Nope. Bar with an alien in it. Alien is reading and doesn't notice him right away.

He blinks a couple more times. He checks the time. They should have been here half an hour ago. He drags a shipping box over to serve as a doorstop and he walks into the bar with an alien in it, looking around.

Alien turns his head when the box is dragged. "...hi."

" - hi. Uh. I come in peace? Why do you speak my language. That door used to lead to my closet." He has short green hair and is wearing sweatpants and holding a tablet. The shipping box says 'students get free overnight delivery'.

"Oh, it's a magic door, that wasn't me. The language is also not me and is magic."

"My society hasn't discovered anything that is usefully called magic. I guess except this." He looks dubiously back at the door.

"This is new to me too. I got here the same way you did, magic door."

He checks his doorstop and ventures farther in. 

It is a bar.

"The bar is a magical person, communicates by napkin."

"...hello," he says to the bar. "Nice to meet you - or do I need to write on a napkin -"

I can hear you, I simply cannot speak. Welcome to Milliways. First drink is free.

"I shouldn't, I'm waiting on a plumber - I suppose magic bars and aliens should really supersede that - yes, all right. Thank you."

She produces a beverage. It is purple and frothy.

He sits down and drinks it. "Do you mind if I take pictures."

Not at all.

His frothy purple thing is delicious. He takes pictures. He gets a text notification from the plumber saying they arrived. He debates it and then decides there shouldn't be reds anywhere near magic aliens and ignores the text.

"- so," he says conversationally after a little while. "Does your civilization by any chance have faster-than-light travel."

"Uh, why?"

"We need more space, and we've got arcologies on the moons and everything and could settle someplace if we could only get there, but no one even knows if it's possible."

"It is."

"Awesome. Do you personally happen to know how - or know where we can get papers or blueprints or something -"

"I don't understand it all myself but I could get you those."

"If you want something in exchange I'm sure they'll pay whatever."

"I think the thing I am looking for probably requires magic. I can just give you stuff, it's fine."

" - well, we're not going to turn you down." He gets a second notification from the red. He writes back.

You were late, I left. Be on time.

"What's the thing you're looking for?"

"Resurrection."

"Uh. Condolences."

"...thanks, but that's not really - it."

" - do you, like, need somebody who is dead in order to clear your name or something - is this a setup for a movie, I'm going to be so mad if there are secret cameras -"

"...it's a really long story and there are no cameras of which I am aware."

"Well. We don't have resurrection. Kind of a good thing, we'd have run out of space long ago if it were widespread so it'd probably end up just a few centuries-old politicians with centuries-old opinions and centuries to get a stronger grip on power."

"Why are you so crowded?"

"Were you not, before you got FTL? I guess if you got it really fast - we've got thirteen billion people. We've had population controls for, like, fifty years, when we had five billion? Before that it was wars keeping the population in check. Wars and plagues and starvation and stuff."

"My original civilization doesn't actually have it. But they colonized some other places in the same solar system."

"The other planets are too hot or gaseous. We've got the moons, but we can't season them. And  - one more planet would help, but in the sense credits are maybe ten thousand ni cheaper, it doesn't touch the fundamentals of it."

"Season them?"

"Cause them to have seasons."

"Is that important?"

"Without them our hormones get out of whack and no one's found an adequate artificial substitute."

"Oh."

"You don't have that?"

"No."

"I guess that'd let you get a little farther before you needed strict population controls, you could build underground and underwater and the poles and the equators and so on."

"There's not very much of that. People started having fewer children after we invented birth control. - do you have that -"

"Yep. Free and universal, so's abortion, people just want five, on average."

"...well yes that would do it."

"It's hard. My mom's a music teacher and my father's an untenured philology professor and they both worked crazy hours until they were eighteen and could take out a mortgage to afford me."

"How long are your years?"

" - I don't have a point of reference - uh, they have 1475 days, a day is -" he checks his pocket everything - "I've been here twenty minutes and a day is fifteen hundred of those."

