"I guess that's fair, with more worlds than we can get to anyway..."

Nod. Sigh.

'Headed off terraforming?"

"I think I have less than five days of prep left."

"How long'll it take you once you're there?"

"Week or two, not making the rock means I'm making less but I have to look where I'm putting it."

"Have fun!"

Cam kisses him goodbye.

"So one option," he says to Ambela later, "is to have the portal open directly on the human planet, which has the advantage that moving stuff will be much much easier and the disadvantage that humans from one world can go through the portals and bother humans on another world - humans like going to war -"

"They like it?"

"I don't think I'm being uncharitable. Going to war reflects the greatness of their people compared to the other people they're warring with, going to war avenges the great evils their people did our people, going to war means we get their stuff, going to war means our gods will rewards us..."

"Mm-hm. Too hard to have border control at the portal?"

"Depends how clever people are. If the Valar can do a really restricted access list, and no one's got magic that can be used to teleport through the portals or anything, then we could just individually clear humans for portal travel - doesn't scale great, but prevents wars. And we could have some sort of peacekeeping force there on the lookout for actual armies, but I don't know what they'd do about 'someone summons a daeva and directs it to go wreak havoc in some world they're mad at' - of course, maybe wars between worlds aren't fundamentally any different than wars within worlds, which we're not planning to prevent by restricting travel..."

"More likely to have disparate capabilities, maybe."

"Daeva really really change the playing field there, obviate most weapons humans used to use..."

"Yes. If power is ever disparate enough, though, distance just gives a logistics advantage to whoever has - teleportation or whatever -"

"What distance gives us is reaction time. Though not if someone has interstellar teleportation, I guess."

"It wouldn't surprise me at this point."

"It wouldn't astonish me either but it's surely not common."

"Doesn't have to be, if it's transferable or cheap or combines with something else."

"So then we need to plan for all worlds having access to daeva and instantaneous interstellar teleportation. That's going to be challenging."

"A bit, yes. I suppose we could just be very conservative about who has the opportunity."

"Keep the portals closed almost all the time. Yeah, probably safest. I don't like it but probably safest. WIth portals closed and no circle syncing worlds'll get wildly apart, time-wise..."

"Maybe portals very small and far away from everything? Lightleap a ludicrous distance, place a pinhole in intergalactic vacuum."

"We should check if demons can conjure for that."