I can try you now, Promise suggests to Morn.

"Sure thing. But Steel said you have a lot of books on sorcery - mind if I read some of 'em?"

"That's fine - am I leaving the gate open or closed for now?"

Open, Steel lights invisibly, Nobody but us is within five miles of here, right now.

"Okay." Promise leads Morn to her tree and shows him the most introductory sorcery books and asks him to please not mess with the harmonics anywhere closer to her tree than the gate.

"Got it." He reads some books. He takes notes, even.

Promise is likewise reading, except when she's fixing herself lunch.

I could probably turn him invisible now, I was paying attention to him for the familiarity while he was here, but he left before I got around to trying it.

"Go ahead and try to invisible me. But let's talk rebuilding. I mean, about what needs to happen to make this shit not just come up again in twenty years. I think the two biggest things that need to change are checks and balances on the oligarchs' power and ironclad legal guarantees of a few freedoms. The biggest complaints out there are the government curtailing free speech, local administrators seizing others' property at whim, and the excessively harsh crackdown on what were at first peaceful protests. There's also some complaining about the national mandatory civil service, but in my opinion the country needs that one to keep running smoothly. They maintain the roads and waterways and farms. We're relying on your help for this whole scheme, Promise, so... Any opinions or objections?"

"No one else will maintain the roads and waterways and farms? Do people not like those things?"

Promise's invisibility spell snaps into place. "Can't they just... I'm admittedly not familiar with liquid economies, but isn't the point of paying people to do things instead of enslaving them that you don't have to also force them to do what you want? If the state can't afford not to enslave people in order to achieve its goals then there is something wrong with its budget."

"I do think we can up pay and off-days without too much trouble. The national budget is probably screwed up to high hell anyway. There are exemptions from service, if there's a good reason. You can defer your service to later in life if you like. But the idea behind mandatory service is that everyone who has ever benefited from any of the things the civil service does for them, owes the state. If you don't want to pay, you can go live in the wilderness by yourself, they don't forbid emigration. But you pay the state back by working for less than you could have earned otherwise."

"I happen to like living in the wilderness by myself, but I assume it's hard to switch to if you're accustomed to having all the listed things. And aren't a sorcerer. If the conceit is that the citizens owe the state isn't that what the taxation is for?"

"Why do they even bother having a liquid economy if they then refuse to accept your liquid currency as generic debt repayment?"

"I think we're coming from fundamentally different viewpoints here. Would it be better if rich people could buy their way out of civil service and leave the poor to do all the work?"

"Do the poor people desire money more than the rich people do?"

"People vary. But generally, rich people don't care as much about the same amount of money, because they have so much of it."

"So, it seems perfectly reasonable to charge the rich people enough that, using their money, you can pay the poor people enough to be delighted for the opportunity. I assume the work isn't so staggeringly unpleasant that you couldn't find some equilibrium? It doesn't involve being flayed or sorting slightly different colors of sand into separate heaps or anything like that?"

"Punished how and by whom?"

"If you say unkind things about those more powerful than you, they can have you thrown into jail or killed without much consequence to themselves. That absolutely, positively has to go. I'm less upset about other things."

"I am in full agreement there."