Okay, so cannibal rounds probably aren't fake stories they tell each other around campfires...

"Any of you heard of rounds worse than them? Or better but still so bad you'd never want to dock at one?"

"Worse than a cannibal round? I mean, cannibals are awful but they're not organized and they can't make people on short notice 'cause they're doing it to eat, I'd rather tie off at a cannibal round and civilize it than land on one with a competent warlord or cult-king or something."

"Do they often try spreading to nearby rounds?"

"Sometimes you get a war that way, yeah."

Hmm...

"Do any of these cult-kings or warlords have a... a life view they're trying to spread? Or something like a religion? Or do they just make people who are very loyal?"

"Sometimes, yeah, you get all kinds of weirdos in places where there's no regulation about who you can make."

"But if they get very far they're usually also making loyalists, yes."

He picks his words carefully. "How does the regulating work in places like this? No one's told me yet."

"Like how is it enforced?"

"Well, that too, given people can't check who made who. But also who sets the rules, and what they are."

"The government sets the rules and they're complicated, I'd look them up if I were going to make anybody borderline but I'm not likely to."

"Basically you can't be a huge jerk about it, they have to be oriented to the situation and healthy and able to fit in in society appropriately."

"So it's all just common sense stuff? There's no laws against creating anyone with any specific skills or values, so long as they can live on some round or the other? Is there an age limit on either maker or the person made? Or a limit on how often you can make someone?"

"- well of course age falls into 'healthy', doesn't it, and 'able to fit in to society', you can't make a baby because they can't fit in unless you have something special set up and you can't make an old person because they could be healthier and you're deliberately making them not be. And it has to be society, not, like, the woods, I think if you make someone who wants to live in the woods that's fine but if that's the only place they can live that's bad."

"In practice if you try to make a person as often as humanly possible you're going to run out of places in society for them to fit into, unless you're colonizing a recently pacified cannibal round or something. So on average most people make one, maybe two, ever in their lives, but it's lumpy."

"Huh. I've never met anyone who made more than one person, as far as I know. Who's got the highest... maker-count? That any of you know of?"

"Probably one of the cult leader guys?"

"Or a general. But really in either case if you want to grow fast you want to make your people make more people, so you don't have to wait till you can again."

Ugh, why do conversations about making people always feel like pulling teeth? If this were a book or movie he'd have met at least five "as you know" guys by now... which always used to annoy him, but he'd forgive all the writers who ever wrote one if he could get just one eager over-explaining geek somewhere in this world.

Okay, new line of attack. "Have any of you heard of someone who couldn't make anyone? Or where something always went wrong in weird ways?"

"I mean, some people are probably just bad at it?"

"If you make somebody and something weird is wrong with them of course you don't try again to see if it's a fluke!"

"I don't think anybody's ever tried to make somebody and been totally unable to do it. Which is one problem with raising children, right, sometimes they'll make someone and they don't know what they're doing at all, but it's important for research."

What.

It's so simple even children can do it?

Accidentally?

"...Let me know if this is too morbid, but what's the worst you've seen, in terms of someone... not made well?"

"Seen personally?"

"Oh, once we were in port on - this was on another ship, you lot wouldn't've been there - and they had festivals, for making new people in the town, and they had all this buildup and excitement, and then there he was, the new guy, and he had this mark on his face. Stray blot of ink on the reference drawing, I think, snuck in the maker's mental image. And that would be one thing, but it turned out that it was some kind of - he was dead of this face spot, next time we were on that round, I asked around and everyone was so sad -"

Sorry did you just imply that people are made by what someone imagines they should look like? he doesn't ask, because that should be obviously absurd, like anyone who thinks that's how it would work should then immediately after think that obviously it is not how it actually works even if it seems like it does, and all that said if it even seems to work that way it utterly blows up his theory that the made people are being kidnapped from other worlds and inserted into this one with edited memories and skills.

(Unless the maker's memories of having come up with a particular face is edited in afterward...?)

((No, because if there are drawings first... but maybe those are edited too?))

(((Okay but at some point this theory just relies on way too much ongoing, surgical memory editing to be feasible, even for the Gentry... right?!)))

"The face spot," he manages to say, trying not to show the depth of his current quiet internal breakdown. "Did it grow at all?"

"That's what I heard, yeah."

Okay he definitely doesn't remember learning anything meaningful about cancer besides that it's a bunch of cells that grows uncontrollably and can kill people if not treated with enough radiation or poison, but he knows birthmarks are a thing, and most aren't cancerous, are they? Wait, maybe he's assuming too much...

He doesn't know the word for "cancer" and the speaker changed-tracks rather than saying what it was "some kind of," so he just asks, "How sure can we be it was the spot that killed him? Did it spread into his brain or throat?"