"Of course."

"What is the most valuable for you personally new thing that has been invented in Ibyabek in the last five years? A new - style of shoe that lasts longer, or a new food preparation, or a book series that came out..."

"I don't know when the things around me were invented, by and large. If my sidearm were a new model I'm not sure they would have mentioned it."

"When it became widely available is fine even if it was invented earlier, I just want to get at, is life in Ibyabek getting better over time."

"I've been bouncing around between various institutional settings, I don't know what things are widely available as opposed to specifically issued by my school or the military."

"I have a theory about what Ibyabek is like and my theory is that nothing has been invented or improved and things are not getting better and people are not better off than they were when your parents were young and will not be better off when your children are old. Does that sound right."

"No! I just don't know how long my shoes will last because I got them less than two years ago and don't know exactly when the precise model of television my school had was developed and have no insight into the advances in - in the presses that print our books!"

He looks at one of the paladins. "What has gotten better here in the last five years."

      " - we're not really looking for a lecture -"

"I am trying very very very hard not to give a lecture."

     "My wife got a new model of spinning wheel that's much faster and smoother. Is that the kind of thing you mean."

"Yes. My brother-in-law is a papermaker and he says there's twice as many papermills as when he started, and they need less repairing, that's the kind of thing I mean. Another brother-in-law dyes things, and tells me every time I see him about how they've imported new dyes, with more staying power. When I was a child the streets of Sothis weren't paved and now they are. There used to be two docks for big ships that need it to be deep, now there are eight of them. You?" he says to another paladin. 

     "I'm a soldier, like Kyeo, I don't know. We've bred better horses, I guess."

"In the system that Kyeo described - it's like you took a living breathing system where people trade for things they want, and you froze the trades they made one day in a block of ice and then you force them to make those precise trades every day for the rest of forever. With tweaks where the people in charge specifically thought of an improvement, but you can't possibly - a god couldn't see all the improvements, because they're bits of paper mill machinery that don't break as often and dyes that stay better and get people to buy your textiles not your neighbors's and the docks wouldn't do anything without the ships and the spinning wheels don't look any better unless you spin for twelve hours a day and the horses don't seem different unless you ride them and the person who knows what's any better is the person using them. Kyeo does not know any things about how anything is improved because the improving is not being done by the people who would benefit from it and there's so little of it that the people who'd benefit from it can't name any of it. It is a parody of a society, and it cannot get better, because no one is allowed to make it better, because they are all slaves."

"We don't have slavery. I regret that I do not know any paper-makers and cannot answer your question more to your satisfaction."

"You just have people forced to work twenty days out of twenty on a task they did not choose for no compensation with the threat of being dragged off for remedial education if they slack. Which is slavery. Every person in your entire society is enslaved."

"I suppose you let your soldiers desert under fire if they decide this isn't worth the money and your firefighters extort the coughing occupants of burning houses for money before they put them out and if nobody cares to deliver mail to remote farms for an amount of money the farmers can scrape together they'll be cut off from the world and if someone doesn't like any of the jobs that happen to be available they will swear to you that they're so glad to starve instead of going back to school!"

"When people don't like any of the jobs available to them, they do the one they dislike the least. If you randomly picked a job for them and forced them to do that job you would get in trouble because enslaving people is illegal. If they can't find any work there are soup kitchens that will try to feed them anyway. Firefighting is through the church and has a flat fee everywhere in the world that I've heard of. It is...true that if poor farmers can't afford to get the mail delivered very often then they don't get the mail delivered very often? I've never met one who wanted to be a slave about it."

"Ibyabekan farmers aren't slaves, they're just farmers! They farm! And they get what everyone does, because we're all Ibyabek's people!"

"In Osirion there are two kinds of farmers. There are free farmers, who farm and sell the products of their farm and get money they use to buy things they need, and they can farm more or less acreage as they see fit - more acreage is more work but means more pay - and they can choose which crops they want to farm, considering how well they'll grow and how we'll they'll weather a drought year if there is one.

And there are serfs, who do not own the land they farm, and the products of their labor are confiscated at the end of the year, and they don't gain much from having grown more, and as a result they grow far, far less food, we've studied it, because when you're a slave you just don't pour your whole heart and soul into growing as much food as possible, you just don't -"

"We have lots of things you don't have. Maybe we have better people."

"The things you were confused about," he says to the paladins. "The lack of days off?"

       "That was one of them, yes. They don't - have holy days - but -"

"But people highly value time off and given the ability to set their own schedule they will take vacations and take weekends and have their cousin cover their shop sometimes, even in places where they don't worship the gods or in Osirion where Abadar does not prefer us to celebrate his holy days by not working. They're - rich, in the sense that they can produce lots of things. They're desperately poor in the sense that they have very few of the things people value. They have lots of stuff but no wealth..."

        "Not much - decoration," says one of the paladins, slowly. "The homes all looked kind of -"

"No wealth. Nothing they actually want, just whatever something that isn't even a god assigned them."

"I don't think it's an improvement to do what magic aliens tell you to do! Iomedae at least apparently used to be a normal person but most of them did not."

"- most people absolutely don't do whatever a god tells them to do, if you've just met paladins you are getting a very unusual sample of people. Most people do what they want to do, what makes their lives and their family's lives and their friend's lives and their city and their country more a place they want to live."

"Until they can't work and they starve. Ibyabek didn't - spontaneously arise out of hunter-gatherers, we had a visionary leader who saw what it was doing to his people to live like that, and now we live differently."

"People.... don't usually starve when they can't work anymore. ...also - you don't, actually, look very well fed."

        "None of them did," says one of the paladins, quietly. 

"Ibyabek's a hot planet. It doesn't behoove anyone to carry a lot of insulation."

"I'm from Osirion."

"Is Osirion close enough to the sun for it to look twice as big as this one does from here?"

"I don't...think that's what determines temperature, though I haven't studied the movements of the planets. Is the food better or worse here in Lastwall?"

"It's got more variety but people have been domesticating crops to grow on this planet for thousands of years, rather than about a century."