Derrin listens, processing as best he can, as it goes.  It seems like mostly confirmation.  "It is not meaningful to say of Earth that it as a whole has made any choices" seems more scathing to him than anything Thellim has yet said.  Presumably they have, in a sense, made the choice not to set their whole planet's land areas ablaze; but a charitable interpretation of Isabella's statement would be that this is only because people have individually not wanted to set those fires, not because coordinated Earth made a decision apart from those individual choices.

Then one point jumps out at him.  "You are yourself a precognitive psion?"  In retrospect Derrin should have prioritized asking about this point much earlier, but he is smart, not wide; he is juggling a very large number of knives.  "Is this conversation, itself, one that you have selected from among many possibilities?"

Shit.  But Helorm doesn't interrupt, even if a thousand copies of her are potentially running and truly-dying on an otherworldly metaphysically-strange computer right now; this is very much a Let The Keeper Handle It conversation.

[Thellim asked me not to precog this conversation, which I, uh, somewhat reluctantly deferred to her on.]

"Thank you and her.  She estimated correctly what might greatly horrify us, for multiple reasons, without other long conversations first."

"That gratitude brings up another topic; what do you hope to gain, either for yourself, or for Earth?"

[For me, steering power, and for Earth, uh - gains from trade, and any of your assorted insights you can non-destructively transmit, with the caution that I believe you may have historically become acclimated to a destructive form of transmission; Thellim doesn't know enough history to contradict the supposition.]

"Nor yet do I know what horrors may have occurred in our past, though the traces laid down in human nature by natural selection speak of it not being good.  I do hope Thellim mentioned that we are not currently in the habit of taking by violence rather than trade."

[I believe her that you aren't currently in that habit but I don't think you've had the means or the motive in a while.]

Derrin is slightly confused by this, but manages a plausible decoding:  Dath ilani may individually have such means or motive, but their entire civilization has never before been faced with the temptation of a whole other parallel-planet, full of people that the smartest dath ilani (if not average dath ilani) could perhaps outwit, and without the power of organized resistance.

"Would you, Isabella, take all that we have in dath ilan, if the power to do that lay within your capability alone, and we could not oppose you?  And if not, why not?"

[No, because I'm a nice person, and also I am not especially horrified by anything I believe you are ongoingly doing as opposed to my suspicions about your history. To be clear, I expect that your motive would be in a sense humanitarian, I just think based on Thellim's example you need a lot more orienting to the situation before you try to take humanitarian actions more complicated than selling us customized chairs. Which, to be clear, you can't do now, but I can go forward with publicizing dath ilan's existence and get some mages on it if that seems like a good idea.]

The main reason dath ilan would try to take Earth by force is if it looks like Earth is about to erupt an unstoppable horror that expands at lightspeed, or faster given the fundamental possibility of mages and psions, consuming all surrounding galaxies in both its own dimension and in every other resource-bearing dimension Earth can causally contact, including dath ilan, and any other worlds that can be contacted by psions, mages, and whatever psions and mages turn into after they get eaten.

Thellim either has not realized this (75%) or has not mentioned it to Isabella (25%).

[Do you know whether the powers of mages and psions can transmit causality faster-than-light, especially without prior slower-than-light transmission of a receiver?]

[My telepathy doesn't have lightspeed lag but it needs a person to talk to, if that's what you mean.]

"I meant to ask more broadly than your own personal telepathy.  Have any mages opened two-way portals to the poles of the Sun-closest planet for colonization, for example, especially if they did not need to send another mage by ordinary rocket to that planet first.  Or just tapped a finger on your Moon."

[Nobody has that yet. There are planetside teleporters, and some mages are working on getting out of the gravity well but haven't cracked it yet.]

"Do you know whether the planetside teleportations or other such phenomena can occur, in round trip, faster than lightspeed limitations permit?"  He wants to think that surely their curious ones have investigated that, but if the whole planet is like a car on autopilot with no autopilot...

[I think it's hard to get very clear results on that because the mages in question still have human reaction times but there are scientists interested in the question.]

"Please relay this question to Thellim: superluminality y/n probability distribution?"

Isabella faithfully plays eidetic-telephone.

