"The genies are talking about joining the strike. They can't stop granting wishes but they can interpret them as maliciously as possible."

"That sounds likely to become a disaster." 

"Yeah. If the dwarves go on strike it's whatever, diamonds are going to be a little more expensive, but if genies go on strike-- Well. My advisers are talking Isle."

He thinks about that. 

"I'm not sure that wouldn't also be a disaster, just a longer-term one." 

"How so?"

"Right now, genie wishes are the most reliable magic we have, if we put a bunch of genies on the Isle not only are we losing that resource but also even the genies who aren't on the Isle just — aren't going to be interacting in good faith, and even if they aren't interpreting wishes as maliciously as possible that still seems likely to end badly in the long run." 

"They want to be free and not in their lamps anymore. And... on one hand we really don't want a bunch of all-powerful free agents running around, even if we can use anti-magic fields, and genie wishes are useful. On the other hand, I definitely would not want to live in a lamp forever."

"Yeah," he says, very softly. "I don't know either." 

"And I keep thinking-- what do I know, you know? I'm sixteen. Probably my dad is right."

"I think in general you're better than you give yourself credit for." 

"Of course you think that."

"Doesn't make me wrong!" 

"But-- all the adults are there like 'this is fine, would the nonhumans even know how to interact with people in an economy, fairies and genies are dangerous and we need to control them, it would destroy the diamond industry' and I'm like 'but... keeping people as slaves seems wrong' and they're like 'they're not slaves, slaves are human, they're nonhumans treated with appropriate regulations for nonhumans' and I'm like 'it definitely does seem like slavery to me.'"

"...genies being dangerous is fair but —" and he doesn't know how he was going to finish that sentence, only that he definitely was going to finish it. 

"Any human can torture a mouse to death pretty trivially but if the mice locked us all in solitary confinement cells I think... that would be wrong."

"Yeah." 

He's just. Going to pull Ben closer. 

"All of Asher's great-grandparents were slaves. Two of his grandparents were born slaves but they don't really remember it."

"— I didn't know that," is the only thing he can think of to say. 

"Last time we had an advisory council meeting, when we left he literally punched a wall."

"That does sound like him. 

I don't think he's wrong." 

"About what?"

"About it being something to punch a wall over." 

"He thinks-- if you add together all the nonhumans who aren't animals and who don't live in their own communities, it's maybe a few thousand people, and some of them are very dangerous, and we should negotiate with them to figure out a compromise that keeps them-- in their current position-- so we have goodwill that we can use to convince Morgendammerung to increase its efforts to adopt industrialized agriculture so they stop mass-murdering sapient pigs and cows and chickens-- and, and it all makes me want to throw up--"

He — 

He doesn't know what to say and there is nothing that seems like it will help and he's already holding Ben but he's just. Going to hold him tighter. 

"There are lots and lots of bad things in the world and in five months literally all of them will be my responsibility."