Her room is actually much smaller than her room on the ship. "Because we hate being confined, but in an apartment in the city you're not confined even if it's not much space." There's a changing table and a bed for Katin. One wall is mostly a computer monitor, with a interface for non-chipped people clumsily added. 

"Oh gosh, I guess if I need space I will just have to walk all over the city!" cackles Peka. What does the computer monitor do.

Give her menus she can't read. Macalaurë spends a while trying to get the translation up and running and then it gives her menus she can read. She can watch movies or watch the news or go on the Internet. (She is the subject of the news! They're replaying videos of her arriving in the city.)

That's hilarious. "Look, baby, we're on TV!"

"Wa," says Katin.

"I look really drab in my old clothes - would've even if I hadn't given my sister the good stuff -"

"Our society is richer than yours. Part the Valar, part the lack of castes, part the lack of central planning, my brothers have been going back and forth on which of those contributes most."

"How do the castes and planning things make us poorer -"

"Uh, planning makes you poorer because the way to create the most value is to give everyone reasonable amounts of money and then let markets produce the stuff they want, all other ways of deciding what should be produced are just going to be mediocre approximations of what people actually want, it's been tried, several times with varying degrees of precision and finally in a ten-Year randomized controlled trial of two cities built specifically for the purpose, which settled it. The castes because if the best singer in the world is red, well, she can't sing, can she, and if the best engineer is purple, and if the best merchant is green -"

"...I'm not really sure how me being able to sing for a living makes everybody have nicer fabric."

"Whenever someone's not doing the job they're actually best at, there's value lost. If you collect all that value it adds up and there's nicer fabric."

"Huh."

"We were going to give everybody an economics lesson but then they were such assholes and there are complications like if someone develops robotics before we have a good arrangement to take all their reds..."

"- yeah."

"So no economics lessons for them. The Governor in Voa told Maitimo she wished they'd killed all their reds fifty years ago because then he wouldn't be all furious on behalf of them - it's good she had Maitimo because Tyelcormo would have probably just outright murdered her -"

"Thought Elves didn't do that sort of thing."

"No one's ever really had a good reason."

"People say things like that all the time. One time a red - not from my city, one downprovince - saved a drowning purple toddler - had to touch him to do it - they didn't kill her but the news was all about how they wished there were robots instead -"

"So she should have let the kid drown? Why - how do they - can any of them think -"

"They tell themselves he would've been okay or someone else would've gotten there, I guess."

"It would be wrong but very fun to just steal all of everybody's reds and watch the whole thing crash and burn."

Snort. "We'd cope in a one-caste society better than everybody else but we'd still need to import most stuff -"

"Yeah but I think you'd integrate fine, if we find space for you in Endorë somewhere - Maitimo says not here -"

"Why not here?"

"He didn't say - might be partially the homosexuality thing and partially that if someone did something bad the Valar might overreact -"

"Am I going to have to leave - what homosexuality thing -"

"No no no you and Katin can stay here forever if you like it and your family can come too and probably some other people, just not - it's just not a good place to try to put all the reds from every country. And Elves don't do that, and aren't really all right with it, but Maitimo looked at it and said that one seemed like just a species difference and, quote, "the last thing this catastrophe of a species needs is more purity taboos so let's set our sights on getting them to stop forcing people to have sex and otherwise stay out of their intimate lives entirely"."