"Katin was already on the line."

"Telkam could have gotten a bank loan."

"I have fairly atrocious credit. No fixed address, weird work history - maybe could've still gotten three thousand tap - anyway it seemed like the thing where they were short the credit was one thing, and the fact the father got away with it was another thing and the fact the charities that deal with that situation don't serve reds was another thing and the actual root thing was fixable with hair dye."

"I really appreciate it!"

"You knew?" he asks Makel.

"...I found out."

"Got stuck in his house with no bleach in that storm."

Squeeze.

Aitim eats some fruit salad. If this requires effort it's invisible effort. 

He shakes his head. "So are you two going to have Milliways babies with door powers?"

"Maybe! That sounds fun."

"It does! Are credits going to be cheaper, what with the colony planets -"

"Not this spring, our neighbors would wonder what's up and we want to wait until we have the planets to show them."

"Aww."

"It's tempting, believe me, but not worth someone being stupid - and if there were a war and it were going badly I'm not confident the council wouldn't use daeva, they know it's important but..."

"Important to -"

"If we use daeva for anything interesting - 'finding' a bunch of good planets for settlement around nearby stars is weird but won't get anyone looking in the right places - then other people are going to be desperate to figure it out and it is easy to do once you know what roughly you're trying to do. Not easy to do safely, but that wouldn't stop lots of people. And we can't just do a universal rollout, teach everyone to do it right, because there aren't very many daeva and there's a civilization relying on them already."

"Oh."

"It's very frustrating."

"You could get a lot of use out of the demons who don't take summonses from humans but they won't stretch forever."

"And we can't grow off resources that we don't expect to be sustainable or someday we'll have more people than we can support."

"Yep."

"Planets are the big thing. With planets and the tech boost from trade we'll be unimaginably rich."

"We will."