"The Anitami parent does; the other one still gets deported."

"Oh. What if the illegal one is the mom and she's pregnant?"

"She gets deported."

"About the baby I mean."

"That would be up to the country she gets deported to. There's an exception for if the partner is the one who reports her, then he can keep the baby."

"...that's mean."

"Making another law-abiding family suffer through an empty spring because people who were willing to break the law took their credit is also mean."

"No, I mean, like, that way, somebody could come in and think she was going to have a baby but actually the dad didn't want to share the baby with her."

"Yes. Breaking the law puts you in a position where a lot of people can hurt you."

Nod.

"Some countries just execute illegal immigrants."

Squeeze. "I had always hoped we would - get our act together a little more - before contact with aliens."

"I'm not sure I count. Maybe I'm just sort of warning you."

"I have thought about telling the government that you are an alien and so we need to straighten up our act real fast aliens are watching but - I don't have a good enough handle on all the variables."

"Like what variables?"

"Well, we don't know what the plant people actually want from us, and it's not likely to be the same things I'd judge an alien society for or do judge my society for. It might be something actively bad but not so bad we wouldn't do it to make aliens happy. It might be really bad and then we start gearing up for war. I don't know what people will guess it might be, or what will change if they know aliens are probably observing us. You might be able to credibly make claims but - then you'd be in a lot of danger if your claims turned out to be wrong, and you don't actually know."

"Yeah. I don't."

"The thing the plant people did is - not something Amentans would ever do. So plant people are probably pretty different from us. But that's all we've got."

"The putting a little kid in a basket? I thought it sometimes happened and that's why there was something they knew to do about it."

"Oh, yes, people sometimes do that, but we would never ever make contact with aliens that way."

"How come?"

"We would not particularly expect aliens not to just kill a random baby; we don't have babies no one wants and giving someone's unauthorized baby to aliens would be such a appalling punishment, random chance of being horrible and random chance of being great, it's like if for armed robbery we flipped a coin and either executed you or made you manager of the store you robbed. It's - not robust, it's really unwise, you really don't learn much from it..."

"Maybe they studied you first, and knew I would be adopted. Maybe they looked at the list and knew you were on top of it."

"I hope so. That would be encouraging."