Leonor winces. Tomás says, "It's been covered. I work in bindings. They need to be specific. 'The best we can do' isn't specific. Does he want Revelation's people safe from these monsters or doesn't he?"

"I know he does; I'm sorry that's not coming across very well. He's committed to finding something that keeps you as safe as he can, and he will settle on something that's specific enough for you in the end. What he's doing right now is exploring options - he has to do that, it's an obligation he has if he's going to help you. It doesn't mean he doesn't care; it means he does, enough to find something that keeps you safe and Fharlanghn happy."

"Just because it's against his religion to let Fharlanghn ever experience any discomfort for any reason doesn't make it against ours and he can't stop talking about it like it intrinsically matters to every right-thinking sapient that the furniture angel get to tour Olympus Mons at peak hours if there's any amount of inconvenience that could make it so. That's his bag and it's his job to outline it so I can bind to spec. He needs to tell us specifically what his terrorist's demands -"

"Tomás," says Leonor.

"I'm not a diplomat, that's your job," says Tomás. "He's a fucking terrorist."

"Mm. Do you have any specific questions for him?"

"Have I not made that very clear? I want to know if I can do uninhabited places plus a whitelist, or not, without that reducing to whether he thinks we feel bad enough about doing it."

"All right. I'll talk to him about it. In the meantime I think it'd be a good idea for you to take the rest of the day off from this and come back to it fresh."

"Are you kidding me right now?" Tomás looks at Leonor.

"Why don't you write something up for me about what bindings can and can't do," she says, "and I'll muddle along with that as long as I can. Remember these really aren't pros, this is out of their normal line and who knows if they'd be career types anyway, we have to accommodate that."

"Hmph." He leaves.

Leonor waits till he's out of earshot. "I'm sorry about that."

"It's all right. Has Raafi been doing okay so far?"

"He really did leave very gracefully. I think he and Tomás are never going to get along well but hopefully between us we can smooth it out. I could try borrowing one of the Federated liaisons if not."

She nods. "Hopefully, yes. Has he been clear about what he's looking for and why he's doing things this way?"

"I think I understand, but... I admit I'm not sure I understand, and at any rate I can't write the binding myself."

Kat nods. "So, it sounds like he thinks Fharlanghn is making a lot more in the way of specific demands than he is - he's not, Raafi hasn't heard from him since the conversation where he got Fharlanghn to give him the year's leeway on diplomacy. This is all running on the usual expectations for clerics, which we have to be able to meet without hearing from the gods at all, they simply don't have enough time for that. Those expectations vary from one god to the next, and I don't know what exactly Fharlanghn's are, but usually there's some minimum thing they'll accept, and then we're expected to try to get the best outcome above that according to their values. And that's entirely up to the cleric to work out - we're trusted to do it because our outlooks are so close to our gods'. I think that's where the impression that Raafi expects you to care about the daeva's freedom is coming from, we really have to be in that mindset, ourselves, to do it right. But he doesn't actually expect you to care; some clerics do actually have a lot of trouble with the idea that the topic of their devotion isn't as important to everyone as it is to them, but Raafi's very good about that - I'm a little confused about why that's not coming through clearly here, in fact."

"Mm, I think it's complicated, lots of little framing things that could easily just be cultural stuff it's not really reasonable to expect him to be on top of. Let's see - what I'd expect from someone in Raafi's position who expected nobody else to care at all, which I think we might as well round down to, would have said something besides, ah -" She consults her transcript. "If that's the best we can do. Maybe he would have said, 'if that's the best we can do without increasing the material danger' or 'if there's no other low-hanging fruit' or 'if the technical barriers to a more permissive binding which still maintains everyone's safety are in your expert opinion insurmountable'. Or maybe he would only have said that if he didn't expect us to care and he was a diplomat, I don't know. What really set Tomás off was that Raafi brought back in the safety consideration only right after Tomás suggested that the daeva could visit Oerth, I think that was infelicitous timing. If Raafi didn't expect us to care about the daeva's freedom of movement at all, and were showing that in a way Tomás understood, I think he might have... assumed we were tracking the safety consideration as the only one we really care about, that we were in fact quite desperately trying to hold on to as many safety considerations as possible, and if a new safety consideration came to mind after we brought up travel to Oerth it would have been better if it were somehow Oerth-specific, to do with dragons or what have you, not... general safety of having criminal daeva around mortals."