Cam does some calculations. "Okay, good to know."

"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."

Sigh.

"Is resurrection really the only thing you want? - I guess it, uh, would be, if you can get yourself anything else -"

"There was a war. With some magic things. I caused - some collateral damage, ending it. I would like to fix it."

"- that's really admirable but, like, there are lots of people dying because of material scarcity not being ended, you could maybe give yourself credit for being in the black on the whole -"

"I already am, it doesn't help as much as you might expect. Uh, if you remove your doorstop you can stop time in your world, that happens when the door's closed."

" - oh. That's useful." 

He removes his doorstop. Opens the door again to check it's still his house. "I should learn more before I call the government, in that case. I don't even know how to tell the government without sounding crazy - don't know any blues..."

"Blues?"

"- the caste that does governance. And rent-collecting."

"Castes are an everybody thing, not just an untouchables thing?"

" - yeah. You don't have castes except clean and unclean?"

"I have met ten sapient species and yours is the only one that does castes at all."

" - really. Huh. Well, aliens. Every society on Amenta has the same castes, with a couple careers that are maybe different in different countries."

"I see."

"It seems like it'd be hard to do population control without castes but I guess if you don't have to do it at all -"

"Five of those species don't even reproduce. Three of them do but not at unsustainable rates. I guess orcs might run into your problem eventually."

"If credits were a straight auction blues would all have five kids and purples mostly couldn't afford any. - the politicians and real estate magnates would get all the credits, and retail and farmers wouldn't get any," he clarifies.

"Makes sense."

"If you make the books I could translate them and publish them online and then even if people didn't believe the explanation they'd take a look."

"I guess you could sit here transcribing things. I'm, uh... If your species routinely goes to war over people with plumber ancestors touching food and you consider this obvious and unembarrassing even when addressing an alien, I'm not... totally sure..."

" - people were going hungry. Even if you don't understand pollution you can - look at the consequences - and it's not routinely, no one ever did what Voa did before -"

"Yeah no I get that it looms large in people's minds, I'm not saying whoever tried that shouldn't have watched the situation more carefully, but I want to, you know, watch the situation carefully -" He appears a few things. "- you've got aliens, scads and scads of them, if you think it's obvious and unembarrassing that if someone does something like that you starve and kill people over it -"

"We might not trade with them if we can't agree on procedures. We don't want to bother aliens, we want somewhere to raise our children -"

"What if you have so many scads of aliens that all the good planets are taken and you don't like how they handle their landfills?"

"You said you can make stuff. You could make a planet."

"I'm not leaving this bar till somebody comes by with magic sufficient to put everyone back."

"Put everyone back?"

"Interstellar war, collateral damage, resurrection, remember?"

"Yeah, but - do you even have reason to believe it's possible -"

"I can put fifty-four million of them back. The remainder are just a different species. I haven't been here long enough to assume it's out of the question and Bar hasn't told me I'm out of luck either."

"- that's kind of a lot of collateral damage."

"It was a planet."

"You've got a lot of nerve, saying maybe we can't be trusted with starships."

"Yep."

"You have scarcity-ending magic, you use it to blow up a planet, but you want to tell thirteen billion people you've never met that maybe we're not virtuous enough to have children."

"I want the books."

Cam bows his head and hunches his wings over himself and says nothing.

"Oh, is the difference that you feel bad about it? We worry about pollution and we're not even appropriately sorry, you blow up fucking planets but you feel really sad about it. Tapa kills babies born without a credit, you know. If you're looking for things that are your fault to feel sad about."

Cam takes a deep breath. It doesn't cut it. He repeats it.

"Suicide rate in springtime is five times the rest of the year. Supposedly a spring when you're expecting a baby is amazing. But the rest of them -"

"Do you think," says Cam very quietly, "it's possible someone in the government would be better at reassuring me about how you'd handle meeting aliens."

"Is the door going to stay."

"My understanding is that time will pass in your world if you hold it and if you don't let it close with you on the far side it will stay."

