"So I'm still sort of groggy, and yet, now that it sounds from the rain outside like there isn't going to be an enormous global disaster, I sure do feel weirdly better for what are no doubt totally unrelated and coincidental reasons."

"In dath ilan are people not supposed to have feelings about enormous global disasters?"

"They're definitely supposed to, but I'm an unusually Evil dath ilani so I shouldn't have any feelings like that, clearly."

"Well, you know, I like you Evil but I think Evil people have a preference against enormous global disasters, they're not very profitable and the last one also led to a bunch of civil wars and so on."

"Probably not supposed to cry as much about them, though."

"- I'm joking, I understand that you can classify as Evil and still cry."

"It's not very Chelish, to cry about them, but your being here in Cheliax is, if you hadn't noticed, premised on the suspicion that we are doing Evil wrong and need to learn to do it better, and maybe it will turn out that doing Evil right involves more crying than is strictly conventional. Anyway, it's only me who saw, and I won't report you to your wide-eyed researchers who you want to impress."

"I - there's so much I need to understand about Golarion - and it seems like all I can do, is ask one question after another, and there's probably some order I could ask them to make them more efficient, but I don't know what it is, so all I can do is keep bothering you like this, for which I'm sorry -"

"Would my researchers be particularly unimpressed if they were just told the fact that I cried, even if they didn't remember seeing it?  Cheliax norms call for people to look cheerful while the world is ending, and not to have been heard to have cried when it didn't?  I - won't ask why, if the answer is yes, just - yes or no."

"Uh, if you weren't an alien, yes slightly, since you are an alien, no."

"Right then."  He doesn't ask why, as promised.  Later he'll understand, no doubt.  "It's - I wouldn't want to have a breakdown in public, in dath ilan, either, but it's not their way to hide the fact that it occurred in private.  What people see - reaches them in a way they can't control, they can't stop themselves from also feeling distressed if they see you crying, they can't fully control how it changes their opinion of you either.  But you can be abstract about it if you're told afterwards that it happened, so that makes it okay to tell people about things it wouldn't be okay to show them.  It's not about hiding the truth."

"I think I should still live like that.  So go ahead and tell my researchers what happened."

" - if you say so." Squeeze. "I have thought about whether there's a better order to introduce you to everything about Golarion than you asking questions and I haven't really been able to think of one either, so go ahead and ask lots of questions, I guess."

How do you feel about being rented?

Keltham doesn't ask; for one thing he still needs to query his own sexual-romantic self about it first, and it's not currently active enough for that.

"I don't know if you're the sort of person who ever likes to talk about herself at all - but it occurs to me that - now that our relationship has moved past safe first-date activities like you giving yourself completely to me to do anything I want potentially including killing you - we should maybe do some more serious and heavy stuff, like me asking you about your life history."

- giggle. "Yes, all right, I guess that's the sort of thing people get around to on a second date." And she's got it all Taldor-ized and everything.

"So what's your life history?  In six words or less."

...is that a joke? "...worldwound...wizard....weapons specialist...met Keltham."

"Selfish dath ilani died, met Carissa."

"Now the long version."

She really does like him. 

"I was born in Corentyn. It's a city on the same coast as Ostenso, but pretty far, five hundred miles or so, right where the Inner Sea opens up into the ocean. My father is a merchant; he works out what cargo will be sent in his ships to other cities, and what they'll trade for there, and he sells foreign goods to merchants in Corentyn and sells Chelish goods far away. I have a half-brother who's going to take over the business from him someday. That's how it's normally done; there's a lot of accumulated expertise no one's written down, so you teach your children. Teach your sons, until pretty recently. My mother is a wizard and when she met my father was doing odd wizard work, a step up from laundry - daily cooling spells for people who don't like the summer heat, Comprehend Languages to translate for merchants, that kind of thing. 

When I was young there was a civil war, and that's when the Queen signed her compact with Hell and formed modern Cheliax, though I don't remember much about it, except that the ships were impressed for moving soldiers around and my father was very annoyed about it, and parts of the city where we didn't live got destroyed. My mother kept me home and tried to teach me magic. After the war the church opened up a school for wizards in Corentyn and my mother got a job as a teacher there and I tested in, and did very well, and when I graduated was encouraged to enlist in the Chelish army and go fight at the Worldwound, because it'd be best for my growth as a wizard and paid very generously and was also necessary to prevent the destruction of the world, which even Evil people care about typically. So I enlisted, and I've served six years now, with a year off in between three-year terms. I planned to stay until I hit fourth circle, because I want to be fourth-circle, and I knew in my heart I might actually stay until I hit fifth, because then you can Teleport, and then I was going to open a magic shop in Corentyn and have kids and be rich."

