"I guess the different calendars would make it hard, but that's still kind of sad. What's your favourite holiday? Mine is probably either Plantingfeast because of all the flower displays, or Disease Eradication Day because that's the day for having giant parties with all your friends. I went to a thirty-person party one time, it was great."

"My favorite Ibyabekan holiday is the Eve of Revolution, which celebrates the day we began to claim our planet for our people."

"That makes sense as a thing to have a holiday about. Some people celebrate the first moon landing but it's less universal and some people celebrate the first Mars landing instead; maybe in a few more decades it'll've converged on the same thing everywhere."

They get to the park, which is mostly trees with well-trodden paths between them. There's a pond with two parallel lines of stepping stones across it and children jumping between them. An adult has climbed one of the studier trees and fallen asleep in the fork. There are, as promised, lots of songbirds.

Kyeo will reasonably contently walk around the park. It's a nice park.

They pass a woman photographing the birds and a couple of teenagers playing a game involving flicking marbles at other marbles.

"I guess you didn't have a lot of chances to go to parks on your spaceship."

"No. There were hydroponics."

"I can see that being okay for a lot of people given how good the view out the windows would be."

"Yes. The stars were lovely."

"Do you want to see some pictures of Earth from orbit?"

"I've seen one, but I would be happy to see another."

They have a few favorites. The day side, swirled with clouds over sparkling oceans and green continents. The night side, set with the gleaming jewels of cities. The north pole and its crown of aurora. The moment just before dawn, when the thin blue line of the atmosphere lights up around the orange-gold sun.

They're lovely photos. "It must be hard to see the stars if everything is lit at night."

"Yeah, for proper stargazing you have to go out to the end of the train line and hike over the next hill. You can see the suncatchers going up just by looking out your window in the evening, but that's it's own whole thing. Why doesn't Ibyabek light everything at night, don't people need to do things at night sometimes?"

"Not usually, no. If someone needed to do something at night I suppose they would carry a light. What is a suncatcher?"

"They're big panels for capturing solar energy. They only handle a few percent of the planet's total energy use, but it goes up every year. Crews assemble them in low planetary orbit and then boost them up to planetstationary orbit and while they're on the way up they're like rectangular extra moons. Some people hate them for interfering with stargazing but other people think they look cool or that they're better than spending land on ground-based suncatchers, so we put up some every yearsegment but not enough to fill the whole sky. There are big contests to design the patterns they print on the protective film they're covered in during assembly, so they're not just blank rectangles."

"...huh."

"What does Ibyabek do for energy generation?"

"Well, the planet is not as settled as Earth so there is not much reason to put it in space."

"Also I get the sense that you don't need as much energy because you don't do as much stuff."

"Hm?" says Kyeo politely.

"You don't have fidget cubes or building climbing walls or big subway networks, and most people don't study most fields of science, and your grocery stores are smaller, and you keep asking why things are necessary as if you're used to only doing a limited number of things and have to be careful to pick the most important ones. So probably you're used to fewer total things going on at a time."

"Uh, also that's what the economics mailing list predicted based on the stuff you said. If it's way off base feel free to make fun of us all.*"

* Translator's note: literally "explain why we're all wrong and change minds and collect social approval thereby," but it's a three-word phrase.

"I didn't talk to economists."

"They read the stuff you told the historians."