"I have no idea how to get someone from the government to investigate the interdimensional bar in my closet without any proof."

"Do they have private phone numbers or something?"

"Probably?"

"Who do you want to call?"

" - I don't know. We have a ruling council, I guess, if you want to go straight to the top."

Cam fumbles around for their numbers and finds a couple and hands Sahan the slips of paper.

" - okay. I'm going to - think what to say, before I call them."

"Mm."

He turns to do that on his tablet.

Cam looks at what he was reading, finds he cannot quite focus on it, makes himself an ice cream cone instead.

And eventually he asks Cam if Cam minds helping with a demonstration for the council. "I want to ask them to write something down and then you can get it. To prove it."

"Yeah, sure. I need to know who wrote it."

"I'm calling Intal Neli."

Nod.

And he makes a phone call. 

      "Hello?"

"Councilor. My name is Sahan Insel and I got this number from a visitor with spying capabilities I want to demonstrate to you now. Do you have pen and paper."

      Pause. " - yes."

"Write down a six-digit number."

He looks at Cam.

Number?

"877460," Sahan says. "The visitor is an alien, I just figured I should lead with something provable."

      "Where are you?"

Sahan gives an address. "My house. The alien wants to talk with a diplomat or somebody."

      "You are welcome to give him the phone if that would be helpful to him."

Sahan repeats this for Cam.

"Sure."

Sahan hands Cam the phone. 

"Hello."

"Hello. I'm Intal Neli, I'm on the Anitami governing council. I didn't catch your name."

"I'm Cam."

"It's a pleasure to meet you. I am arranging for some people to meet you, is there anything else I can do for you?"

"I don't need anything, thanks."

"How did you do the numbers trick? Is there a camera here?"

"I can make arbitrary material objects. If you'd like to name a material object that is not wherever you are I can make that too."

"How can you do that?"

"I'm a magical species. This is also how I got your phone number. Speaking your language isn't me, I'm actually mildly surprised that's working over the phone since it's a property of the location where your citizen found me."

"He sent us to his apartment."

"Yes, the magic door is connected to his apartment. It's a weird magic door. Do these phones do pictures? Perhaps he could send you a picture. I have no hope of figuring out how to operate it, I'd get the focal length or something wrong and look like a cryptid."

"I took pictures already," Sahan says. "If you're done I can send them."

"He says he took pictures, I'm gonna give back the phone." He gives back the phone.

He sends pictures. "Are you gonna believe them? When they say no we won't bother aliens promise?"

"I'm assuming professional diplomats know how to say more well-cited things than 'promise'."

"But if you already know they're going to say something persuasive what are you expecting to get out of talking to them?"

"Specifics."

"Can I start on the books since they're going to be convincing?"

He sighs and goes back to his tablet.

Cam reads.

And after a while he gets a notification there are people at the door and presses a button to let them in and then calls to warn them not to go in the living areas, a pipe burst, the door is in his bedroom. And a few minutes after that four people step through, two with blue hair and two with yellow. They stop to blink in confusion at the bar but not nearly as long as Sahan did. Then they glance at each other and one of the blue women steps forward. "Hi. You must be Cam?"

"Yeah."

"I'm Amala Eletan. Uh, where are we exactly -"

"The place is called Milliways, if you close the door time stops whence you came, I do not own or operate it I just found it same as he did."

She nods at one of the yellow-haired people, who closes the door. "Thank you for bringing it to our attention."

"You're welcome."

"They have FTL," Sahan says. "But he wanted to talk with you about it."

        "We'd be delighted to talk about it!"

"I can also tell that you have aliens. Many hundreds of kinds of aliens, in your same galaxy alone." He picks up the things he made. "These hold a terabyte each and I conjured up the first written work in each language currently spoken in the galaxy. I'm a little worried about how you will interface with them given your expansionist needs and caste system."

She nods. "That's a really impressive ability of yours. Is there any chance we can have the works  of these alien species - our archaeologists and linguists and so on will be so thrilled -"

"I can filter for 'published' but I can't filter for 'willing to share with aliens', I'll want to think about it."