So Carissa already knows herself well enough to know she'll want children.  Well, she's had longer to figure it out than Keltham.  Then again, some people younger than Keltham already seem to know...

...why is he thinking that he doesn't know if he wants children?  He was going to become a billionaire and have lots of children.

It's pretty obvious on reflection that it's because these children will be real.

"I was born in Default, the city you're born in when you're not born anywhere particularly interesting, because your parents don't have any particular reason to be anywhere else and so they might as well live where everybody else lives; it's the largest dath ilani city in the world, and the center of Governance is there but not in the center.  I got the usual education, but with fewer persistent friendships over time with other children, because my parents moved around a lot.  Conventional wisdom is that more persistent friendships are better, in childhood, but my parents basically waved it off because they thought I'd be pretty much all right even if they didn't optimize every single aspect of my childhood as hard as possible.  I agree with them about that, but one still gets the impression that all of their friends were horrified.  In that dath ilani way where you're privately horrified but conceal the overt signs because, first of all, you don't think that exerting more social pressure will help, and second, they can guess perfectly well that you're horrified.  We had a small house-module, maybe something like a tenth or twentieth the size of the villa that got burned down."

"I'm not sure at exactly what point it became clear to them that I was a little different than the other children, but it must have definitely been apparent at the point where I got - one of the elaborate tests that children get, in dath ilan, which aren't just there to measure us, but also to provide the results for the prediction markets that say what will happen in Civilization's future - anyways, I apparently ran across a lightly injured adult who needed me to get help, and I helped him, but I wanted to be paid for helping.  I think that was when my parents decided that they'd made a mistake by assortatively mating with each other to select on the quality of reserving a little more of their life for themselves, and moving a lot if they wanted to do that, even if it meant their child's life was less than perfectly optimal; I was more selfish than either of them, which doesn't always happen, in a heritage-mating setup like that one, but happens sometimes.  And dath ilan - when you're different, if it's something they can live with at all, they'll do what they can to make life in Civilization easier for you, despite you being different, because everyone is different, somehow, somewhere, everyone needs exceptions.  My parents did the very correct thing, then, and sort of gently tried to offer me opportunities to be more Good, if I wanted to be, but without suggesting that I couldn't still just be Evil if I wanted.  They argued with me about it, and tried to argue me into being Good, but only after I started it by trying to argue them into being more Evil."

"I left home as soon as I could pass the requisite financial maturity and self-governance tests, at thirteen.  I set up in a part of Default distant enough that my parents wouldn't visit me often enough to be annoying.  I got a very default job - doing a thing you don't have words for, setting up high-precision processes that do things, very mundane high-precision processes though, like some business wanted a tweak made to their high-precision process for selling things," this language really is not going to do 'computer programming' without a long digression, "and put all the money I could into the craziest investments I could find that basically seemed to me like they should work, some went up, some blew up, after five years of that I was ahead of the broader market but very barely.  I was hoping to - teach myself, if I kept investing like that, that I'd get good at it."

"For socialization I had a circle of friends my age writing, a kind of stuff that doesn't exist here, though I did a lot more reading and only enough writing to count, but it meant that when everyone was sitting around in a circle eating whatever people had brought in and talking about everyone's work, that I could keep up and talk about it.  I picked that writing circle because their themes were, not quite 'doompunk', not quite, Evil aesthetic, more like supervillainy, but not that really - the point was that they were people who could admire people who were selfish, so long as those people were clearly fictional and they weren't out there being selfish in real life.  Which, you know, beats people not even appreciating the aesthetic as an aesthetic.  I thought about trying to find a circle of other more selfish people, but always decided against it, because - I didn't want to take it from being my personal identity, to a group identity, it was mine and I didn't actually want to be around five other people doing it slightly differently and have debates about that."

"Civilization really does try hard to make it possible for people who are different to, just be like that and it's fine and their lives aren't about being different.  But a lot of us who are different don't want that, either, we don't just want to pass through it all unnoticed, we feel like we have something to prove, not because Civilization is telling us to prove it, but because we want to prove it anyways.  And if what you want is - to be acknowledged for it, to make people admit something, to excel so much that you're above average, Civilization isn't just going to hand that to you.  Not everyone can have things that not everyone can have."