Thellim isn't sure why this question is arising in the middle of the question about whether or not dath ilan is going to conquer Earth, but she has obviously taken a prior interest in that subject.

There's a mage supposedly training himself now, to settle FTL questions once and for all.  But in terms of experiments that could be done with mages and psions that happen to already exist... there's been improvised experiments with remote-viewing clocks on the other side of the planet.  There's been improvised experiments with an ancient highly-practiced weather-mage who can stir a wind on the other side of the world.  All such experiments have "failed to produce statistically significant evidence" of a 20-millisecond difference depending on whether the target is next door, or on the opposite side of the Earth.

Earth is sufficiently confused about how evidence works that Earth scientists have not dared to try to say to reporters that this looks like magic is FTL.  Thellim has gotten ahold of the raw data and treated it with sane numerical procedures, and derived strong-enough likelihood ratios against 20-millisecond delays; real epistemology is quite capable of saying that an effect size has been ruled out, not just that somebody failed to produce statistically significant evidence for any effect size.

[FTL information reception: 0.99y/0.01n
FTL causal transmission: 0.98y/0.02n
FTL counterfactual information reception: ~1y/~0n, reminder: precognition is a thing]

Thellim doesn't transmit back the reasons.  If the Keeper wanted to reconsider her reasons and not just the final summary probabilities, he'd have asked her for her reasons.  It feels so nice to talk again with somebody who knows what it even means to trust her sometimes.

Not the answer he'd have guessed.  But all right, if the physics of the larger universe that embeds Earth and dath ilan permits superluminal travel, the Great Silence is vastly exacerbated as a question thereby.  Combine that with something superintelligent probably having passed by Earthsystem and left magical eclipses in its wake.

Then if Earth has not already been invaded and consumed, externally originating invasions and consumptions are perhaps also prohibited by whatever passed, or by something above it.

This moderately reduces the chance that Earth is going to erupt with an unstoppable horror that eats dath ilan.  It is still something that the smart dath ilani will be very concerned about, given their current total lack of comprehension of many, many Additional Questions.  It is plausibly something that dath ilan would invade Earth over.  It is not necessarily something that dath ilan will invade Earth over, given that there is a chance dath ilan will not be annihilated.

"Forgive me the sudden line of inquiry.  My own first thought was that dath ilan is - most likely to behave in a manner that might be termed impolite and abrupt - if it seems like your world is about to completely annihilate our own, even inadvertently.  However, if FTL is possible, it is moderately less likely that you can accidentally do this to us, because then aliens would have been more likely to have done it to you already.  You speak of humanitarian interventions by dath ilan; I take it that Thellim has already forecast cases in which she thinks we might wish to so act?"

[She thinks given the opportunity you might want to take refugees, which seems of the possibilities relatively easy to do decently, if enough people-moving capacity turns up as eclipsed learn more.]

"Refugees... from what?"

[Natural and eclipse disasters, various human conflict and the fallout thereof.]

Thellim has been listening to some of this on relay.  She requests a transmission-relay, of language-less telepathy rather than Baseline syllables so that Isabella also hears this time.  [Keeper, Earth has a tremendous number of people who I would read as traumatized, tired, or just plain unhappy with Earth.  When and if we have teleportation scaled up sufficiently, I believe we should have by then prepared to receive the entire Earth population as refugees; if some choose to stay, that will provide safety margin.  Isabella will be shocked if teleportation at that scale happens in three years and surprised if it is less than ten.]

"A logistical challenge to be sure, and that would only be the beginning of the challenge.  But not obviously an unsolvable challenge, at least on our end.  Isabella, you spoke of desiring 'steering power', for yourself, in this.  Say more of that, if you would?"

[I think that - naively the civilizations meeting could go very badly, or well according to only one set of values, though I'm not actually sure who'd come out better for it, and I don't want that, I want - full meetings of the full complexity of what's going on on both planets, and there are probably lots of things we can just hand over straight across like access to the custom chair store aforementioned, but I do not want you, say, accumulating a lot of power and then wrecking our study of history, or committing cultural genocide, or systematically disenfranchising people for believing in ghosts, or anything.]