"I don't know any factory workers."

"Surely you have some general idea of any job that isn't in space? What do your parents do?"

"My father is in the Glorious Leader's government and my mother does not work most of the time although at one point she swept streets."

"What sort of schedule does your father work, then?"

"It can be irregular if there's some kind of emergency but I believe he normally - hm, Ibyabekan days are a little longer than Earth ones, but it works out to nine hours plus some work-related meals each day."

"And about how many days a year? Feel free to explain your calendar and I'll do the math if you'd rather not."

"It's divided into hundred-day blocks and most blocks have a couple of holidays in them he'd have off, though he's expected to attend official festivities."

"Wow. That really is diligent; that's a lot more time working than most people here. The economists thought Ibyabek would have a low GDP* from people doing the wrong jobs but maybe it doesn't matter because you work all the time and never have time to consume any of it."

*Translator's note: the expression used is agnostic to the size and structure of the economic unit in question; it could equally easily refer to a city, a civilization, an industry, or the set of companies founded by alumni of a particular school.

"...we need to eat and wear clothes and so on."

"Sure, but you can make enough of the necessities for everyone with a tiny fraction of people, and then the rest is all, you know, science and art and stimgadgets and fancy chocolate and nice bicycles and faster trains. And a lot of that stuff increases the amount of stuff you can make with the same effort, but there's also a lot of it that's valuable in proportion to how much time people have to enjoy it."

Kyeo looks at the birds and doesn't say anything.

"It's not surprising that different civilizations have different priorities. At least you care about making sure everyone is okay even if they can't work; a lot of civilizations in the history of this planet failed at that."

"- yes, that's the important thing."

"It's good that both our planets figured that out eventually and it's good when anywhere does things the way they like. Though it would get harder to move to somewhere else once there are lots of star systems, so personally I hope we don't get single homogeneous planets in this timeline. I like the thing where you can pick a city based on whether the trains run all night or what fraction of people are on caffeine or how much of a poetry scene there is."

"I don't know whether to expect it in this timeline."

"Yeah, it would depend on a lot of things. How far into the solar system we get before FTL is practical for colonization, what sorts of people go off to settle new planets, how cheap transportation ends up being, and so on. And of course the prediction markets will start figuring it out as more data comes in, and that will affect who goes off to colonize. And of course we might not have the same distribution of inhabitable planets as you even though we have the same stars."

Nod nod.

"Do you know anyone who's been to another planet?"

"Yes. My grandfather went to school on a Xeren world, and I have also met the ambassador from Kular and - and his son."

"Ooh, space ambassadors, that's a cool job. Stipulating that all your knowledge is secondhand, what's Kular like?"

"They have half a dozen planets under the same flag, not just one. I speak their language tolerably well, if the linguists would like to learn about it."

"Oooooooh yes! You can set up the language app to learn it and publish that but people will also want to interview you in realtime to get the subtleties."

"I am not a native Kularan speaker but I suppose there isn't one."

"They'll understand. Did you learn it in school, or from books and your friends, or other?"

"In school, and I practiced some with the ambassador's son."