Carissa has no idea what to say to that but her honest reaction is " - I'm terribly glad I didn't grow up somewhere Good, somewhere where - people'd think they made a mistake, having a child who wants to be paid for doing important work helping people -"

It's not like Golarion is doing incredibly better than dath ilan on the strength of its greater selfishness.

Keltham elects not to say it out loud, for now.

"They didn't think I was a mistake, a person that they'd wish they'd never made and brought into the world.  Nothing like that.  Not even close.  They felt they'd made their own wrong life choices that had resulted in me existing, that's not the same as saying that I shouldn't exist, that if there's a button you press to get a Keltham, you don't press the button.  They just felt that they could've made other choices and gotten some other result instead, and then they would have felt like they'd made their own choices correctly, not that one possible child would be - more valuable to them than the other, if you put them side by side -"

"Their lives are also theirs, and their regrets belong to them, and they didn't try to make them be something about me or something of mine."

A sudden lump comes into his throat, as Keltham realizes, having not quite thought of it before:

Everyone who knows me thinks I'm dead.  Really dead.

The Keepers have to know.  The Keepers ought to tell anyone who's really broken up about it, right, it shouldn't be that much of an infohazard - that you wouldn't even tell the kid's own parents, he's still alive -

The Keepers will tell them that Keltham is still somewhere, probably many different somewheres but some weighing more than others, and that to say anything about the details is far beyond anything the Keepers can do.  The Keepers would not be able to foresee specifics like Golarion.

Dath ilan wouldn't put that much effort into cryosuspending every single person no matter what, if they expected all the selfish sadists to end up in worlds with masochists who give them everything they want.

Maybe hearing the current state of knowledge is actually worse for somebody than thinking their kid is just gone, because if they're just nonexistent, nothing any worse can be happening to them, and more importantly, you can be done thinking about it at some point.

Maybe the Keepers won't tell his parents, or anybody else who knows him, after all.

The distinction Keltham is trying to draw doesn't make any sense to Carissa  - or, at least, not to the extent he's trying to say something more complicated than 'they get to wish they'd had a different kid if they want to', which is obviously true - but it doesn't seem like the time to say that.

Snuggle. 

He's feeling a bit sad now, and will snuggle back and hope that she thinks of something to say so he doesn't have to.

"I'm sorry. That in your world people can - die forever. They shouldn't."

It is not entirely clear to him that people can.

Not that this is necessarily a good thing.  Though it could be!  Keltham doesn't know.  It depends on, you know, the entire state of the entire multiverse that he cannot in fact extrapolate in his tiny little mortal-sized brain.

But he should maybe not talk about this much until he's tried to figure out the ways in which it will be an enormous infohazard, which, again, it clearly will be, somehow.

"I suspect that - at the scale where whole universes interact, like that - time might not mean as much, or be as synchronized, as it is in Golarion.  If you can see dath ilan from here, if that's at all controllable, then it might be just as easy to see dath ilan's past as what I think of as its present.  That could be why Asmodeus wasn't trying to grab anyone else right away, if it was expensive, and if He knew that all that was needed was one dath ilani to get things rolling here, and that, in time, Golarion's Civilization would then ascend to where it could finish the job itself."

"And if you think about it from the perspective of somebody who died - they just need - someone, somewhere, who's powerful enough, who can see them, and cares.  Or is willing to trade with something else that cares."

Some trades stretch across time.  It's a saying in dath ilan that usually means something rather different, there: just ordinary time in one world, coordinated trades that parents make with children who don't exist yet or haven't matured as economic agents.

This makes so much more sense in light of Carissa's realization Keltham thinks there are infinite worlds but she isn't sure she would've had that revelation if she hadn't been listening to his conversation with Isidre. 

"That makes sense," she says, slowly. "...so, under that theory, you were the single dath ilani it was most important for Golarion to grab. ....and I was the place in Golarion it was most important to put you."

"Yeah, that's a problem with the theory, I'm frankly actually not seeing that.  There are dath ilani with higher Intelligence, higher Wisdom, superior social skills, and a far more encyclopedic knowledge of what you have to do to get a Civilization booted.  I'm also pretty sure that Golarion isn't the most fun-for-me world I could possibly be in."

"It's almost as if something wasn't really optimizing all that hard, but that just straight-up doesn't make sense at the requisite power level, so a much better bet is that something else was being optimized instead.  Or I was cheaper in some unavoidable way than a smarter dath ilani, or Golarion was more accessible... or there were only the hundred dath ilani from the air-traveling machine to distribute, and not that many more places to put them..."

"I kind of doubt I'm going to get it after thinking about it for an hour, if I didn't get it in the first thirty seconds."