" - that I have a hard time imagining -"

"- have you ever held a baby? A happy, snuggly baby who giggles and grabs your finger and is nice and warm and soft and just lap sized - a bad spring feels like - the opposite of that, cold and lonely and hard and like nothing you're doing will really matter in the long run -"

' - huh."

"It also has effects on sex drive but birth control means that's a separate issue."

"It is impressive your world isn't constantly at war, honestly."

"A few billion in population ago everyone realized they couldn't go on without controls. Two is tolerable if you space them - you still have a one year old in the gap, that helps, and when your second is two you only have to wait a little longer for grandchildren, that helps."

Nod. "I'm - really glad you were able to get out."

"Thank you."

That evening space Elves tell the whole story of attempted Enemy interference on Amenta and how it was thwarted.

"You landed in Tapa because they had the prettiest buildings?"

"We did send emissaries everywhere."

"They could've shot you down -"

" - I mean, they tried. Those ships are shielded against incidental encounters with space debris at substantial fractions of lightspeed, rockets are by comparison like someone kissing them."

"Wow. Okay. So you negligently demonstrate enough of a tech differential to be scary, drop on one side of a war during the war because their buildings were prettier - imagine if, I don't know, Cene or Yvalta had the prettiest buildings -"

"They were friendly too by the time we got there."

"I think it'd have gone badly if you'd gone there first."

"Anyhow the Tapai explained the caste system and the war and we said we'd bring Yavanna in and asked about contacting the other side but they had their communications down - eventually Moryo just went over to Voa -"

"Why me?"

" - well, we don't have the blue/green distinction, right, you had the authority to promise whatever you wanted and the language down and we were really just planning to let them know what was going on what with alien involvement in the war -"

"At least until we learned they had murdered a kid for talking to us!"

"...how old was the kid?" asks Shasali.

"Just four, I think - we came in the spring -"

"That's not really a kid any more," says Isama.

"I know Elves're different but wizards are a lot like you and they still consider that age childhood - come of age a season later - and it's definitely before you're done growing, even for Amentans - anyway he was a kid, on the radio, he was giggly and excited to be talking to aliens and - and we showed up and they'd murdered him for it -"

"I guess that would be pretty startling to an Elf," says Isama.