"We live to forty, we're fertile five to twenty. Only in the spring, if we live somewhere with seasons."

Cam makes a note of that.

" - so. The FTL."

"The FTL. Uh, translation is a local bar effect, I can't just drop stuff on you. I mean I could but less useful. Also I should probably make some effort to be sure all you're going to do with it is have five kids apiece and not, like, prosecute some awful war or whatever."

"There aren't any wars right now. There was one a year and a half ago but it was - the kind of thing that wouldn't happen if we had planets - Voa poisoned their food exports so their neighbor couldn't get enough food and they annexed a province."

"...poisoned food exports. That's a weird thing to do."

"Apparently this one asshole decided to make a point about how the food preparation trade agreements were excessively careful by arranging for every company in Voa to stop complying all at once, they were letting reds touch it, it was a disaster. I have a classmate from Tapa and he was shipping the snacks in his dorm home because the rations weren't enough for his family -"

"Reds?"

He makes a face. "The caste that does sewage and garbage and handling the dead."

"...ah-huh."

"Everyone's got systems set up to keep them from touching anything," he says reassuringly. "Even Voa, and they reversed the food thing once it turned out to be a fiasco. The rest of us are clean."

"If aliens have different procedures we'll accommodate, I think there was a lot of wrangling about that back when international trade got important." He shrugs. "I'm not exactly an expert, I'm studying architecture."

"I'm... not sure you should be expecting contact with a whole alien civilization, here."

"Well, we also might find aliens with the FTL."

"Suppose."

"Since there, like, apparently are some in the first place."

"The magic door does interworld, not interplanetary, could go either way. I could check, I guess."

" - you could check whether there are aliens?"

"Yes."

"...how?"

"I'm a magical species and I can make arbitrary material objects including according to parameters that allow the transmission of information between worlds and with no delay."

" - and here I was thinking FTL was a big deal, wow. That could - that could -"

"End material scarcity."

" -yeah."