"I put the enchantments far enough in that that should be hard for anyone with normal human hands. And the way I designed it it'll stop working if the fountains get taken apart. It's possible you could disassemble one just enough to get at the death zone without breaking my spells but I don't think kids will do that by accident. And it wouldn't kill you anyway, you'd just get gangrene in your finger and have to amputate it."

"That's less concerning, thank you," says the person who raised the question, before scribbling something else down on her paper.

"Your people in the Hari Empire, do they have any other transferrable technological or scientific advancements that we should be asking you about, either now or at some later time?"

"I'm not sure what all you have or which of the things you don't have you could replicate. We have cheap public transportation to and from the capital city that means nowhere in Har is more than two short-ish flights away. We have elections - people vote on our leaders - which makes people happier with the government and less likely to violently rebel. We have certification exams for doctors and laws against lying about being certified. We've got a good approximation of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius, it's six and forty-one hundred-forty-fourths. We have some guidelines for doing medical studies to avoid getting confused by random chance, but I don't know if what you do is better than what we do."

"I see," says the person, frowning. "It's probably overly optimistic to expect to make any significant progress on other topics during this meeting, we'll have to reconvene after the linguists have made more progress."

"The queen will likely have questions, after she's been debriefed on this."

"Is there anything urgent enough that you'd want to pursue it before taking the time to become more fluent in Kaltish? Anything else you need, for that matter?"

"I'll probably think of something I should've said right after we're done but I can't now. I just really want to learn Kaltish. Oh, and thank you, Imrainai, you've been a big help and I'm not going to forget that."

"I'm glad. And thank you for trying so hard to improve the city. We'll make sure that you learn Kaltish, then."

The spell runs out much more quickly than the other, because it's translating his words for many people instead of for just one. Someone notes when he's about out of time and instructs him to take his hand off the tablet.

The other academics disperse, apparently all quite certain that they have a lot of new ground to cover, and Mahan is left to continue picking up Kaltish. Imrainai spends most of her free time helping him practice conversation, and eventually moves on to reading and writing.

"Do you want to go to the library?" she asks, after a while of this. "They have lots of books there. You could practice reading and learn more."

"I want to! How much do I have to pay the library?"

"Oh, the library's free. As long as you take good care of the books, I guess, otherwise you have to pay for damages."

"You're paying for me?"

"No one has to pay to use the library. It's a civil service maintained by the queen via tax money, like the fountains."

"I like that. Why?"

"Because it's good for the whole society if even its poorest members can learn things on their own. It makes them better citizens now, and it increases the odds that they'll be able to gain the skills they need to take care of themselves and help other people in the future. - uh, sorry, I don't know if you've learned all of those words, I'm just really enthusiastic about the library."

"They learn so they're better so they pay more taxes later, right? I think I understand."

"That's part of it," she says, seriously. "Obviously we do want people to be able to do useful work, we have a lot of work that needs to be done around here. But it's also just that - people are better at living together if they know more. An educated society is better than an ignorant one, and its people make better choices and are better able to fulfill their own needs."

"Do you mean they do less breaking the laws?"

"I expect that they do break fewer laws, but that's not what I meant. They - hm. When you told us that diseases came from living things in the water, things too small to see, you educated us, and you helped us make better choices about our water supply and sanitation. If a woman reads about disease spread in the library and understands more about it than she did, so that she can take better care of her children and keep them from getting sick, the world is better than it was when she didn't know."

"Because sick people make people sick. And sick people don't work. And you can't go to a shop if no one can work, no one would do the selling."

"Yeah, I guess. And also because... I mean, why preserve the ability to sell things if everyone in your city lives in abject misery? You've succeeded as a leader if everyone in your city is happy and cared for, and making sure they can work and buy and sell things is a necessary part of that."

"Yeah, if the people aren't happy they can fight you until you stop being a leader."

"Depends on how many of them are unhappy and how strong the unhappy group is. But I suppose that's one reason to think about it even for totally amoral leaders, yeah."

"Totally amoral?"

"Ohh, sorry. Amoral is the opposite of moral - sort of, I guess maybe immoral is the opposite of moral? It means if you don't care about whether something is right or wrong."

"If I say 'two and two are seventy-nine' that is amoral?"

"No, that's something else. At least, it is now, I guess there are situations where saying that two and two were seventy-nine would be immoral. Moral is about right and wrong in the sense of - if you help people, that's better than hurting them?"