"If I say 'I don't need any of the people, I will kill them and eat them' that is amoral? And if I say 'I need the people, they make the food and they write the books, I will not break the law and I will only eat animals' that is moral?"

"Much closer! But not quite. It's - hm. If you say 'I don't need any people, so I'm going to kill and eat them,' that's immoral, it's wrong. If you say, 'I need the people, they make food and books and my life is better when they're healthy, I won't break the law and I'll only eat animals,' that's amoral - it's a reasoning process that'll lead you to do good or bad things depending on which thing is best for you. People are naturally pretty amoral in a lot of ways, so a good society will set things up so that even an amoral person will mostly do good things. But being moral is, like - you see that the people in the city are sick, and maybe you know how to take care of yourself and never get sick as a result, but it would be better if no one were sick, and so you help them even beyond the point where you can get anything out of it yourself. And then the world is better."

"Moral is thinking healthy people are better than sick people? And happy people are better than sad people?"

"It's a little more complicated, but that's not a terrible approximation. Different people disagree on the specifics, of course. Har obviously has different values than Rainfold does."

"Values is the things you think are good and bad?"

"Yeah. Roughly."

"I don't know Rainfold's values. What are they?"

" - well, there's the obvious 'sickness and abject misery bad, health and happiness good', but in terms of things that not everyone agrees on, Rainfold thinks that everyone should be equal under the law, that slavery is evil, that men and women are equally valuable, that everyone should have some place to go where they can be free and minimally safe, that it's good for poor people to have access to things like the library and maybe be able to lift themselves out of poverty, that the dead should be allowed to rest without anyone disturbing them, that no one should have to worry about being attacked, that it's important that the legal system be fair and something that most people can understand and live by... obviously some things vary from person to person and from group to group?"

"...How can you disturb the dead? In Har I never heard that someone disturbed the dead."

"It's important to most people that their body's respected after they die. If you don't do that, the dead people get upset."

"In Har the dead people don't get upset. In Har the dead people don't get anything. The dead people in Har don't... do... things. Can I be alive after I die in Rainfold?"

"Nah. Not alive-alive, anyway. You pass on to the next world after this one, but the ghosts aren't talking very much about what that one's like."

"That is very different. I hope the next world is good if I have to go there. How should I respect dead people so they don't get upset?"

"There are rituals we do. Funeral rights, to release the soul from the body so that they can pass on safely. Peth could tell you more about it, it's her job to perform them."

"So you don't want dead people to be upset. People here are happier if they are all equal under the law. People here think women and men are the same - that surprises me, I thought humans were too different to think that."

"Not the same, exactly. Equally important, maybe."

"Hm. Equally important. Are they equally king and queen?"

"Mhm. Each within their own domains. The king handles national defense and law enforcement, and the queen handles spending and domestic services, like the fountains and the library. They're supposed to agree on foreign policy."

"If the queen doesn't like how the king is doing law enforcement can the queen stop spending anything on it?"

"Yes. If she's wrong and it throws the city into chaos, then the legislature can vote to remove her, but fundamentally yes."

"So the queen does law enforcement. And the king works for the queen."

"I suppose there's an argument to be made about that. I don't think so, though. The king's decisions determine whether the queen and the legislature are safe to operate; she couldn't do her job without him any more than he could do his without her. And I think it's probably harder to prevent gross abuse of the armed forces than to prevent gross abuse of the nation's purse."

Shrug. "You know more than I do. What's gross abuse?"

" - oh, sorry. Abuse is using your power in ways that are harmful and inappropriate, and 'gross' in this case is, like, clarifying that you mean really bad abuse, not the sort of irresponsibility that you might expect anyone to demonstrate from time to time. I keep forgetting you're not actually fluent yet, you're getting way better at this! Did you still want to go to the library?"

"Yes! Yes, let's!"