"I would expect them to get me out of here first thing and then take my advice on anything else involving this place which at that point I will have lived for a while and they'll be new to."

"Under what circumstances is that likely to result in hostile behavior toward the Hari empire?"

"...I'm having a hard time envisioning a situation in which it's in my interests to answer that given that I'm very creative and could definitely think of something no matter how unlikely it was."

(Ariu concludes from this that the answer is that as long as she doesn't expect to be crushed for trying, which she doesn't, she will definitely attempt conquest and no realistic concessions will change her mind about it. He kind of hopes someone kills her and her friends. This is, however, an inference, and he's not going to hold onto it too strongly because why would he understand aliens correctly.)

"It might be in your interest to answer if, to use an extremely implausible example, the answer were 'in my culture of origin, claiming to live in a polity with a four-syllable name is an insult, so I heard that I was in the Hari Empire and decided I should murder everyone because no one has apologized for insulting me.' While we might find ourselves at odds over genuinely competing interests, I would like to avoid accidents."

"How about this: if I were literally omnipotent, and could impose my will completely on everything known to me without any risks, I would not then value anything about the continued existence of the Hari Empire, but would want to preserve the lives and within-compatible-reason well-being of all of its inhabitants."

"I expect that answer to turn out to have been extremely helpful. To me, the Hari Empire is a means to the end of achieving peaceful compromise between all members of the electorate. Reports about you have included that you seem to have an extreme distaste for slavery; is that because it isn't good for the slaves' well-being?"

"Yes."

"My expectation is that slavery is good for slaves' well-being because slaves benefit from being alive and living in an orderly society with farms, textile manufacture, and peaceful trade, none of which would be possible without slavery. I am guessing that isn't your expectation."

"I... agree that, at least on average, probably the slaves in this empire benefit from those states of affairs, but I think you can achieve those ends without slavery and that's a very dramatic improvement for everyone who would otherwise have been a slave. I haven't worked out yet exactly what pressures or historical reasons are causing there to be quite this much slavery here, I grew up in a place with some slavery but much less of it."

"I would be delighted to hear about your justice system and how your society treated small children."

"I haven't been there for twenty years, so I don't remember a lot of the details. Are... small children... somehow one of the pressures producing the slavery...?"

"Yes. Do you not have... I suppose with your magic a toddler could compel their mother to do nothing but play with them or, what do humans like, bring them candied nuts? I would expect you to need to compel them not to."

"Actually the selection of food I found is incredibly limited and unsatisfying to the human palate but that's a distraction. Some young subtle artists do need safety blocks put in so they don't incontinently use their powers, but most subtle artists don't do things without trying, some of us have completely harmless instinctive power manifestations like my shields, and getting a specific result like what you suggested isn't trivial without training so they'd mostly just be weakly smacking people in the mind. Also most people aren't subtle artists."

"...I have questions but I think the most useful thing I can say is that we don’t need training to kill thousands of people. We need training not to. And where knowing how to avoid such harm doesn’t suffice - there is a city lost beneath the ocean because of one criminal. There have been societies without precisely the institution we know as slavery. Some were so stifling that it was arguable whether it was slavery they lacked or freedom. Some executed people much more readily than we do. It’s conceivable your society has systems I can't imagine - I expect it does. But I’m concerned that you’ve come here with this goal for society and observed that the Hari Empire doesn’t pursue it in the way you’re used to and concluded that it is specifically institutionally hostile to the pursuit of its inhabitants' well-being and continued existence instead of being the best system for preserving those things to ever arise on this planet."

"It's certainly come to my attention that one possible explanation for why you have so much slavery is that you're addressing a very hard problem that would be difficult to solve with lesser interventions. I don't want to destabilize things I don't understand."

"It seems to me that in your haste to trick me into believing that you believe the obvious lies you’ve attributed to me, you’ve missed my point. It would indeed be very hard to ensure everyone’s well-being. I have never tried. Neither have I tried to make people worse off. Perhaps there are people who have tried those things, but they are not among the imperial ministers today, and our system of laws is not designed toward those goals - neither of them. It is designed to ensure peace by brokering compromise between free people. Do you know yet how it does that?"

"The way your first sentence translated was very confrontational and impolite in my idiom and I'd like to hear a few candidate rephrasings in case I'm overinterpreting that."

Ariu certainly parsed it as very peeved. Ariu is still under the impression that Boots is an enemy of the Hari Empire and not actually interested in peace or cooperation, though. Ariu is trying not to dwell too much on how the empire will obviously be trying to prevent more people from showing up.

"It was very confrontational in my idiom as well," says Haria, "though as for politeness, it's too culturally bound to be worth aiming for, with you, and I've already perceived you to have been rude by my standards. I could also say that you give the impression of wanting me to believe you agree with something you seem to think I said, but that I have not gotten the impression that you agree with the thing you seem to think I said."

"I thought you said that a lot of people have very powerful magic and this makes them dangerous, and that slavery as presently practiced is a means of addressing that problem, and that it's not the only means of addressing that problem that has ever been tried, and that some alternatives are worse on various axes including some criteria you understand me to care about. Is that correct?"

" - Aha. That is correct. I wouldn't call that a very hard problem, by itself, and thought you meant that addressing the problem of dangerous magic in the hands of fools without hurting them more than necessary was very hard."

"Well, if some of the fools are small children and fools because they are small children doing it without going extinct might be very hard, I don't know very much about how local magic manifests in small children."

"Humans can generally do magic before the age of two. Essi hatch able to do magic. It's possible I give my forebears too little credit but this still doesn't strike me as a hard problem in itself - which is a subjective judgement and not the point. I'm sorry, I misunderstood you."

"I'm glad we were able to clear that up. Where were we again please?"

"My understanding is that we aren’t at war entirely because you think you would lose and not because you think you stand to gain anything other than your own continued life through cooperation. This is even though your stated desires include the well-being of everyone in the empire, which I would imagine would be easier to achieve without fighting them. So I find myself wondering if I've misunderstood your attitude or if perhaps you have misunderstood the structure of the empire."

"I... think you've misunderstood me but it's possible you're just using some concepts more broadly than I expect? It's very likely given that I've been here only about a day that I do not understand the structure of the empire. I don't know if any of the things I don't understand would affect my fundamental attitude here or not, since I don't understand them. I would in general prefer not to fight people? My omnipotence example didn't involve a step where anything I would call 'fighting' would happen."