"We had the planet made - ones at the right distance from our sun are a little hard to come by naturally - and it has a little town set up to accommodate the colonists, and we wrote a constitution and elected a government and everything before we left. About a quarter of the people have come through."

"Can I have a look at the constitution? We've got sort of usable machine translation of some Amentan languages, now -"

"I don't think I have it in a format you could use - we can ask our demon for that too, I suppose -"

Nod.

"Amenta has aggressive population controls - we want kids more than other species tend to - and one exciting thing about the colony planet is that we'll be able to relax them."

"China used to have that, the one child rule."

"Anitam - my nation of origin - auctions credits. They cost - hmm - as much as purchasing outright a luxury apartment downtown in one of our major cities, that seems like a metric that might translate. People spend their lives saving for it."

"Wow. What's your colony going to do?"

"Depends on whether we become daeva when we die. If we do, then it's outright beneficial for us to have as many children as we'd want - it means everyone else has all the daeva they need. If we don't, then we'll still employ credits but they'll be vastly cheaper because we can afford a growth rate. We'll probably consult Earth governments on how fast we should be allowed to grow - we know it's not a question you're accustomed to thinking about, but on Amenta it'd be very hostile to grow faster than your neighbors without their consultation so we'd find it most natural to talk with anyone who is interested about what growth rate won't be concerning or upsetting."

"I've never really thought about a possible daeva shortage before."

"It wouldn't have come up if it hadn't turned out there are other universes. Luckily we're the ones who found out about it and we're very very accustomed to managing scarcity without anyone ending up mad at each other."

"How does that usually play out in Amenta?"

"We have a good process for negotiating binding international treaties - over population, over pollution, over immigration, things like that."

"Are there other things about Amenta you'd like to tell our followers?"

"I'm not sure how much you all know already!"

"We've put together some things but I know it's nowhere near the complete picture! Go ahead and tell me everything, it can be edited down."

"We have a caste system! We know that's unusual and that most people who don't have one have a hard time imagining it. There are drawbacks, but we're a democracy and an overwhelming majority of our citizens of every caste value it as an important cultural institution and source of support and community. It'll stay in place as long as it's the way our people want to live their lives. We live longer than you, to a hundred sixty of your years or so, and extended families are important to us. We love kids. Many Amentans would have a baby every one of our years if they had the resources to give their family a happy home."

"How does the caste system work?"

"Caste in Anitam is patrilineal; in most countries it's matrilineal, and in a few places the parties to an intercaste marriage can choose which caste to buy a credit for. Castes have their own strengths - greens for creative and intellectual genius, art and theatre and music and mathematics and anthropology and literature and the sciences. Purple for honest work, the sort of things where the products of your labor are immediate - chefs, retailers, construction and manufacture, cosmeticians, shipping. Yellow for attention to detail - journalism, secretarial work, programming, summoning, management, finance and banking. Grey for physical things, sports and police and dance and sex work. Blue for foresight, large-scale thinking, good judgment - government, the courts, diplomacy, land development. Red for biohazards work that requires special cleaning procedures - sanitation workers, coroners and undertakers. Orange for emotional labor - teachers, therapists, nurses, daycare workers, doctors."

"What happens when people don't fit their specialties?"

"You can do out-of-caste work with some restrictions on how much money you can make from it; you can also do something in your specialties that plays to your strengths. An orange who is a genius mathematician might teach advanced math students; a yellow might get a research role in an engineering firm; a grey might take a security job that lets them do research and write papers while they keep an eye on a camera. Some places are experimenting, now that we have the space, with letting people dye their hair and go do something different. Right now that's a very unpopular proposal with the voters but if it goes well people might eventually get more enthusiastic about it."

"It seems odd to have an entire caste for biohazards but maybe that's just having grown up with angels around talking."

"Sort of historical accident - back when we first urbanized, keeping the cities clean and the sewage handled was a huge deal, by far the most important job. And now it could easily be automated, but castes have caste pride and there's a lot of resistance to automating red jobs away or cutting the red child credits. Anitam's experimenting with letting reds re-caste themselves as something else; if that works out well, then we won't have a red caste anymore."

"Ah, I see. And it'd be precedent for other experiments like that."

"Yes, exactly. We're hoping it goes well!"