"Well, he's an outrageously good singer, so it makes sense if a song's oomph scales up with its quality."

"He's also a very technically sophisticated composer and that has something to do with it too."

"I should probably find out sometime what the composition process is like to get magic out of it, see if there's an obvious reason humans never found it."

"It would surprise me if you didn't. The things Macalaurë performs are sophisticated magically, getting the exact effect you want with music is very hard, but we have children's lullabies that have some effect. We knew music was magic even besides Cuivienen."

"I think I have read one short story in which music was magic - but differently - and this is alongside lots of stories about forms of magic that definitely don't work like divination by blood sacrifice or stepping into a tree to walk out of another tree miles away."

"Bizarre. And yet it works for you, so it's not that servantmaking is the human magic and singing the Elven one."

"Yeah, it's something else, and if it could reasonably be that humans are just too bad at music and too impatient to stumble across it that's hardly impossible but it depends on how hard it would in fact be to stumble across, which I don't currently know."

"I'm not sure. It is true that generally less technical skill in composition can be compensated for with a better singing voice."

"And we may just optimize for completely different things in our music or something. But we do have lullabies..."

Maitimo starts singing. It's a Cuivienen song that feels like being wrapped up in a blanket.

"Snuggly."

"And not very sophisticated. Huh. Well, as long as humans can be taught you can have singers in all your houses of healing in a few years."

"I wonder how that interacts with infectious agents. Do you even get those? Ever?"

"Yes. I'm not sure if we only get mild ones or if it's just easy for us to fight them off. We asked the Valar about making them stop but apparently if they did that none of us would ever be able to leave Valinor."

"Might be the same principle as vaccines."

"Oh?"

"So, I actually looked this up once, the vaccine for the pox is literally deliberately infecting somebody with a similar disease. Someone noticed that if you'd had that similar disease, you wouldn't get the pox, even if you hung out with poxy people all day long. So now when kids are like three they have to sit through having the - there's like fifty names for the thing, my creche's kids called it 'the bad freckles' - but it practically never kills anybody. And some other vaccines are actually the same disease as the one they're trying to prevent, but administered 'dead'."

"And the body learns?" he says. "That would make a sort of sense. In that case I will revise my opinion of the Valar - I am glad they gave that some thought even when it seemed needless."

"Yeah, the body learns. It's possible Lári should get a standard course of vaccines even though she's growing up here. But what I was wondering was if you gave a batch of creche kids the bad freckles and they were cooped up in quarantine getting over it so they didn't pass it to anyone younger, and then you sang them all better and they left, would they get the immunity? Would they still be carrying the freckles?"

"No idea. That one might be too risky to experiment with, better to just ask Estë."

"Is Estë likely to know about human immunities?"

"She's the Vala of healing, she's the one who explained to me why we sometimes get minor illnesses even in Valinor, I'd expect her to know if anyone does."

Nod.

"If you're free tomorrow night I want a rematch of Governor."

"Sold."