"Makes sense. So the concern is that there might not be planets available?"

"There might not be planets available and you are the tenth species I have met and the only one with a species-wide caste system."

"I'd be happy to answer questions you have about how that works for us."

"I'm only incidentally curious about how it works for you, I'm curious about how you will expect it to work for aliens who also happen to be sitting on nice planets."

"Ah. There was a period in Amentan history where societies warred for space. It was an awful time and is remembered particularly unpleasantly in Anitam. No one wants to repeat it, no matter how strange the societies we run across - and we were expecting aliens to be a lot stranger than you, honestly -"

"Some of them might be."

"And many of them can be presumed to be more technologically advanced than us, not having gotten FTL from a magic bar long before their physicists thought of it."

"That's true."

"It seems likely that there already exists some treaties or rules or agreements discouraging newly spacefaring civilizations from bothering their neighbors - honestly, if there are that many neighbors, the fact no one has said hi itself maybe points to some agreement like that."

"I was not, however, counting only species with FTL. I was counting everybody."

"I was assuming the policies about bothering one's neighbors universal enough that they would explain why we've seen no signs of aliens."

"You don't know that. You don't know why you haven't been visited. And it's possible no one in your galaxy has in fact invented FTL at all. And my version would get you farther than that if you wanted."

"As long as there are empty planets anywhere we'll go for those."'

"What if you check five thousand planets and they are all full, are you going to check another five thousand?"

"We can check five thousand at once. Or perhaps some society has artificial gravity and we can build our own suitable planets. Or perhaps some society will sell land in exchange for vaccinations and computers and help getting the infrastructure base to sustain those. The kind of security one achieves by chaining societies to their home planets doesn't seem like the sustainable kind. We'll go meet our neighbors and figure out something better than that."

"That's a lot of perhapses. And if you say hi to the neighbors and it turns out that they have weird customs about corpses or fertilize their crops with feces..."

"- then we probably don't buy their food. It's a practical concern, not a moral one."

"You had a war over it in recent memory, I'm told."

"There are trade agreements which ensure reliable access to food for the countries which have to import it. A country secretly stopped abiding by them, leaving their neighbors starving; the neighbors took a province so they could have independent food security and then agreed to peace. If they'd had another means of feeding their people they would have taken it."

"Aliens are not likely to care about the same things in the same ways and anticipate the same distribution of possible fallout from diplomatic hiccups."

"We wouldn't expect them to. We will not rely on food from societies that don't care about pollution in the first place."

...sigh.

"He blew up a planet," says Sahan from the corner. "But we're not good enough for starships, noooo -"

       She is temporarily speechless. 

"Sahan, do you think you could give Mashal here an account of what happened, for our records -"

         "Maybe we can go somewhere private for that," says Mashal.

"That would be great." Sigh. "It - sounds like it might be worthwhile for us to learn more about each other before we make high-stakes decisions. I take it they're not even urgent, because of the magic door?"

"Yeah."

"How much background do you have about us?"

"Not that much. Fifteen minutes of conversation."

"That's hardly enough to decide whether to buy us lunch. Can we table that conversation for now?"

"If you want lunch I can make you lunch."

"I suppose you could. ...I had this absurdly delicious seafood plate once, the next time I went to the restaurant it wasn't on the menu, they said it was seasonal, what do you need to know to make things?"

"More than that. When was this? What was the menu item called, at what restaurant?"

She checks a scheduling app on her tablet and has a date and location. "I don't remember what it was called, though."

"Either question suffices." Seafood plate.

"Ooooh." Smile. 

"It's pretty handy."

"It seems it. Can everyone do that, where you're from?"

"Everyone where I live when I'm at home."

"It seems like that'd produce a fascinating society. What do people get up to when they don't need to work to live?"

"Art. Obsessive neighborhood association regulations. Research and writing and analysis. Flying around. Breeding exotic animals. Physics experiments. Social drama."