"Can I see what he actually said about it?"

"Sure." She turns the screen.

"Okay, so what I'm seeing is - the question of how to make it safe for them to be around mortals had already come up, here - and then Tomás said 'can we just skip figuring that out and not let them do it', more or less, and Raafi said 'only if there's more than one place that still lets them go and be around people', and Tomás was like 'how about Oerth for another one', and Raafi was like 'no, if we're letting them run around Oerth we need to figure out how to make them safe, same as here'. Which seems pretty reasonable to me on the face of it - here where he said 'if that's the best we can do I can allow it', that means if you really can't come up with a binding that keeps people safe, you can actually limit them to the one inhabited place, all he has to do is check that thoroughly enough, and if limiting them like that leaves them more places where people will agree to the risk of being around them, he doesn't have to check as thoroughly. But he's not going to treat Oerth as agreeing when we haven't."

"I don't think that's what Tomás was trying to say at all but now I can see how it would have come off that way. Tomas explains later - down here - that as a technical matter it's actually impossible to make a binding so daeva can't possibly hurt anyone if they're allowed to move around freely and talk, and he gives examples of that. We know there are lots of very powerful people on Oerth and that Fharlanghn has operated there for a long time; Tomás wasn't at all polite about explaining his inferences there and he was heavy on the hyperbole, but see this sentence here about going out for a coffee, he's imagining that if the state of things there is and has always been like what he sees Raafi as going for here it would be difficult to impossible to avoid some rate of encountering people who've been exiled from other places for violent crimes. At any rate, my understanding - though I'm not a professional summoning expert like Tomás - is that in fact you can't let a daeva move and talk while also preventing them from many harmful acts that can be perpetrated by moving and talking. Does that mean it's possible to go with Tomás's idea after all, of a whitelist-only situation for inhabited areas?"

"It should be. I do expect him to want to be very sure about it. Maybe the next step should be to have him ask his summoner friend."

"He has a summoner friend? That's great, that should help a lot if he can get confirmation of the technical details from a friendly source."

"I think he mentioned? The demon one. He's thinking about picking summoning up himself, too, but you're right that he's not going to make a career of it."

"- Oh, that wasn't what I meant by the 'career types' remark at all, nothing about professional summoners in particular. Ah, Revelation's a very rich society. A poor society needs practically everyone working on farming just to have enough to eat; an industrial society can have increasingly large numbers of people specializing elsewhere; we just... don't. We don't need anyone to be doing anything for society to hum along. A lot of people, given that, just don't have jobs; everyone you meet with a job in Revelation wanted one. Tomás has a lot of professional pride, pride in himself as the sort of person who chose that, and I was reminding him that you're from a society where the fact that you have something you do with yourself might just mean you had to pick from among your options to put food on the table, even if you do like what you picked."

"-oh. Oh, um. - I'm sorry, I'm not upset, this has... lots of implications, for the other parts of our work. Um. Good ones!" she chuckles. "But not to do with this at all, all right. Clerics are more or less people who have chosen their jobs, by definition, but I could see Raafi happily rambling the back woods for the rest of his life, so you're not that far wrong with him, I suppose."

"Oh, I sort of figured that this might not actually be a good guess with clerics, but it calmed Tomás down right off. What are the implications?"

"Not so much my temple in particular but Lastai's church as a whole does a lot of work with people who are very desperately poor. I'd heard that you don't have poor people here but if you can just... support... as many people as you want? That would be - there aren't even words for it."

"Revelation ended material scarcity," says Leonor. "People are reluctant to summon demons if they don't have to, I'm sure you've noticed, but it would just take one summoner with one demon, if they have a good deal with the demon, to feed a planet. Fairies help a lot too, we were already pretty rich as a species by then and logistics in getting goods around was a big deal, if I remember my history classes."