"I can explain what the actual problem is if you want, I know more about it than any published material you could name, but for most purposes 'just assume it's unbearable torture' will serve you well as a rule."

"Oh? What is it?"

"It sort of... fills your entire mind with a sense of the person who is touching your soul and what you feel about them. Except that 'fills your entire mind' is an understatement, it takes up more than the amount of mind you normally have. And the fact that it's so terrifying and overwhelming to begin with means that usually most of that space is filled with pain and fear."

"That is useful to know."

"Happy to help. Let's see, what else... how would you feel about providing Nuime with some Allspeak installations? Oh, and my alt and I have made some minor theoretical advances in magical engineering that you might not find redundant, who should I tell about those?"

"I'm sure we can get you someone to come by with an Allspeak wand. We typically call forks that and leave 'alt' for more generic situations. How communicable-in-writing are the advances?"

"I'm his fork but he's not mine," he says. "I could have them written up."

"If you do that we can just dump them into the network to whom it may concern."

"All right, I'll take care of it. Ideally I'd like to go home with the means to set up the Internet for Nuime, Independence, and Dawn if they want it. I think I can manage that mostly by myself, given a crystal ball and a while to read about it; but I probably shouldn't personally summon a demon to conjure the relevant materials because they might get curious about my soul, so I'd need some help with that part. And a few hours in front of a crystal ball. Are those things available?"

"A world's worth of internet is also an inherently irregular order for a demon to receive even if you copy the Revelation tech tree."

"I can divide the order up between multiple demons. And come up with plausible justifications for all of them, given another few hours in front of a crystal ball. But at that point it's more of an inconvenience for you to put it through for me; I welcome alternate suggestions."

"Cam could do it, or possibly Epic, or you could trade for it the long way with someone - for Nuime, anyway."

"Trade with who? I'm a little unclear on the multiversal economic and political situation."

"Maybe Tide - that being the friendly Yeerk polity to whom the baby daeva were remanded - they're friendly but not quite fully in on the peal gift economy arrangement. There are a few Elendil members similarly situated too."

"All right. Well, if Cam or Epic would find it worthwhile to send me home with three planets' worth of internet, I'll go for that, and if not, you can have some people whose time is less valuable summon a bunch of demons or I can suggest to Esarkan that he trade with Tide."

"The last option might set precedent you find useful, it occurs to me. Trade relations are stabilizing and don't require nearly the level of personal trust that pealing per se does."

"What do you mean by 'pealing per se' in this context?"

"Well, the term is derived from a pun on the name regularity of my template but has in the absence of comparable puns been expanded to include 'coming to the attention of the network while being a relevantly-similar-enough alt of a person already trusted thereby'."

"I see what you mean. Yeah. Well, then, regardless of how the Internet question comes out, I'll suggest to Esarkan that he trade with Tide."

She sends a network message then - "Cam suggests that you can save him more than enough time to compensate if you obviate some work in forensic demonology, which was probably intended as a flippant remark but would in fact pan out if you can accomplish that."

"What sort of work in forensic demonology might I obviate?"

"He feels some need to keep up on the activities of Dawn and Independence."

"Elaneth-imire can produce an account of what's going on in Dawn to pretty arbitrary levels of completeness, and he will if Tivarante clears it. I can make the suggestion to Midnight but I don't know if he'll go for it."

"The challenge here is providing an account which achieves the same or a better standard of verifiable accuracy."

"Elaneth-imire almost certainly knows more about the state of Dawn than you can get from even very clever conjuration. I suppose it's an open question whether you'll accept his standards of evidence, but the evidence available to him includes a soul power that lets him see everything happening on the entire surface of the planet at once whenever he likes."