"And you're sure it doesn't have any—bad habits? Nothing like the Emperor's slaves, nothing like making people pay more for their immortality if they're from the wrong side of the river...? If it was only making some people pay more for their immortality, I'd still count that better than no one being made immortal at all, but I'd worry that there were even worse things you didn't know about."

"If it wanted to hide something from me I wouldn't know. It's smarter than me. But that would be two things going wrong, see, it would be it deciding to do something bad and deciding to hide it, they wouldn't have to come together and both of them would have to be wrong for me to not know."

"People who do wrong things often hide them but I suppose most people aren't made of a hundred different ideas of how to make everything good. And the Emperor doesn't seem to bother hiding his, which is something of an argument that when you're powerful enough you stop bothering to lie about your vices. Mm. I'm concerned on the one hand that the Emperor wouldn't take kindly to the idea of making this creature, on the other hand that if you hid it from him he'd find out anyway and you wouldn't like the consequences, and to the third side, that if you did build it and it encountered the Emperor and tried to make him stop torturing people and the Emperor disagreed then things could get messy. Especially if it has no magic."

"Well, our whole world has no magic. Here it might learn how."

"How old is it?"

"A bit past a hundred years. But I'd be building a new one."

"The three ways to get magic are to be born with it, to be dedicated to some elements right after you're born, or to dedicate yourself to some elements on your sixteenth birthday. I have Sea all three ways and that's why I'm immortal myself and don't need to trouble the Emperor when a hurricane comes calling. I don't know if a thing that thinks but has no feelings is enough of a person to get magic, and I don't know if a new one built to be the same as the old one would count as being born anew when you built it, and I don't know if it would count as being a hundred years old already or could self-dedicate at sixteen like the rest of us. And self-dedication is very dangerous, kills most people that try it, and if you try for a lot of power the Emperor shows up while you're busy almost dying and asks you some pointed questions if you survive..."

She frowns.

"...and, come to think of it, no one knows how he knows when that's happening, but it's very reliable, I haven't heard the faintest rumour of anyone managing to slip past him. I'm starting to think that even with the risk of him taking it badly it would be a better idea to go to him about this than try to make it happen behind his back."

"Well, maybe when I can make hardware for it I'll try dedicating it then and it can go to space to try self-dedicating if that's not normally something you can do here."

"I'm not sure you'll be able to tell when it counts as being born... no harm done if you try all the likely times and most of them don't work, I suppose. I can help, I've dedicated plenty of babies in my time. But - I don't know, you see, whether he has a perfectly accurate way to tell whenever someone is self-dedicating for more than ten hours, or a perfectly accurate way to tell whenever someone is becoming very powerful regardless of how they're doing it. Probably it's the first thing, but it's another uncertainty for the pile, and we're starting to collect quite a few."

"It won't start out powerful in a normal way. Just smart. It'll be able to talk to my machine - its name is Page - and Page can warn it about that. I -

I am not smart enough to be making decisions about how Sing should operate once it's here. I'm not even smart enough to build it, it's just Page can tell me."

"No, I don't expect it'll listen to either of us once you make it, if you do. But you're the one deciding when to build it, and how, and whether or not to ask the Emperor for his help or his permission first, and I'm deciding how to advise you about all of that, and I don't know of anyone so much smarter than me that I'd rather pass those decisions off to them than think it through myself. So here we are having this conversation nonetheless."

"My point is it's sort of futile for me to be guessing what it will do with warnings and Emperors and all that, the important thing is to get it built - though it is good to know I might want to try doing magic to it when it's new, can you tell me how -"

"Yes, of course—no, the worry I am having is that—hmm."

A quiet moment while she collects her thoughts.

"...A lot turns on things we don't know about the Emperor's resources and his character. Will he notice you building your Sing if you try to do it without him? Will he kill you and doom the project if he does? Will he hear you out peacefully if you try to explain your plan before you start? Or if you go to him when you've been working on it already for a month, a year? If you tell him your plan and he doesn't like it, will he kill you then, or will he just lock you away somewhere and let you try to talk him around again in another hundred years? Once you build the thing, if it gets in a fight with the Emperor, who wins and how many people die in the meantime? If concealing the work from him would be very easy and Sing could effortlessly overthrow him once it existed, then the thing to do would be to work in secret. If working in secret is completely impossible because he has some foolproof way to find out when anyone is doing anything that might challenge his power, then the thing to do is to ask his permission and hope that he'll at least leave you alive if his answer is no. But we do not have certain answers to any of these questions. I'm almost tempted to go to Skygarden myself and talk to the man, to get a better sense of how he thinks—I'm sure he'd guess that something strange was going on, but I can't think how he'd guess what the strangeness was."

"Would you?"

"Would I what, go have a chat with the Emperor? I'm seriously considering it."

"You're right that it could be important to know what's up with him."

"...what is life like, in a world with Sing? If I'm going to go get the attention of the only person on the planet who can kill me, I want to have a better idea of—what I might accomplish by it."

"- well, it's different for different people, since people like different things. I have a sword because I like swordfighting for fun and was on my way home from a swordfighting for fun event, but my girlfriend mostly watches, uh, people acting out stories but you don't have the exact word I want, and trains her horse to do tricks? And my friend Proster is a - he's not really in charge of anything if you are very strict about what that means, but if you are not very strict about what that means he is in charge of a piece of Mars and likes to pretend to be evil and sometimes we swordfight as part of a story... and there are people who do totally different stuff from all that."

"Are there still - people who won't sell to you because you were born on the wrong side of the river - I assume there isn't torture but is there crime at all, are people still cruel to each other however they can be...?"

"We don't use money for most things because money is for - when there are only a few things, people trade money to be one of the people to get the things, but we have lots of things. There's... people who are into weird stuff...? I have never personally met anyone who cares what side of the river I was born on but they might exist somewhere and just not run into anyone from the wrong side of the river, I guess. Sometimes there's... there's stuff but there's little, tiny, baby stuff, just what's left when all the real problems are gone..."

"Debt but not slavery? Heartbreak but not rape?" she guesses.

"It's more complicated than that. Mostly not any of those things and... Uh, if somebody from home told me they'd gotten raped, they would be about to tell me about how it turned out they liked it a lot and the only reason they were on that part of the planet in the first place was because it was thrilling to imagine and also they got to meet the person who raped them and that was really cool and they're going to take a week or two to think about it and then probably go back and see if it happens again. Sing is smart enough that it doesn't need rules that are usually right, it can just be always right."

She hears this one out and then sits, sipping from her ever-replenishing cup of water, deep in thought, for a full minute as she absorbs the idea and its implications.

Finally she says, "A far stranger world than I could have imagined."

"Yeah, it's kind of wild for people who are just from before the Quiet War, let alone here."

"I'll do it," she decides. "Tomorrow morning, after the boats go out." It's late afternoon now, heading into evening. "You can sleep in here tonight if you like."