Jaume nods.

"But in general I have no idea what the best thing to do about slavery would have been. Government has always seemed impossible to me. I listened once to a talk by a man who had managed the patent office in Osirion for sixty years. A sincere Abadaran, who had tried very hard to set Osirion's patent laws to encourage innovation. I asked him what was the best thing that had come out of the office's policies, in those sixty years, and he told me -

- originally patents were public with enough details to reproduce the technique. No one in Osirion could copy them, not legally, but someone could go somewhere else and copy it, so if you had a really secret technique you might prefer not to apply for a patent. Obviously people with secret techniques complained about this and they spent a couple of years arguing about how they wanted to adjust the laws, and ended up going with a more limited kind of patent you can get if you keep your technique secret.

But in the years before they changed the law a silversmith from Taldor got on the wrong end of some political dispute in Taldor and came to Osirion and started a company, and didn't apply for a patent as the secrecy matter hadn't been settled yet, and his apprentice ended up departing with all his trade secrets and starting a competitor which does a lot of work the guilds don't allow elsewhere, and then some of his apprentices did the same thing, and now Osirion has an enormously successful silversmithing industry. Now, even without patents, there are agreements the Taldane expatriate could have gotten that would have prevented this, but he was confused and didn't realize he'd need them. 

I find this very upsetting, in a sense. Everybody involved was diligently trying to do things that made sense, and in fact the thing that was most important was none of them. And I still don't really know what the takeaway is. Should you have patent law? Should you not have patent law? Should you have secret patents or transparent patents? Should you hope that your laws are confusing? Should we compensate the Taldane expatriate? I think the convention is probably enormously important but it's a rare circumstance where I even have a guess about in which direction."

"It is a confusing enterprise. I'm not sure what the Queen intended to accomplish by it. Under most circumstances I believe myself to be operating by principles simple enough that they can steer me regardless, but..."

"It is very hard to have principles simple enough to steer by and also applicable to the kinds of matters that go before the Convention. I really dislike it. Hopefully it will be concluded soon. I have told the Inquisitor I'm leaving when clam season starts even if it's still going."

"Clam season?"

"Pedraza's near a clam field. Every summer for about a month they burst out of the fields and swarm the docks and the city, eating people, and attack boats with the same purpose. I hadn't heard of it when I lived in Osirion but apparently it's a terrible problem through the whole Longmarch. I've got to get home and fight an enormous number of man-eating clams and I can't say I'm not looking forward to it."

"Oh, the gigas clams, I thought you meant the small kind people eat. Yes, they are troublesome."

"It's just so much more straightforward than politics! I have never once shown up at their house to eat them, and when they show up at mine I can improve matters by stabbing them!"

"I don't recommend trying to eat a gigas clam, I don't think one remove is enough to eliminate the risk of turning into a ghoul."

"Good to keep in mind. But I mostly mean, if we were caught in a cycle of mutual raiding with the gigas clam civilization then I'd have to figure out if there was anything to be done about it. But as it stands we leave them alone and they try to eat us so there's no politics anywhere to be found."

"I hope the clam season goes as well as can be expected.

"You have given me a fair bit to think about but if there is anything else not related to slavery that might be responsible for my present alignment that you can think of I would like to hear about it."

"A lot of Chelish men treat women appallingly and possibly in a way that adds up to Evil over enough of it."

"I don't think that's it in my case though I suppose if it's something subtler than whoring, which I am not given to, I might not think of it. - I suppose I could be about to dig myself more of a hole in that fashion, I bought some debt and it was suggested to me one of the debtor families might wish to extinguish theirs by offering a young lady as a wife and I have sent for her, paying her travel expenses in both directions regardless of the outcome, to see how we get along, but she is not here yet."

"That seems potentially entirely fine but I am worried that the ambient damage that Hell has done to everyone's expectations of each other could still damage it. Paying her travel expenses in both directions regardless of the outcome seems like probably a good start on that. What would getting along well look like, to you?"

"Well, most people do not like me and I would find that wearing in a wife."

"That makes sense. Why do you suppose most people don't like you?"

"I'm not sure. ...The story my sister tells whenever she is trying to summarize me as a person to someone else is that once she tried to play poker with me and her husband and upon realizing that I was supposed to actively misinform the other players I threw my cards in my brother-in-law's face. I was nineteen at the time, and I'm not sure what exactly this illustrates but she seems to find it illustrative."

Not spectacularly good manners? He has had enough exposure to what Chelish people consider a disqualifying temper to be fairly sure it's not that. "I think it is a good thing to have a wife whose life you are aspiring to make better as she makes yours better, and to protect especially where she takes on great costs for you, like bearing you sons. I think a lot of Chelish people are doing each other Evil in this department but have no particular discouragement for you."

"Mm. Are there other things I might be missing?"

"Probably, but I do not have a good lead on guessing what they might be. Are there...things that you want other people to have, for their own sakes, in a way that feels motivating? I was poor as a child and feel strongly about the plight of poor children in the cities; my wife wants fatherless girls to find good marriages."

"I... well, I don't want people to have to become Asmodean priests but that does not seem to be a going concern any more. I suppose more expansively I do not want people to be - coerced into situations where they become incapable of adhering to any principles they would have liked to retain under better conditions? This was never a particularly achievable desire in the past and I am not sure how it could be implemented now, though there is probably more scope for it."

"I don't know a lot about how one could pursue that desire. ....you could try to get conscientious objection to conscription allowed?"

"I would like that, come to think. I'm not on the committee on the army but I could perhaps sit in or speak to its members. I'd want to see how it works elsewhere, if it does..."

"Osirion doesn't have it, though we also don't start wars. Lastwall has it but I don't know any details. I think Andoran has been experimenting with, uh, conscientious objection to many laws, to less success, but maybe they'd still have thoughts about where it does work."

"The Reclamation paladins probably know something about Lastwall's arrangement. I don't know anyone to be specifically Andoren but there is probably someone."