where even if your planet has an absolute advantage in every sector of manufacturing, we can still both become richer by trading with each other because our relative costs to produce different goods are different?]  Thellim's mental voice sounds more cheerful now.

[Good guess. Uh, why did computing progress slow down? I don't think mages are actually heavily involved there and computers had to be decent first before we could do VR anyway. Interdimensional travel might totally be possible but nobody has invested years in trying it because there was no proof of concept about there being other dimensions to travel to, if you tell a lie detector and it gets decent press someone'll probably be able to take you home before you have to pull together the cash for immortality. We have comparative advantage.]

[I don't know in that much detail why computing progress wasn't faster?  I have a general impression that it's hard to make the features smaller because you need higher and higher frequencies of light to carve smaller and smaller features into silicon.  Which seems like the sort of thing where one mage could help build the machine you need to build all the computer chips, instead of needing a mage to make every chip.  You might not even notice every time your society jumps a hurdle where it only takes one mage and our society is just stuck in that spot for another thirty years.  And... I guess it's possible that there are natural events that connect two universes and then they know how to reach back to each other?  But dath ilan seemed to occupy a universe that was very - mathematically simple, at its core, so far as we could ever tell - and there was no room in the character of reality for things like eclipsed-produced psions and mages.  Your world seems like the sort where the rules allow for people like me to materialize; I don't think dath ilan's rules allow for me to go back.  Maybe you could materialize more dath ilan people here, if they're about to otherwise die and have their brains not suspended.  I'm curious about what your world does for immortality - we're just putting cryoprotectant into people and vitrifying their heads, so we can bring them back later when we have the tech - but feel free not to answer if it's liable to take a lot of thinking on my end, I shouldn't be trying to absorb everything at all at once.]

[Mages can do de-aging, on top of healing in general. The vitrifying thing isn't popular. Are you saying you don't want to be brought home, if someone susses it out?]

[I'm not that much of a wuss!  I'm moderately upset and overwhelmed, that's not the same as traveling to an entire new world and having no thoughts on my mind except running back home without looking at anything or trying to help with anything!  I don't think you can get me home.  And if you can open two-way communications then at least my Civilization - of which I am part - will consider that there's much higher priorities than my going back home.  But if at some point there's cheap-enough travel without every transport costing millions, I'll decide then which Civilization suits me best, and in time of course there'll just be one Civilization with two worlds.]