"I am Oat," he says.

"It's nice to meet you," she says.

"Is it? Why?"

"...Well, I suppose what I mean is it might be nice, and if it turns out it isn't at least I won't have made that any likelier by insulting you, if I say it is nice."

"Oh." He considers this perspective. "That's reasonable."

"It turns out a lot of things like that people say are sort of reasonable if you think about them."

"But do people normally think about the things they say in that way?"

"No, but they still happened in the first place. People now are just saying 'nice to meet you' because that's what you say but it would have had to make sense before that was what you say."

"It wouldn't have had to be reasonable. People do unreasonable things."

"Like what?"

"Murder is usually unreasonable."

"Well, yes. But it's also pretty unusual."

"Is it?"

"Yeah. Not very many people murder other people."

"What do you mean by not very many?"

"I would have to look up actual statistics but I mean if you go around meeting people all day in some place that doesn't have more murderers than most places you probably won't meet any murderers."

"I am not sure that's true," he says thoughtfully. "You might not meet anyone you could tell was a murderer, but that is different."

"I mean actual murderers," she says. "So I guess maybe we should look up statistics about it if we care when we're off this shuttle. I'm hungry," she sighs.

"What do you mean by hungry?"

"...Well, they said not to eat for a while before takeoff so I skipped some meals and now my tummy's grumbly? Did you just recently start learning Common?"

"Oh," he says. "Comfort-related. That makes sense."

"Are you so little because you didn't have enough to eat?"

"No. None of the other starving children I've met were this small."

"Oh. Are you a mutant, is that why?"