And now Tisarwat's brain was struggling in a different way, thinking that out of all the things to wonder about being similar between this dimension and another, the lottery was the first thing on Eleanor's mind, apparently.

"I think," she said, "it's a combination of both? There's definitely no planet called Earth in the Radch, anyway."

And, again, she would know.

"But the Radch has been in power for thousands of years, so who even knows what existed thousands of years before then? As for lotteries..." Why lotteries? Did Eleanor just have a proclivity to gamble? To take chances, to make risks? That could be useful, if that were the case, "we have them, but only some systems. It's not exactly a universal thing."