Cam is not super impressed but he just sighs again rather than thinking of something to write.

"Anything else I can help you with?"

I don't have anything else on the agenda right now unless you needed to be alerted that one of your brothers is selling his possessions to learn various alphabets for some reason.

"Nothing nefarious. He just really really likes languages."

I noticed. I didn't think it was nefarious, just unsustainable.

"Then he will learn a lesson about the hazards of passion, maybe. - I arranged to buy his favorites in case he regrets it later."

That's cute. Cam's tail swishes.

"Just wait until you meet my father, he'll be even worse."

He's on his way, right?

"Yes, and he'll be very distressed to have missed so much. And you can bribe him to override me on court things, though please don't do it too wantonly, I really am trying."

How wantonly is too?

" - there's a book. It's called 'how they could have lived' and it looks at two thousand courts that fell, over the last hundred winters."

And who needs a plate of sushi when I read it?

"A person at another court, which is why I didn't recommend it sooner, but you can get someone to read it to you - or I'd be happy to, if for some reason they can't."

It's weird that works. Is there any risk it'll stop, perhaps in response to my not having to propagate payment to the author at all in order to get a copy in the first place?

"The debt system doesn't usually change how it functions, but I agree it doesn't make a lot of sense. I actually don't know whether it'll charge the person who reads to you, but if it does we can go pay it back."

What I'd be worried about would be debt kicking back to the author, who we don't have eyes on if they're in another court.

"It seems plausible it'll decide the reader is indebted to the writer; I'm pretty confident it won't decide the listener is."

I lack this intuition but you're the expert trying to be ultra-conservative so perhaps you have a good reason to think so.

"I wish we had a good way to give you an intuition for debt. My brother was talking about having a computer do it but I don't think that'll work. In a million years we'd probably work out something with crystals but I think it might take a while."

Computers can do a lot of things but I don't think sensing debt is one of them.

"Debt uses information that's not otherwise accessible, like whether a statement's a lie or how much someone cares about the answer to a question. There couldn't really be something programmable to estimate debt using only visual and auditory information. But there are crystals used for debt manipulation and I am imagining you could design one that changes its opacity to represent a debt-relationship, something like that."

Ooh, that could work. And for convenience a computer could monitor it for me.

"That'd make it significantly more useful, especially since I think you might need one pair of crystals for each pair of people."

How big are these things?