"Don't you know? I thought that was how you sifted me out of all the possibilities."

"I certainly know what you did but that's not quite the same as understanding the why."

"But you told me how many people on Davlia are alive because they got warp sooner! To me that indicated you'd narrowed it down some."

"Well I'd say it's for those rather noble sounding humanitarian reasons that the Federation tends to talk about. Except those don't seem to result in people actually being nearly so interesting as you."

"My strategy relied pretty heavily on the rank and file, but I acknowledge there are more of them. What's your present understanding of those noble sounding humanitarian reasons, then?"

"Oh, perhaps saving lives, providing the opportunity to make decisions that matter on grander scale, and the chance to understand those mysteries of the universe you mortals seem so fond of."

"I'm not personally attached to the mysteriousness of the mysteries if there are hints you're itching to hand out."

"I would hardly know where to start with the more interesting ones. Some temporal psychology could be lived through I suppose but I suspect you wouldn't appreciate that."

"You could make a verbal attempt to introduce the concept perhaps."

"I don't think your language has nearly enough tenses for such an attempt."

"No? What a pity. At any rate, my motives were the obvious humanitarian ones! It came up at my trial. The Federation has, not bottomless, but considerable, spare capacity to do geoengineering and medicine and peacekeeping that save and improve billions of lives, and nudging a few on-the-cusp planets some years earlier got them the opportunity to solicit that spare capacity for their needs."

"And in doing so you accomplished those nobles goals to a far greater extent than anyone else in the galaxy who has claimed to share them!"

"It's true, but it only worked with the Federation behind me, however little they knew they were," she shrugs. She finally decides which Space Fruit toppings look best to have on a bowl of "priv" and approaches a food stall. "So the other claims may easily have been as sincere and strong, and just worse-placed."

"Worse-placed?"

"If they didn't have a background conducive to thinking of and implementing my idea or a similar one? A Davlian couldn't have, for instance."

"That should hardly rule out most members of the Federation."

"That's true, but it was also a demanding lifestyle! It would have been incompatible with anyone who couldn't sustain their motivation all alone for extended periods of time without confidantes."

"Well if your fellow mortals were actually willing to act on their beliefs than that wouldn't the case, now would it? They have no one but themselves to blame."

"Surely you've encountered common knowledge problems in all your vast experience."

"I suppose those are a flaw of many lesser species."

"Oh, how is it your people avoid them?"

"By possessing the same knowledge, generally. And by not having such a cumbersomely large number of us running about."

"I think I'd find it dull or even frightening to find all my knowledge mirrored in other people with quite the accuracy you'd need to avoid the potential for common knowledge problems."

"Yes, it can be rather dull. Though I suppose its not entirely mirrored - the rest of them somehow manage to find me rather confounding if you could believe that."

"Have you got stories?"