"Oooohh. Children? Or does your species do that differently?"

"My species can't have children."

"Do you want to?"

"Some people do."

"Amentans would not make that trade. Infinite abundance for infertility, I mean."

"I get that impression."

"I can say it pretty confidently, blue credits cost more than a luxury apartment two blocks from where you work and a full time personal staff of eight and six vacations a year to anywhere you might want to go and I don't know anyone who had that kind of money and decided not to have the kid."

"Wow."

"What are the other species you've encountered?"

"I'm a demon. There's also humans, angels, fairies, Elves, orcs, Dwarves, Maiar, and Valar. Maiar and Valar might be the same thing."

"Is there a guide we should read?"

"There is not."

She eats her seafood, quietly.

He resumes his reading. It's on his computer, which is a bit fancier than pocket everythings what with the being controlled by his mind.

He seems kind of touchy and apparently blew up a planet, she's not going to interrupt. She thanks him for the lunch when she's finished.

"Anytime."

"Is there a good time to talk more?"

"Now is fine, you seemed to be focusing on lunch and I didn't have anything to say."

"I'm curious about the other species."

"Angels and fairies are like demons but with different magic. Fairies move stuff, angels change stuff. Humans are like us but they can't do magic to speak of and they can have kids and can die. Elves are taller and prettier and patient and prudish and cyborgs. Orcs are uglier cyborgs and they might give you a run for your money on the children thing but they don't have population controls, at least not yet. Maiar and Valar are psychologically wacky magical beings that only sometimes bother to have bodies; Maiar are less powerful."

"We didn't have universal population controls until we hit five billion and universal access to contraception for both genders and the birthrate didn't fall and everyone realized we had to do something. It was a rocky transition. Hopefully it'll go more smoothly for them - or are they one of the species with FTL -"

"They have access to it."

"Oh good."

"Mmhm."

"Is there any chance we could meet them?"

"It'd be a logistical nightmare."

"Ah well. Have there been problems with any of these species getting FTL and tearing off to murder others?"

"No. Elves had it first and Elves are weirdly peaceful. Nobody else has done much with it yet."

"I should suggest to my people that we put together a package of - media that can manage the language barrier, dance and music and silent movies and so on - for distribution to all these distant aliens."

"Elves have the prudish thing, they had some human and daeva - daeva's collective for demons and angels and fairies - media and wound up censoring most of it for having gay people or antisocial conduct or whatever."

"Huh. - wait, gay people? Why gay people? That seems really random."

"They have an extremely narrow range of acceptable romantic and sexual conduct and it draws the line around monogamous married couples who could have kids if they felt like it."

"Well, okay. I can tell people to look for media that doesn't depict any antisocial behavior or, uh, conduct not between monogamous married couples that could have kids if they felt like it but that might restrict it down to dancing."

"By dancers with long and neatly braided or covered hair. Short looks disfigured and loose is obscene."

...giggle. "It's a big internet, we probably have something Elves won't mind."

"They also just have really high artistic standards but the cream of the crop will probably be fine."

"Everybody else can cope with depictions of poor judgment and the occasionally consensually extramarital kiss?"

"Outside ideological minorities, sure, as far as I know."

"We have ideological minorities who assign moral importance to monogamy but I can't think of any with an opinion about gay people. I guess there are people who lost their children and resent it?"

"Lost their children?"

"Children born without a credit are put up for adoption, in the countries that don't kill them."

"...you would have serious trouble getting along with Elves."

"Maybe they would be willing to give us an alternative."

"Maybe."

"If you don't enforce population controls you get mass starvation. Or endless wars."

"How Malthusian."

"We'd love to do better. We're working on it from as many angles as we can. It's just not an option with the tools we have at present."

"What are you going to do if you meet aliens who find even your better morally atrocious?"

" - I don't think we'd be willing to, what, make the gay people divorce? - even for starships. Probably some country would and then let their gay people swap out to some country that wasn't."

"What about the reds? Seeing as castes are uncommon, sample size of ten."

