"Sure, but figuring out how to use all the appliances competently for that and finding familiar ingredients for recipes we know seems like it'd be a job. Instead I can passively wonder if Radchaai consider cheese indecent or if it's a coincidence that we haven't gotten any."

"There are places where people have various objections to cheese but it's not a common stance."

"Oh, good. We like cheese."

"Never gonna have Mt Tam again, I assume, but oh well."

"You could order lots of cheeses and see if any match the one you remember."

"Yeah, you know what, a cheese tasting sounds fun, I'm gonna have a cheese tasting for lunch tomorrow."

Giggle.

The email comes a few hours later:

Isabella, 

Your tablet invited me to reach out to you - I typically don't, as people find it more stressful than it's worth. I should have mentioned that, as the Radch is much larger than most of our neighbors, the places that allow unrestricted immigration from here are almost necessarily ones that appeal only to a very small fraction of our population. I hope some of the more selective ones are more appealing; it's always good to have backup plans. 

Magic and mysteries aside we are not in the habit of arresting children for innocent mistakes, or for less-innocent ones as long as they don't become a pattern. I'm sure you've gathered that magic and mysteries further incline us in this direction. Be conscientious by comparison to the baseline for unsupervised teenagers with a large expense account in a new place, but please don't make yourselves miserable. You're not going to be arrested. 

On a related note - while I think I mostly scare you for practical reasons that are unlikely to change (not impossible! we could get you lots of clones living in twelve different independent polities and that I suspect would do it) it seems like at least some of the questions you have are ones I can just answer, and some reassurances you'd find useful might be ones I could just offer. If you can imagine those conversations being productive I'd like to have them. I promise they won't leave you worse-off.

- Anaander

She mimics the style of opening and closing; either it's appropriate or it'll be translated into something that is.

Anaander,

- Isabella

(She asks the tablet what the age of majority is.)

I have an open appointment tomorrow at 14.

The tablet informs her it is 17.

We can come in then.

They get the same Anaander as last time, or at least an identical-looking one (from the news, some are older or younger). "Welcome back!"

"Hi! All your neighbors seem to think you might conquer them if you ever feel like it."

"Well, yes. Even if they've privately decided they don't expect that they don't have much to gain by advertising their not-expecting-it. And the Radch expanded for a long time."

"Fifteen years ago isn't very long ago on the scales you operate on."

"It's really not. Of course, they don't just have my word to go on, we've ceased building warships and we've started repurposing existing ones and there aren't military appointments being made towards the next expansion."

"I don't know how long it takes to build a warship but if making appointments and un-repurposing ships doesn't take all that long that's not much of a guarantee."

"I agree."

"Tablet said official word was you stopped to focus on domestic building?"

"I think that's the best way to improve our citizens' lives at this point."

"What I don't know is why you did so much annexation before."

"Two reasons. The first is that no one else is careful enough and their civilizations keep destroying themselves and I could do better. The second is that at the center of the Radch there is a shell built around a star. No light escapes it. No outsiders can enter it. Protecting what's in it is very important to me. It was necessary to have the industrial capacity, and the command of its physical surroundings, to protect it against anything that might threaten it."

Isabella doesn't have an immediate reply to that.

"Neither of those things changed recently, exactly, but - I am slow to change my mind on human timescales and considerations that might more wisely have caught up with me long ago became compelling a century ago, and straightforward to act on a few decades ago."

"At about what rate do other civilizations destroy themselves?"