"I'm not sure we have whatever that stuff is."

"To be fair, as an engineering material, it has the reputation of being mainly useful for completely impractical purposes.  Somebody builds a corporate headquarters but they decide they want it to look like an enormous tree, that kind of thing."

"I'm an art major and I dunno what you're talking about either."

"Oh!  What's that career trajectory like on Earth?  Where does your funding come from, what does the ascended version of an 'art major' look like..."

"...'ascended version'? Uh, the funding is terrible actually unless you get famous but I have a rich sister who will not let me starve."

"What does this planet spend its wealth on?  It's not pretty buildings.  It's not high-tech furniture or high-tech houses.  I know you have enough agricultural technology that only a tiny fraction of the population work on farms, I looked that up.  Your materials science can't be that far behind ours if you can make skyscrapers.  Your factories have robots.  They have better robots.  A tiny fraction of your population should be able to supply basic material support to the whole.  How is your funding for artists that terrible -"

"Sorry, I shouldn't have said that, I'm already over my Earth complaints limit for Saturday.  'Ascended' would be whenever you turn into the - successful, higher-status version of whatever your career path is?  The gradients in fiction matchmaking aren't that sharp, but I have a full roster of clients and can charge approximately median fees, which definitely wasn't true when I started out in life.  I'm as ascended as I can get without a lateral career shift.  Maybe if I became a fiction matchmaker specializing in fiction for ascendant... venture capitalists, I think you'd call them, though 'reckless moneylender' or 'mad investor' would be a more literal translation.  What does an ascendant art major look like?"

"I mean, like, some people get commissioned to paint murals or put giant creepy horse sculptures at the airport in Colorado but there are only so many airports in Colorado?"

"So, roughly, there's only a few major expenditures of money on artwork, you're aiming to collect some of those when you're grown, and of course your planet has no early-stage life investors so you only get to try for those if you have a wealthy sister... is that about it?  Do you have a career Ambition - some particular art you want to create?"

"I mean a lot of people want to be artists because art is fun and cool, so it isn't like, uh, welding, where you can get steady money for knowing which end of a torch is which because nobody is like yay welding how jolly. I wanna do concept art for movies, I think, or maybe book covers, they get to do sci fi creatures and stuff? But specific project wise I'm not specifically itching to draw anything or I could just draw it."

Thellim does not explain that the entire point of a civilization is to let more people do what they want and things that are fun and cool or else why bother having a civilization in the first place.  She is over her limit for Saturday.

"I have a cousin who welds reactor cores but yes, most welding isn't that - sloped? - offering of potential opportunities for steep ascent?  But most jobs aren't that sloped, right?  People with unusually strong desires to gamble on sharp ascents compete for the few jobs that are gambles on exaltation.  Most people take jobs with smoother outcome distributions.  Artistry wouldn't be that much of a gamble in dath ilan, but my impression is that most dath ilani artists have some grand career vision they're practicing to be able to pull off someday.  But things here seem very different and - I don't know how Earth allocates an Alex to artistry, or how an Alex allocates himself to artistry, or what you're supposed to ask an Earth artist on your way to bagels."

"I got into college and put 'fine arts' on a piece of paper, and traditionally you ask if you can see my portfolio and I pull up some stuff on my phone for you to coo politely over, but I'm not sure you would consider it complaining about Earth over budget if you happened to hate it and decide that Earth was insane for letting me have charcoal."

"Correct me if I'm mistaken and Earth actually does this part just fine, but where I come from, they always make sure to show you the earliest works of famous people next to any exposure you get to their post-exaltation stuff, so people don't get an exaggerated picture of what you can do when.  I mean, this also teaches you that some famous people were ludicrously talented and were already better than you at age nine, but that is not a majority of exalted professionals in any field except math."

"I don't think I've seen any childhood doodles of any famous artists, no. I did once see a very cool progression of Mondrian paintings that made his later stuff make more sense."

"What I'm trying to say is that I am not expecting to like the work of a young still-learning artist without much of a client roster.  I am expecting to see whatever it is, nod, say that it doesn't work on me yet, and wish you good skill on the journey ahead of you.  And that is supposed to be okay."

"If you don't wanna look at it you don't have to!"

"...I am worried that this is going to end in an awful mismatch between my culture's," carefully tuned system intended to increase how much young people retain enthusiasm for their careers despite older people being visibly much better, "practices, and yours, so maybe I shouldn't look at your portfolio after all."  Are they at the bagel shop yet?  A distraction would be useful around now.

Yes, they have reached the bagel shop. (There's a closer one but Isabella doesn't like their cream cheese.) Isabella gets a the-usual and Alex gets a raisin one with strawberry schmear.

Thellim exactly imitates Alex's order!  She hasn't tried that combination before, and imitating other people's food orders is a good way to get out of your own culinary ruts and find interesting parts of the space that other people found before you.

(She makes a mental note to ensure adequate protein and fat later in the day, though.)

Om nom. "Isabella says you do professional book recommendations as a service."

"I used to!  But I don't know any books here.  And unless you have some unexpectedly high-impact opportunities in the book recommendation space that only dath ilani can perceive, my comparative advantage here is probably in interdimensional relations instead."

"I don't think people would pay for book recommendations here anyway, honestly."

Thellim's first impulse is to remark that she bets that this non-willingness to pay is not because Earth people are already reading a stream of excellent books which are about the best books they could possibly be reading.  She can't do that.  It is still Saturday.

Earth's refusal to pay for nicer things would be more understandable if there were any reasonable project that she could understand Earth as prioritizing instead.  This whole place is full of high tech, higher than her own in some ways, why don't the people here have more nice things when this civilization clearly has the basic productive capacity to do that?  Where does it all go?  Even if their evil governments are stealing all the wealth, where are they stealing it to, and shouldn't enough people be visibly working on it that the population would have to notice?

Can't say that either.  Still Saturday.

"I expect you're right," Thellim settles on.

"D'you have a favorite book from back home?"

"Choose a dimension!  Books relatively excel along different dimensions in a much more stable way than they have comparable absolute goodnesses - my favorite book can vary from hour to hour, depending on what I'm in the mood for.  Which book stands out as having the best humor, the best characterization, or having taught me the most about how to live, is a much more stable quantity."