The next morning Sadai has a longer, more specific list of things to buy and wants to know when the flight to Orvara will be.

Flight is that evening! List can get forwarded.

Good. If he has questions about magic she can answer them.

" - I mean, the question is 'how do you do it?' and you have very good reason not to answer it."

"Yeah. Although you'd probably have a hard time reverse-engineering or developing new spells off much I tell you, I'm relying on a lot of knowledge I got from people who knew more than me and the cognitive boosts, I'd probably take at least ten but more likely fifty times longer to get anywhere on my own and would need reams of notes. The basic idea though is that there are several sets of rules on how to combine certain basic actions and I'm trying to rebuild from scratch the ritual that allows me to create a new set of rules like that so that I'll know it better and have better control over it and more intuition on how it works and make it be more efficient at the kinds of things we want, like seasoning the poles."

"It sounds fascinating."

"It is," she agrees.

"If you're going to Olvala and I assume not comfortable decontaminating subsequently I should get you a separate space. I can rent a warehouse, do you have preferences for access to lighting, space, materials, temperature..."

"I don't have a problem with decontaminating subsequently, I can even just shed the outer layer of my body and regrow it if you'd like."

" - that'd work. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Do you know how to get to the airport?"

"Yes, I memorised the city map the day I arrived."

"All right. Anything else before you go?"

"Don't think so. I'll do a few more experiments and such today and run to the airport later."

"All right. Take care."

And he goes to work. Calls Isel in for a meeting.

"Hey. What?"

"Found someone who can warm up the poles cheaply, thinks he can even season them. I bought them all up - well, not all of them. I bought up eighty thousand square miles. I want to send the reds there."

" - when'll they be habitable -"

"By next winter, probably. Thing is, for a lot of reasons I need this to be absolutely free of casualties. Can you sell them on it -"

"I don't know. People're probably attached to their homes and their jobs, and I think they, like, vaguely expect me to try to do things but I don't think they'd trust me if I said 'yeah just get quietly on the boats they're definitely going to terraformed poles' - which if they were actually desirable we'd have other people living on -"

"We can send a couple of them out to scout and report on habitability. And they don't have to be thrilled they just have to think it's a better bet than rioting and refusing to cooperate with training of their replacements."

"Maybe if you've got the land habitable before you start asking them to train their replacements, and some people scout it and have internet so they can send live video back, and also get the chance to walk all over it so they know we won't try snatching it back."

"That slows it all down a fair bit but makes sense."

"I thought you opposed getting rid of our reds in favor of rotation."