"If anyone has robots who can do the red jobs we'd be thrilled not to have reds."

"Are we assuming they like the reds enough to sanction us over it but not enough to accept red immigrants themselves?"

"Or don't feel able to accept a population that will reproduce as fast as you're inclined without controls and whose presence might affect where they can go depending on how well you fare in interplanetary diplomacy."

"If societies want to sanction us over reds or gays we'll get by fine without universal approval ratings. If starships were conditional on it and there were no prospects of that ever changing - I think most governments would decide to kill the reds and hope it isn't held against their grandchildren."

"Wow."

"If we had planets we could just give them one."

"Would you?"

"I think so. It might depend how expensive it is to terraform them."

...sigh.

"I think people'd find it a bit frustrating to be judged by societies that are beyond scarcity over the tradeoffs we make under conditions of extreme scarcity. Particularly when the judgment accompanies a reluctance to help us get more resources, it feels a bit perverse."

"Are castes a scarcity thing somehow?"

"Almost entirely. If we can afford to fund this many university-preparatory schools and this many vocational training programs and we know the heritability of aptitude for university is over ninety-eight percent, it'd be doing our people a ridiculous disservice to throw away that information. Every proposal I've seen for casteless training and preparatory programs costs the government vastly more than what we've got for worse results. ...and if someone let non-greys enlist in the military their neighbors would all panic and there'd probably be a war."

" - very strong norms that only greys enlist serve to keep the playing field level without everyone devoting all their resources to war."

"...aha."

"If we didn't have castes we'd be putting a lot of kids through school that wasn't going to help them or get them a meaningful job and then dropping them on the world with some background in literature and no idea where to find work they enjoy that pays well."

"And reds?"

"Like I said, ideally we give them their own planet and maybe aid until they're self-sufficient. If terraforming each planet costs approximately the GDP of the whole world..."

"Then you murder them all so your grandchildren have clean hands."

"No, then we leave things as they are. If access to new planets requires pleasing some society who objects to the existence of reds and won't themselves take the reds or create somewhere for them to go, that's when there's a problem."

...sigh.

"There really aren't very many reds."

"There are countries that would kill just as many of some other caste if it were for some reason a condition of starships."

"That doesn't really help."

"You'd get volunteers. One in two hundred chance of death but your grandchildren will not suffer like this any longer - everyone would take that. You're interpreting this as 'we're unusually willing to kill innocent people' when it's instead that we are in much, much more pain than you can imagine."

...sigh.

"I think I'd tell those aliens that what they're doing is - finding people who are being tortured, asking them whether they'd kill someone to escape the torture, and then declaring they aren't worthy of no longer being tortured because they're hypothetically murderers."

"There's a difference between 'yes, I would do horrible things to make this stop' and 'yes, Steve, I hate that guy'."

"Some Amentan governments would do horrible things for starships. I hope I haven't left you with the impression we want to."

"That's - really not the level on which I'm observing a problem."

Sigh. 

"I'll probably wind up helping, just - I don't want the tone set to be that all your problems are solved as soon as you have ship blueprints. You have a crowded world and some very awkward social problems to introduce to the neighbors. It's not unheard of for people - I'm thinking of humans in particular, who you seem a lot like, less the obsession with children - it's not unheard of for humans to hear about neighboring humans doing something they can't countenance and invading to make it stop, and that's going to be a smaller gap. The guy I met first mentioned reds and wasn't even - embarrassed, cognizant that an alien would have a different reaction -"

...nod. "We'll keep in mind that it could inspire outrage and violence."

"You might want to - be underway on getting them their own planet, or whatever else seems like a suitably non-embarrassing acceptable long term solution, before you start trying to claim lots of other real estate."

"If people are just as likely to take offense about gay people - are they? - then we should probably anticipate we can't avoid such conflicts just by being consistent about living up to our own moral standards."

