" - that would be great, actually." Family photo, with tiny wriggling twins and no Telkam. Picture of his husband. Picture of Lina.

Servantmakers pull shines from the everything and put them on paper for him.

And Aitim turns his pocket everything off again. "Thank you."

"You're welcome!"

He goes home.

"So," he says to Shasali, "I have a fun dilemma for you."

"...by fun do you mean fun?"

"No."

"What is it?"

"Population was about stable before the storks. Now it seems to be increasing, because the infant death rate is lower. There are two possibilities. One is that a million babies randomly appear every year, and that once we have the technological capacity all million babies will get rescued and the population will be stable at whatever level that implies. Two is that random baby drops scale with the present population."

"It could be something else. Fixed quantity of babies, or the drops scale inversely but not enough to counteract storks, or someone's controlling it, or the servants run on the souls of dead babies - this place is bizarre -"

"You don't say. There are apparently places with indoor plumbing; I think we should move there and try really hard to get good statistics on baby drops, because it matters a lot if it scales."

"- better do it soon before we're more attached to the creche babies."

"Don't know how much it costs. As soon as we can afford it, yeah."

"How much it costs to travel? We hitchhiked here, maybe we could do it again... they probably have creches there too."

"I'll look how far they are."

She nods.

He looks into that, and into local governments.

Most places here are city-states. Some villages and farms fall under the province of city-states nearby; some don't. Lapis and Wrebb are the nearest rich democracies; Wrebb is closer, although still a hike.

And how much to sit on someone's automaton going there?

If they don't care when they leave they can do that for not very much.

Do they have to give notice at the creche?

It'd be polite.

"I think we do that, go to Wrebb, see if I know more than them about text compression, work in the creche until we're making enough off other projects."

Shasali nods.

Leaving the other babies probably bothers her more than Aitim. Aitim is going to fix up the world they'll grow up in, from somewhere with indoor plumbing thank you very much, and he has his baby and will only miss other babies a bit.