"I am relieved to hear it! Whatever advantages my brother's approach has for knowing where one stands with him, they're rather outweighed by, well, everything. Your cat reminds me a lot of Nistar, actually, temperament-wise."

"Cricket's funny - he likes me, he likes me very much, he even admires me for all the actual good qualities I have and not just because I feed him and pet him, but simultaneously he does not have any of these qualities and wouldn't want them."

"Nistar has some good qualities you have, like caring a lot about people in the abstract and being frustrated by needless suffering and thinking strategically when it's in a domain where he's good at that, but the ones he doesn't have he wouldn't want."

"And the qualities I'd want I just arranged to cultivate."

"I can't say I've ever thought much in terms of cultivating qualities. Options, yes, definitely. Capacities. Resources."

"I do qualities! But it's not as useful as it sounds because it only works if I want the quality and unlike Cricket I am most prone to admiring qualities that I identify with, or else I go 'that's nice but it's incompatible with this other thing I'm doing'."

"So if I identified myself as deficient in wisdom, I'd find a friend with more of it and I'd trust him to point out to me where I might be erring. If I did it your way, and decided to cultivate the quality, how?"

Since, you know, the friend's not in the mood to be consulted. He'd actually left the country on a trip. Without warning. Mitros didn't get a chance to say goodbye.

"I've never actually gotten anybody else to pick up my method and I don't know if it's because it only works for me or because it doesn't sound appealing to most people, but I have this very systematic habit of writing down everything I think at the first opportunity - this is why I like having a writing system for my idiolect - and then I can look at it as something outside myself, apply some of the same objectivity I'd use thinking about another person or - or a character in a book, whose thoughts you often get better perspective on than another real person's - and I trace back whatever bit of mental pattern I don't like and find where it starts to go wrong, and once that's come clear I can replace it as long as I'm quite sure of what I'm replacing it with."

"Huh. Well, I don't have the problem that it sounds unappealing, so we'll see whether it's even learnable at all. I should like to also be the wisest of the house of Finos, sounds useful."

"I don't advise thinking about it in comparative terms for this purpose."

"Because I'll stop short of the potential of the technique, or replace things with the wrong priorities?"

"Neither - I think it'd be distracting. Thoughts go by very fast, you have to write quick and indexing my results to what I imagine other people's would be like has never helped me."

"That might be a difference between us. Other people are my reference point for absolutely everything."

"That sounds... uncomfortable."

"Unlike you and Nistar I find practically all of them interesting and I like thinking about them and I can call up a lot of understanding very automatically. It would be limiting if it turned out that, I don't know. I needed to do something where there just weren't any people who could do it, but on any scale short of that it's very comfortable."

"Fair enough. You may need to adapt the notebooking idea."

"I shall start with the standard version and see if it gets me anywhere. That's good experimental procedure."

"Good luck with it."

"Thanks. Should I let you get back to work?"

"I'm not in a hurry, but if you are by all means get back to hammering out funding allocation stuff for swift implementation as soon as someone who will sign it is wearing the correct hat."

"And acquiring some notebooks. But the funding allocation work is already practically bursting to be implemented, it'll be just as likely to find a patron with the sacred hat if I return to it in an hour. Do you know a good place in the area for dessert?"

"I do! There's a little place with fudge cakes over the bridge and up a block and tucked back with stairs up to it, it's hard to find if you don't know it -" She shows him the way. "Cricket found it one day."

It is a tiny shop and they're standing quite close and he puts an arm around her. They are fantastic fudge cakes. "Tell Cricket I am very very grateful."

"I will! He can't taste sweets himself and thinks it's hilarious that humans like them." Eee arm.

"Amars has a cat familiar, should I try to find some food as delicious to cats as these are to us and then bring Cricket a present?"