"- I think errors of permission are less likely to provoke invasions, generally. I wouldn't categorize that as an error but even if you meet someone more violent than Elves who objects it's harder to identify specific people on whose behalf they might be tempted."

"Are they likely to object to prisons?"

"Elves would. I don't know much about your neighbors."

She does not look super impressed with Elves. "We've got a province trying to do without, if the statistics shake out we could implement that elsewhere. I'd - really rather our social policy not be guided by the presumption our neighbors are itching for moral excuses for conquest but we can be flexibly organized so as to deemphasize or abolish whatever they object to. Unless they all want competing things."

"Mmhm."

"We wouldn't do that. Slavery was abolished through trade sanctions and immigration arrangements and treaty."

"You wouldn't do - what? Demand things of your neighbors?"

"Start a war with an alien species we didn't fully understand in order to make them conform to what would be moral conduct towards our species."

"Good for you."

Sigh. "I appreciate the advice."

Sigh.

The other blue-haired one comes back, hands the first one her pocket everything. She reads it.

Cam waits.

"Is there anything else we should know?"

"Probably. I didn't really prep for this, I'm sorry."

"We'd be happy to pick it up in a couple days, if that makes the most sense."

"I could read up on your neighbors or something."

"And on whether there are any empty planets to be found, that being relevant to what's next for us."

Nod. "I - there's - ugh -"

"The war in your universe."

"That's not even it, it's, putting you in closer contact with demons would solve a planet scarcity problem but it would also make it really easy for anybody who wanted to including reds to go anywhere with any material objects they wanted -"

"You could put us and not reds in contact with demons," says the new woman. 

"We can take lists from them and get them whatever material objects they want regularly," says the one who has been talking to Cam.

"It is in fact easy enough to do once you know how that they could guess."

"I would expect we could manage security such that they wouldn't have more information than we have at present, but if that's not possible then -" she bites her lip - "what's the range on your FTL?"

"Not applicable."

" - then their planet could be really really far away."

"And they could summon a demon and get a ship and go wherever they wanted."

"We could just not give them child credits," says the new one.

     "No. Planet. Nice planet."

" - okay."

"Which is easier if you have demons which mean they can go anywhere they want."

"Can we put them on the planet before the existence of demons becomes publicly known?"

"...and abandon them on a poorly infrastructured rock until the rest of your species learns not to freak out about them, or let demons make them places to go?"

"And send supply shipments which they would not need to know were, uh, demon in origin."

"At which point you have everything you want out of this interaction and no particular need not to forget about them six months out."

"Except reputation with our disapproving neighbors. We might be resentful if they attack us for not allowing sibling marriage or for adopting out unauthorized children but we couldn't even complain if they went to war because we were demonstrably untrustworthy when it was slightly convenient."

"I suppose that's practical."

"If there turns out to be a shortage of planets I think it'll be worth discussing."

"Demons can make those."

"Are they among the species that'll have. uh, moral complaints with us?"

"I'm a demon."

"And we very much appreciate your not conquering the country over ethical complaints, but if we're going to be in touch with your societies it'd be good to know if that's typical."

"I'm not a typical demon but I don't think any demons who have moral sensibilities will except them for the reds."

"My question here is at how much risk we'd be putting our people. So it's not - how they'd feel about it - but whether they'd start a war."

.........sigh. "Safely summoning people involves putting restrictions on their behavior so they can't do that unless you fuck up."

"In that case it sounds like it'd be great to be in touch with more demons."

Ugh. Sigh.

"Is there anything else I can answer for you-"

"Probably but I don't know what to ask and I don't care to leave this bar to go investigate on my own."

"We can consult and write something up and you can interrupt us if you think of something?"

"Better than nothing."

Off they go and sit and talk quietly and occasionally take notes.

Cam quietly researches their planet and their neighbors, by conjuration since they could bypass him entirely if they talked to Bar and he'd sort of rather gatekeep.

