"Do you think you'd be good at being a librarian?"

"Probably better than anyone else you have. Is that what you most need?"

"What we most need is for people to be assigned to jobs they're good at and enjoy. The current librarian has been chomping at the bit to ride horses. If you were a librarian, you'd be in charge of keeping the books in order, answering questions, helping people find books, and requesting books from the scavengers. You'd also keep track of the sleepers and our other records, and if you have time left over I have a list that's like seven hundred items long of things it would be useful to be able to make that we can't." 

"I'll have time left over. I doubt I can recreate all of modern engineering for you on my own, but I can take a stab at it."

"Recreating candles would be good enough! --Did you get the younger kids because you merged groups with someone?"

"No. Most of the older ones jumped ship from someone else, or were wandering around by themselves before we picked them up, but the four youngest we picked up right away. Some people from church had babies, and at some point it occurred to me that nobody could be feeding them. Honestly I'd have picked up more, but of course after the first couple weeks all the really little ones had starved or been scooped up."

"...Good answer. Second question: what religion are you?"

"Catholic."

"Okay, so, good news. We have the pope."

"Well. How did you determine that?"

"A priest realized the Bliss was happening and called the pope, who mysteriously hadn't blissed-- the going theory among the Catholics of Eros is divine intervention-- and who fell asleep as soon as he gave permission for the priest in question to ordain a nine-year-old, who then somehow survived everything going around killing nine-year-olds in order to come to Eros and convert half the population to Catholicism."

"That is something to recommend your community, yeah."

"Right now, the entire government is gay Jews. That's admittedly just me and Chris, but still."

"...I don't know if I'm really a, uh, government-type person. But I guess your options are probably pretty limited."

"You adopted three young children as soon as the Bliss happened and kept them alive for seven years. Rebecca says they're reasonably well-fed and injury-free, and Alex says they're on grade level for everything except math. You're an old, and I remember before the Bliss well enough to guess that that means you're more emotionally mature than me and probably Chris. And you have a bunch of Asimov's Science Fiction."

"These things are true. What kind of help do you think you need?"

"If you stick around I'm going to assign you to the library job. Lots of people come through there, that'll give you a sense of the interactions between people and what people are good at and interested in. And then I'll try to delegate work to you and see what you're good at? But things you might end up doing depending on your aptitudes include assigning people to jobs, figuring out how many of what things we should scavenge or make, mediating disputes, talking to people who are sad or can't do work or don't have any friends and figuring out how to help them, figuring out what complaints we should do something about and what are just grumbling, handling the transition to an actual economy instead of central planning..."

"These seem like things I can try figuring out. And I am optimistic. A couple of the kids are still suspicious, but I don't think any of them dislike it here."

"Is there anything they need to be-- happy, healthy, functioning-- that isn't going to be obvious? I really try to get people the things they need to be okay."

"...each other, though I suppose that's not particularly non-obvious. Connor needs to be able to do useful work that doesn't strike him as - stupid, or a long shot, or valuing appearances above utility. Tracks will offer to do defense or weapons training if he hears it's needed, maybe even pilot one of the robots, but it'll be terrible for him; he's still recovering from previous trauma as a child soldier. He just - needs to decompress. Dana needs to be doing something obviously useful. Naomi should do all right, as long as she's appreciated and no one spends too much time tearing apart her priorities or trying to get her to commit to opinions. Zana - Zana mostly needs room to do things and learn and grow and experiment, and someone around to remember that she's a child and a human and needs all the things that normal human children need, no matter how hard she tries to get people to ignore this. Anemone has a habit of saying a lot of very concerning things and needs at least someone around who will resolutely not be overly concerned about them, and she still has night terrors sometimes, so she needs someone who can stay with her when that happens. Tamir - hasn't been with us for very long, honestly, but I think he mostly needs someone to hug him and assure him that he's safe enough to think about anything besides how safe he is. Christina's the same, although she requires more in the way of evidence. Tempest is fine, she mostly needs someone to prevent her from breaking her ankle by jumping off the roof of a building somewhere. William and Mary just need to keep being kids.

"At a first pass, anyway. People can't really be summarized in a sentence."

He's taking notes. 

"I think we can do all of that-- feel free to harass me if I drop something, one of the reasons I'm so eager to try you out in government is that right now we basically do government by means of me remembering things, and that was fine when Asher was awake and there were only a hundred people but with the community at the size it is I know I'm constantly dropping balls and I don't have the time to think about how to get us to a more scalable system--"

"That makes sense. While you still have a lot of kids you might just want to add another layer to government, maybe break people up into squads and have each squad leader determine which needs should be met by them and which needs they need your help to meet. Of course once you break a thousand people or so, that becomes complicated, and you'll either want to add more layers - which is more space for concerns to slip through the cracks or get tangled up in a game of telephone on their way to you - or be able to transition to a system that lets most people look after their own needs without any direct handholding from the government. But of course that's harder to do with children. You can't expect thirteen-year-olds to figure out how to get all of their needs met without someone else checking in on them."

"I was actually thinking of transitioning to using money but I guess I have a post-Bliss idea of what it's reasonable to ask thirteen-year-olds to do. --There's just not that much to spend money on and the government is going to continue to provide housing and medical care either way."

"There'll be more to spend money on once you figure out how to make more things. I think - you're sort of still in disaster management mode, you know? And what you want is to make really sure that you have something that can get you to the point where you have a more normal demographic distribution that consists of a lot of people who know how to do a lot of different things, so they can be a long-term community that doesn't need any handholding. You could totally use money, though, I think thirteen-year-olds can handle money. I don't know that they can handle, say, the responsibility to notice when what they're doing is making them persistently unhappy and they really ought to be doing something else. So if you have a government that's halfway between a pre-bliss government and being - parents, or camp counselors, then you need to be aware of what your current system does for people, so you can check whether any systems you transition to are also going to get those things done. - uh, not that I've ever done anything like this before. I don't think anyone has. We're gonna have to do a lot of spitballing."

"I mean, handling people's feelings and their relationships with other people is a lot of what I end up doing, and I think you're right that that's going to have to be a government thing until we get a lot bigger or a lot older. Some of it is just straight-up practical. If people are miserable or busy having relationship drama they're not functioning as well as they can. But I think it also makes people less likely to bliss. We've only had one person who isn't a pilot or an anchor bliss in the past three years, and some of that is probably that Eros takes sleep really seriously, but I also think keeping morale high and stress low is part of it."

(He is clearly desperate for someone to talk to.)