"I no longer feel nearly as much shame when I do certain kinds of immoral acts! It's just intellectually offensive. I have professional standards, after all."

"...You don't feel embarrassed when you're obnoxious, so therefore you don't care as much when anyone else does things you find obnoxious for unfathomable human reasons?"

"Mmm, not quite. Most humans have a part of them that goes 'breaking the moral code is embarrassing and wrong' and feel embarassed and guilty if they do. I don't. Vampires are a much better cultural fit for Har than an average American, we're much more willing to murder, steal, rape, pillage, et cetera, if we can get away with it."

"Do you think you can get away with that here?"

"I do not. You've got freaking knowledge mages, which are anathema to any reasonable standard of privacy. It doesn't feel fair, I'm used to the assumption that if nobody can see me nobody can ever look at what I was doing, and unless I carry that trinket around everywhere that's no longer true and they can still tell where I went."

"And it's more salient to you that you can't get away with anything than that other people can't get away with anything they might want to do to you?"

"Not quite sure what you're asking? Being unable to disappear if I wanted to is what I dislike about knowledge mages, not being unable to get away with things. I suppose it is nice that I probably won't get attacked. Vampires probably care less about threats of violence than humans on average, though. It's not actually unfair, it just sort of feels that way. I guess not all my moral-related feelings got ripped out, eh?"

"Ah, yes, that's very understandable. Some people don't leave home much for that reason. Are you saying privacy is an aspect of morality?"

"For some people, yes. If I had to name the five most essential pieces of morality... Fairness and justice, kindness and caring, loyalty and honesty, respect and duty, and cleanliness or purity."

"Ah. Oh, that makes sense to me. Ways it's game-theoretically useful to predictably behave regardless of incentives, that also make life better for the people around you... cleanliness is an outlier but a lack of it hurts yourself and others. Humans have the same sort of emotional investment in all of them that you or I have in repaying what's done to us and bathing regularly?"

"Oh, Agerah have a revenge thing? Humans do too. Now you get it. Broadly, yes. The exact ways it's codified and which aspects are considered most important vary a lot from culture to culture. Cleanliness doesn't come up as much in places with good sanitation for example. There's actually research on it - most humans care about all these things a little bit, but how much they care about particular aspects depends fairly strongly on what their parents or friends or teachers told them they should care about when they were children."

"So you and Valanda want to teach our native humans to care about those things and that relates to slavery because... oh, because you want to be kind to the slaves?"

"Yes. Though freedom falls under 'fairness' a lot, too. A slave working and receiving nothing for it is offensive. Like being cheated out of your pay. I'm not sure if other species value what they're taught to value, but it'd surprise me if they don't at all."

"For criminals it's punishment for having hurt someone to start with. For children they usually receive food and shelter and education."

"Yeah, fair, but... I think this is hitting privacy. Because privacy is also tied to independence, the ability to prevent people from doing things to you, to control your own life and situation. That's less central than the ones I mentioned, but America cares about it a lot because of its history. I mentioned this for kids, the age of majority thing, but if criminal slaves had a term and would be freed at the end of it it'd offend that part of the moral code less."

"It's what we do with criminals we don't think can be part of society. It's not our first resort, we start with mild deterrents and help understanding and following the law, but for people who can't be stopped there isn't an amount of time after which we can just let them go."

"Yeah, I suppose..." Sigh. "Many of these nations have recidivism problems. It's just that saying 'slavery' is like throwing a lit torch on an unprotected building."

"Of course. As you try to convince people to value morals, is there any help you'd like?"

"I don't really know. I was never a people person. Maybe don't worry too much if Valanda brings more people through Milliways? It'll be very hard to build a moral society from scratch, but if he imports one, maybe it can grow. And you may have heard I am selling these calculating machines - people from Milliways will have new technology, new magic, which can be scary, but if they're screened enough so that they're not going to start a civil war, could also be very profitable."

"You expect Valanda to visit Milliways again? More than you expect anyone else to?"

"Either him or me. He's gotten doors at least twice, me six times - all from Earth, though. If you get it more than once, you're probably going to get it on a semi-regular basis. Probably. Everything about Milliways is so frustratingly uncertain."

"Ah, so Milliways doors are definitely not distributed randomly through the population. Hm. Well, that's all I need from you. Twenty-four rings to stay while I write a letter to Valanda, deliver it to him without letting it out of your illusion till it's in his possession and tell him to read it hidden?"

"I think who gets doors is based on some impenetrable concept of interestingness. And, deal. I was expecting to be here longer anyway."

He fetches his illusion amulet and takes out his tablet and starts reading the computer science textbook he had set down earlier.

He disappears into the shadows. The letter takes a while. It must be long or careful or both.

The letter, several pages sealed with wax, falls from a place nowhere near the dais.

Illusions upon illusions. These people do like their theatrics.

Back out he goes. He remembers his path to the millimeter.