Their planet: population thirteen billion and a bit, a very low but nonzero growth rate agreed upon by international treaty. At peace, currently. Mostly democracies; there's a smattering of small countries with monarchies. Everyone weights the votes so blues count more and purples less. Reds can vote in six countries, though it looks like usually their ballot arrangements get disrupted or delayed or lost. Almost everybody is creepily authoritarian by Earth standards but not by Elf ones. They all have castes. Blue green yellow orange grey purple red. Intercaste marriage is allowed everywhere except this one place, but it's rare. Out-of-caste work is allowed but can't be more than various small fractions of income over the space of a few months. Two to three percent of people hit their income cap. Some places do two-kids-per-family, some do auctioned credits, some do personally awarded permissions; the justifications for the latter two policies are explicitly eugenicist, plus places that auction credits like the resulting minimal in-caste wealth inequality. 

Anitam has six hundred million people. The capital is Lina; the city the door opens to is a quaint university town of nine million, called Kanah. They've been independent for thirty-six years, before which they were part of some since-defunct empire. They rate poorly on an international corruption index, well on an index of prosperity and social order. They do credits. There are existing social justice movements that favor a minimum wage, giving purples more of the vote, giving universities more money, income redistribution, not executing pregnant women if the prospective adoptive parents will pay the prison costs, letting oranges do sex work, and more regional control of workplace safety regulations.

Jesus.

There's a lot of sighing.

"Anything we can answer for you?" she asks after some particular sighing.

"The last time I taught a planet summoning," he says, "I made a very particular point of rolling it out everywhere at once and not involving any governments."

" - with all due respect that would be a catastrophe here."

"Ah-huh."

"If you want to work with a different government we can send them but you can't - just - there'd be a hundred million people dead the first day -"

"Because you'd all panic about reds who could go around the world in a second if they summoned a fairy?"

"And because at least one person in a million would assassinate a politician given the chance and so every country would lose its entire government just as there's a major pollution crisis and all state secrets would leak to everyone and lots of them include the locations of agents who'd be executed if caught and some of them are more than enough to start a war. But the reds are a major consideration, yes."

"Summoning doesn't make it that trivial to assassinate people. You have to find a willing assassin."

"Or someone willing to make you a box without asking what's in it and the knowledge of what should be in it."

"I'm not sure what you're envisioning here; you'd have to have a demon copy something with an innocuous name for that to get anything very dangerous."

"Off the top of my head if I wanted to kill someone I would acquire the things I needed at home, leave them in a bag at home, go to a secure facility somewhere, ask for a copy of the shopping bag in my closet, set it and leave before it exploded."

"You would have to go through a few demons before you got one who didn't want to know why it was faster to summon a demon than summon a fairy and go home and get it. Also you have to give daeva things to get things and demons are hard to pay."

"Because the line to get into this place is an hour long, obviously. How're demons traditionally paid -"

"And your demon says 'so give the fairy the keys'. Demons are, obviously, hard to pay. People come up with various intangibles. Alien animals will work for a while, we're not good at animals."

"They can go to the theatre - if any of them want kids we could let them adopt. What's a key, my house opens to my fingerprint."

"The demons will not be able to take the children home. They will, however, be able to make your finger."

"But as long as the fairy can't that's a perfectly good reason not to have summoned one. They could stay here and raise the kids, right?"

"You'd get some takers. It's a good idea to pay daeva in advance and that would be hard in line for something."

Nod. "Do demons want, hmm, sex, massages, therapy, dancing lessons, music lessons, art commissions..."

"The first is highly traditional, the latter is a great idea, the middle ones might find takers."

"Then I bet we'll make it work. What skillsets are involved in summoning safely and effectively?"

"...you'd want like a whole textbook." Sighhhhhhh.

" - just to figure out what caste it is, not to learn how to do it."

"...based on my reading I guess yellow, if you insist, but you're turning down a lot of the advantages if you don't let random people summon their own."

"We can experiment with that on the moon or something, see what the rate of mistakes looks like before we scale up access."

"A moon will not meaningfully segregate a badly summoned fairy or demon."

"On a colony planet, then. Thank you."

Sigh.