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The grownups are all very busy, but the children are all bored.
Bored or having nightmares. But Tasárinon was not on a ship and did not see the people dying and has only heard it thirdhand and can't exactly have nightmares about the look in his mother's eyes - well, he probably could, but he hasn't - so he's bored, and he is drawing on the floor. It is an absurdly intricate drawing. He has been embellishing it for three days.
"I didn't think you did. Their journalists used to swear oaths to report the facts accurately but a lot of bylines have been changing lately." Cam hands him a piece of paper with the original and the vernacular translation and the computer translation into Quenya.
"Okay," Maitimo says. "So another barrier to sticking the planet in a black hole, which we've been seriously considering while you were gone, is that all these orcs will go to Mandos and Mandos is going to take one look at this and say 'not possible to reembody.'
Do we have enough of a text corpus to learn the language this oath was spoken in, exact wording is going to matter tremendously."
"Let's see." Cam conjures up everything written in the language. "Oh, and orcs think the Elf gods torture them forever when they die and were delighted to hear that Melkor had a way to keep them for himself instead -"
Maitimo goes carefully unreadable, at that. "Melkor claimed to have a way to prevent orcs backing up to Mandos?"
"I don't think you can send them home," the President says.
Maitimo has no way of suggesting Cam build them a planet without revealing that he knows Cam can do this. Cam not being telepathic is so annoying.
"Hundreds of thousands of orcs die pointlessly every engagement in this war," the President says. "Ending it protects them as much as us."
"Yes thank you this logic is not lost on me. I'd just as soon as evacuate them but I can't put them with any other evacuees..."
"So evacuate them somewhere else. Worst case is that somehow the Enemy finds them and if he can track light-leapers there's no hope anyway."
"We were trying to think how to conduct an evacuation without provoking the escalation you're afraid of," says the President. "Your friends don't think there's any other way and I will confess I cannot think of one."
"If the Enemy has the capabilities he demonstrated when he destroyed Valinor's Suns, it seems likely he could kill everything on this planet the minute he learned we had a way off it. Do you have ideas on how to stop that from happening?"
"We could do that," Maitimo says. "The systems we use for electrical power in Valinor require the Valar to bend Valinor's protections so they can run, because they'd otherwise be dangerous. If you ran them here and you ran them too hot you could poison a lot of land. The Enemy might know a lot more than that but anyone who'd spent time in Valinor would know that."
"I can do radiation shielding subject to usual concerns about doing more or less anything."
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