"Oh, that's not a secret, unless it's a problem for your people that I can. Though my usual methods wouldn't work on your people if you don't have souls, so it maybe shouldn't be a problem? In my world I've placed advertisements offering the service, I can do it below the usual market rate."

Arithnu is out of his chair and is kneeling in a position to offer his blade.

"The reversal of such things… even if it cannot be done for my people, to do it at all… if you speak the truth, you have my aid and service."

"Arithnu, I am honored by your offer, but I must give you several caveats. The soul rapidly accumulates damage when dead, and it is extremely inadvisable for me to bring back anyone who has been dead longer than a week. Furthermore, return from death is itself damaging to the soul, and in many cases where the the dead person has already experienced significant soul decay, and they are in the domain of the deities who like helping people, it is better to leave them in such a place. Some of those caveats can be bypassed by … obscure technologies which are in violation of treaties, which is perhaps a good sign if we are considering showing up in my world as a major power that can demand more favorable treaties. Both the damage which a soul experiences on death and the damage which a soul experiences on return from death are referred to as 'Charon's tax'."

"So, you are saying that where you come from is a place where 'death' is not the end, where there is an afterlife, except for the acts of Charon? Do I understand correctly? It is not that it turned out that the cells' connections could not be preserved by any known technology, despite all our hopes, it is that you have the technology but by treaty and curse and trickery, it is sabotaged?"

"Well, uh, most people are still in afterlives for limited durations? But yes, that's my current understanding of the situation. There's a reason I consider Charon the biggest problem. The 'curse' claim is controversial, I've seen evidence of this but I'm not able to prove it."

"Captain… you know that I have oaths that come before you. I did not expect this one to be relevant, but… in the words of your own people…"

Arithnu solemnly intones:
"Knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when every fighter brags
He fights on Death, for lives; not men, for flags."

"That is from one of your own poets. One who died young, at war. A desperate hope, a call, that others would take up such a fight. I do not understand your human honor, but does it not call out? If it does not, does no part of you call out? Will you not answer such a plea?"

"Hold on. So you don't have a death god, or any leadership that was ever signatory to such treaties or allied with someone who was. My usual attitude to treaties like this is that if Axis wants to have an opinion, Axis should be capable of responding to emergency contact attempts, which they weren't. Sometimes, interdisciplinary studies are remarkably effective. Tell me more about the process of death, for your people? Also, that reminds me, I want causes-of-death statistics and statistics and reports about destruction of cities. There's a different 'antimeme' I should check for but it's not one of the ones I'm at all worried about talking about."

"No. We have no major faction that is actually in favor of death, or genocide, or war, or famine, or disease for their own sake. Sometimes people… make excuses, for why such a thing would be good for their enemies, or even why such things are blessings in disguise…"

Leonarda glances at Art.

"…but that is typically an act of either an unusually bad individual or a response to bad circumstances. Your sound more like… someone took the flaws that people sometimes reach, and turned them into… actual people, who are the very worst traits made manifest."

"My people, at least, have no grand tradition of excusing death itself. We know when to fight. But not even the humans, at least as far as we have manged to pry out from them, have had major powers so… unambiguously desiring such things without at least some blatant flaw to explain their fall into such evil. When we learned that our attempts to preserve and revive the dead would not work, it was not merely a few mocked individuals, our entire planet wept for days."

"As far as I know, we don't have 'souls', unless you mean our brains. It doesn't make sense for us to. We can observe brain damage, simple extrapolation suggests that the complete destruction of the brain, or even a fair bit less than that actually, would be the destruction of you. Well. Us, at least. Your dictionary suggests you have brains. How does that work?"

"Brains and souls are different, yes. The brain is a marvelous vital organ. Animals and people who reproduce just … grow brains, for their children! The brain serves as the focus of the ritual for giving the child a soul, and anchors it. So, you know how— Actually, you maybe don't know how there are expensive tools for making people better at some kinds of thinking. But anyway. A brain makes a soul better at thinking for all the kinds of thinking I have words for! And it lets the soul easily operate the body, too. Do you know how hard it would be to operate a body if you didn't have good intuitions for it? The brain sends the signals, and does lots of signal processing for that, and collects input from sense organs and interprets it. The eye can only focus on a small area at a time, but people tend to see large areas of their vision in crisp resolution. That's because of their brains! I could draw you some neuroanatomy diagrams if you like and we could compare?"

