"Then maybe your food is halfway decent despite selectively removing precisely everything that had been under commercial pressure for hundreds of years because of all the research put into it."

"It does not take hundreds of years to rapidly eat up all the low-hanging fruit if they suddenly materialize again.  I expect there were some subcultures around with fifteen-year-olds who'd never eaten any of the standard recipes, and those fifteen-year-olds got paid enough to drop whatever they were doing and intensively investigate different apple-crisp recipes for a month.  Or somebody demonstrated convergence on an obviously optimal method and then that method didn't contain much specific information about the past.  Some mix of things like that."

"Man, what the fuck happened that you did all that, like -"

"The point is that they don't know and wouldn't tell us if they did! They rederived apple crisp and presumably demolished their Pyramids and permanently crippled the data set of all social science for mystery reasons."

"We put the older cities into a state where they would last, put domes over them, and didn't mark them on standard public maps.  We didn't destroy them.  We do take the ten seconds required to think of better alternatives, where they are available.  But I don't know what I can say to convince Isabella, because she comes from a civilization where any government who tried that would be plotting something."

"How do you dome a whole city?"

"I... don't actually know?  I would guess some mixture of ultralight materials like... I don't know the English word, moderately hard waterproof stuff that weighs nearly as little as air, or even less if you fill it with hydrogen though I doubt it's stable in that form... and maybe a lot of internal bracing with stronger ultralight materials?  Nearby towers and cable points?  Sorry, I'm not actually a megascale engineer."

"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.