"Screw up?"

"They'd get into arrangements that didn't actually keep a roof over their children's heads or keep them off the streets in old age or that kept them out of Axis."

"Oh, well, no sane Khazad has kids without getting plenty of insurance."

"I can't imagine what it'd be like to have been born without it," says Kimli earnestly. "Isun could afford me, but not immediately, and he's a lot younger than I am."

"...well," says Khalil, "yes, that's what happened, we were poor till she got rich - I did hold down a job, the simplest possible work, she'd write instructions on my arm. It didn't pay much."

Eskillimi stops drinking salad dressing and looks at the floor.

"You sell insurance against children being - the way Khalil is? How do you structure that?"

"When you're pregnant, or ideally even before that, you shop around for child insurance against all kinds of things - it depends on exactly what you want to insure against, like, a lot of people don't want to get paid out if they have a stillbirth or fertility problems because that's not really an expensive situation and you can get the insurance for less if you make the company take on less risk from your pregnancy or attempts, but our parents got the works, which is good because it's sort of hard to guarantee to anyone that I'm not faking it and some companies might have tied that up in disputes for a good while. So that pays enough for my helper and if I'd needed a wheelchair or someone to come by and sing me a healing song once a week or something else odd it would have done that too and they had to pay a little more for Isun's insurance considering the relative risk profiles with a disabled older sibling that the actuaries have figured out, but he's fine, obviously."

"That's clever. How much does it cost, relative to a day's wage for unskilled labor, say -"

"For a first child without any risk factors, the basic kind but well-underwritten and all? Maybe a year's worth of entry-level mining? Most people wouldn't start having children while everyone in their parenting situation was an entry-level miner, though."

"Oh, do you control when you have children?"

"- do humans just wake up pregnant one day? I met a braids once who spent half the conversation moaning about humans' accidental children but hadn't gotten the impression it just happened spontaneously!"

"I mean, it happens when they have sex, but you can only get people to wait so long for that, if you tried to require them to wait until they could afford insurance you'd have a lot of lawbreaking."

"- are you telling me orgasms get humans pregnant?" says Isun.

(Ana bursts into giggles.)

"- not exactly?"

"Because in my understanding you have to get fairly specific in what you're doing to get anyone pregnant and that's assuming there's an unmatched set of bits involved."

"I think there's a species difference here but I don't know exactly what it is."

"It's not obvious to me," says Hala. "And there's humans on the hookup app now and then, too, they're not that different."

"Anyway as a sociological fact people will do things that get them pregnant even when there are pretty strong incentives not to."

"That'd complicate insurance, yep. If incentives don't work seems it'd be hard to do most anything."

"They work for some things but not well enough for things like that."

"Our parents thought he was faking," says Ismat. "Maybe they'd have thought different if they could get a pile of gold for backing him up."

"Oh no, that - oh dear," says Kimli. "They didn't get it straight up, anyway, it's in a special account for me that they could control when I was underage..."

"Haven't spoken to them in years. Got their permission to marry Merenre by proxy," she says, shaking her head.

"You needed... your parents' permission?"