"Either such a diagram will match or it won't, and honestly I don't know how to respond to either of those possibilities. So… based on this, and the other stuff we read, it sounds like your souls and brains together act rather like our brains alone. So… that at least sort of makes sense. You have access to other resources, and some of them are involved in your ability to think. I suppose we could envy your durability, a mere rock to the head can destroy everything we are in an instant, but at least… I can sort of wrap my head around the concept. It doesn't sound completely like superstitious nonsense, just… a different way of building a person, using different resources. The mercurials' homeworld has a different material composition, their skulls are more brittle than ours, you have access to… that special substance that our translator is translating as 'life energy' and so you get something… much more durable. Unless I've misunderstood? And… should I just be saying that and letting the translator translate it, or is that translation wrong?"

"You could translate it as 'life energy', but the technical term for it is different. So. You're construct-makers, you should have advanced math, right? Right, you used that sequence that's a generalization of the cicada numbers at first, the one that goes '1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19…'. So you probably know how you can generalize from the counting numbers to what are called 'negative numbers', numbers representing quantities that are less than the absence of something. So then if you want to distinguish the numbers representing quantities that are greater than the absence of something from the negative numbers–"

"–we are familiar with a lot of mathematics, yes, including positive and negative numbers. And including one in that sequence is… actually quite troublesome as you advance further. We saw the various translations, we weren't sure if it was electrical or life related but… 'positive energy', then?"

"'Positive energy', yes. It has nothing to do with lightning, that I know of?"

Leonarda nods.

"And the rest?"

"Well, it does sound like our soul-brain combinations form a more durable store of personal identity than your brains do, but also … nobody knows all the steps by which souls are made and I am increasingly suspecting that Charon has tampered with the process. The people in the area where souls are produced don't let other people inspect it. If the components that make you you are entirely produced in a process you can observe, that has its own advantages."

"Also the ability for people to exist who need neither Positive nor Negative Energy is … unprecedented. There's only one known case of people running entirely on Negative Energy, and they're rather strange and hostile. I suspect your brains are much more complex than ours. It may suggest interesting medical avenues: I know a spell for preserving the body that preserves organs including the brain, but it only lasts eight days and I can only do it so many times per day. And it's easier for me to repair organs than souls, though my usual methods involve the use of Positive Energy, which you don't have, so we should maybe test them. On plants first and then animals and only then people, unless there's an emergency and you want me to try weird stuff because someone is badly wounded."

"If you are confident that it will not harm you, we could give you plant samples. My primary concern was that some planets have life that has developed far less defensive capability, such that they are prone to being digested by even cells that are typically incapable of meaningful aggression against lifeforms from their own world."

"I have spells for destroying unwanted microscopic other life forms inside people's bodies. I think they would work, or if they didn't I could figure something else. Your lifeforms sound alarmingly defenseless, from my perspective? Also I don't know what they would eat if they attacked me."

"All right."

Leonarda taps her tablet.

"Arete? Get Griffith some plant samples, maybe keep some other samples ready. Whatever they ask for, within reason."

Arete comes over.

"What would you like?"

"It doesn't matter much yet? Something where it's not a problem if I injure it, I'd want to injure it for tests. And that you don't object much if it gets killed, that might happen. Whatever's convenient works. Unless you have really durable plants that can't be scratched with normal amounts of sharp things, I don't want to bother with exotic methods."

Arete brings over beansprouts.

"Okay. Before I start active testing, I actually want to mention another ability of mine. I can see souls, positive energy, and negative energy. The fact that I can do this with lots of details, quickly, as many times as I want is a secret. The fact that I can perceive the mere presence or absence of souls is not. And these plants do not have the tiny soul-like positive energy structures that plants I am used to have. They actually don't look alive at all."