"Our pregnancies aren't like that," says Avalor. "Well, the swelling, I suppose? If you want to phrase it that way."

"Probably accounts for a lot of it. Not a lot of women want to sign up to be chronically ill for nine months and then be tortured, especially more than once."

"I don't think I've ever heard childbirth described in quite that way before."

"Let me guess. Not only is childbirth only mildly painful for your species, you also have 100% uptake of painkillers because no one believes God wants them to give birth without painkillers."

"...No one is rejecting painkillers for that reason, correct, although some people have allergies or other reactions to the strong ones and get by with the sort of thing one takes for headaches, and of course there's always the odd person who winds up giving birth on a boat because the baby came a month early, or stuck somewhere during a disaster of some kind..."

"We don't bother to give the headache medicine to birthing mothers because it won't have any effect."

"What an oddly specific headache medicine. I'm sorry things are so difficult for those of you who can still bear children."

"What I'm gathering from this conversation is that we have a lot of space and a desperate need for a next generation, and you have very little space and a desperate desire to create a next generation."

"Yes, I've noticed that. I'm not sure Amentan immigration would fully satisfy your needs, since it's unlikely we're interfertile even if I assume the translation effect is not in fact eliding chelicerae, and we don't exactly have unattended babies to adopt out - we do use that as a consequence for violating population control laws, but there's plenty of domestic demand, more than enough -"

"We can fully supply our people's desire to have children. But the infertility crisis presents... a problem, and an opportunity." 

"Yes. We'll need to get some greens looking at the chemical and see if it would negatively affect any Amentans who went to your world."

"You didn't ask what the problem and the opportunity were!"

"I was assuming the problem was that you're barely treading water with respect to dying out and the opportunity was that you have places Amentans could live. Is that not it?"

"The problem's right. The opportunity is... most countries are handling the infertility crisis more poorly than Gilead is, because they don't listen to the teachings of God. In a century or two, their populations will be tiny, and everyone who isn't over sixty will be taking care of someone who is over sixty. I don't... take any pride in war. I consider myself a peaceful man. But I will rejoice at the opportunity to start a new crusade and take back the world for God."

Avalor's lips thin. "Hmm," she says. "Why is it that they don't listen to the teachings of God?"

"Six thousand years ago, not long after the world was created, our ancestors listened to Satan and rebelled against God. Since then, human nature has been inherently twisted towards evil. I imagine a similar event happened in your history."

She blinks. "No analogous events come to mind. Our world is also older than that. Our calendar is nearly three and a half thousand years in, and our years are probably at least three times longer than yours, and we existed before we began to keep time."

"You don't even know what God is, which makes it somewhat unlikely that you'd know the details of your planet's salvation history. I suppose if we make contact this will be a matter for... xenotheologians? Which I guess is a job now?"

"That - career - is translating oddly - we have theologians -"

"Do you, now? What do they study?"

"To oversimplify - lifestyle advice. They'll tell you to wake up early and phone your grandparents and some of them advocate meditation and they're also the experts on the spread, containment, and melioration of pollution."

"That word is also translating oddly... does 'pollution' mean toxic stuff that's pumped into the air and makes people sick?"

"The word for that isn't unrelated but the kind relevant to theologians accrues to waste and corpses. And reds, who work with polluted things when necessary."

"Red is another caste?"

"Yes. A small one, less than half a percent."