"It will take a very long run."

"Sorry to hear it."

"I appreciate that."

"I do still think there's something absurdly nice about there being only one person who was ever bad enough to own slaves. But if you say there's nothing absurdly nice about the rest of it, I believe you."

"Oh, apart from that one person and various effects downstream of him my world is very lovely. He just did a lot of things before he was locked up."

"Yeah. The absurdly nice thing is everything else being lovely."

Nod.

"This world must look like such a disaster in comparison."

"It has its drawbacks. Like people dying for no reason, I don't like that at all."

"Unfortunately I don't think it's the kind of thing that can be solved by putting somebody in prison."

"Well, maybe not, but I've been surprised before."

"Oh?"

"In addition to the Ainur it turned out that my universe had an omniscient creator deity who set it all up to watch it go."

"We'd better not have one of those."

"Ours has been convinced to cut it out."

"If I found out we had one of those—" he cuts himself off, shakes his head, and instead of whatever he was going to say: "I would be upset."

"This is not unreasonable. Ours has diminished to the point where he can read books like a normal person and now lives on the moon and judges poetry contests."

...he laughs.

It is a bit funny.

"Of things for an omniscient creator deity to be doing, that seems like a basically acceptable one!"

"It is! His taste runs to the tragic, so our media does too, but this is much less harmful."

"No kidding."

"Nobody's asked me to translate any songs yet."

"Are they all relentlessly depressing?"

"Most of them. I'm not sure if we have similar enough musical conventions that you can tell which ones have sad tunes, but they match, almost always."