"Huh. I expect I would be pretty bad at learning an entire new language but if I just had to learn one once I think I'd agree to it for the obvious benefits to myself and the broader society?" She shrugs, sort of self-consciously. "I don't...actually know, I'm not a Keeper. Centuries?" 

'Keeper' has a lot of complicated overtones and connotations, most of which don't especially map to anything Belrun is familiar with. Keeper of knowledge, of secrets, of the past, of history, of information too dangerous to be widely known or just too awkward to be net positive if public - there's a fragment there to do with Merrin herself but she's not following that thought-path right now. 

:Keepers are... historians...?: says Belrun fumbling with the concept.

"- Oh wait. Um. If it's not obvious then I...need to think a bit about how to even explain it. They're...the very smart people who keep track of the very important things? In general but it's especially important for the things that are important and also where it'd be bad for everyone to be aware of and thinking about them all the time. You go to them for advice if you're confused about something and they un-confuse you? Or I guess sometimes if you're being very obtuse about the noticing you need advice part then they just come find you." Merrin has PERSONAL EXPERIENCE of this, it was honestly kind of embarrassing. "I...by definition can't tell you most of what they spend their time thinking about. Since I'm not one and I think most Keepers are, like, three or four standard deviations higher intelligence than me so I wouldn't even understand what they're working on." 

:I am missing some of the concepts you're using. They do... counseling? And have... high security clearances? And are... much smarter than you, plus the security clearance thing, so you don't know most of what they do besides counseling?:

"That's...not wrong but it feels like saying, I don't know, a fiction author is someone who answers messages from their fans, it's - a small fraction of what they do and it's not the most important part. They make public statements as well as doing individual explanations, though that's also not most of what they're working on - they decide amongst themselves on policy decisions for the whole world, I think... They're - just, you can't have a Governance that makes reasonable plans and responds sanely to unexpected problems if no one's keeping track of all the infohazards." 

'Infohazards', now that Merrin is focusing more on the concept as she thinks it, is another complicated bundle of associations that would, in Velgarth, mostly not be bundled together under a single word. Infohazards are facts about engineering or physics that make it very, very cheap for a clever person to cause vast amounts of damage, and obviously most people won't want to but there are a lot of people. Infohazards are whatever lurks behind the veil of dath ilan's screened-off history - temptingly inevitable societal mistakes, maybe? Experiments that were tried and failed and will predictably fail but that someone would want to have another go at anyway? Infohazards are facts about the world that, while true, won't enable most people to make better decisions for including them in their realitymodels, and will predictably make them sad or scared. Infohazards are some mathematical arguments that are oh so compellingly logical and compelling and involve multiplying by infinities and are so, so tempting to follow off a cliff, distorting all of a person's reasoning toward their goals.

(At least, Merrin has been told this is a thing? She personally doesn't feel like this would happen to her in real life, and in fact she went through a rebellious youthful phase where she declared to everyone that this category was stupid, but the thing about a world full of people of +4 SD intelligence from yours is that you kind of have to have a very strong prior that if your intuitions disagree with theirs, they're right. Maybe Merrin is just too bad at math.) 

:We don't have... almost any of that. Screened off history??:

"Yeah. Our history before the last century is - only known by Keepers. I'm not sure why. There's presumably a very good reason." 

:Wow. Yeah, we don't have that. I can't imagine what a good reason to do that might be, actually:

"- I'm not sure? Um, if you don't have Keepers, who are your Very Serious People? You know, the people who have correct opinions on things and everyone knows they're generally right and worth listening to and that way you can get all the smart competitive young people to actually coordinate where it matters?" 

:Uh... I have advisors and a council and stuff? They're not always right, nobody's always right!:

"Nobody's always right! I'm sure Keepers are wrong sometimes - I wouldn't personally be able to assess that, but domain experts definitely make mistakes. There are a lot of mechanisms in place to ensure that they notice and update from it and can avoid making exactly the same kind of mistake twice." 

She wonders if Belrun's country uses prediction markets. Leareth sounds like the sort of person who would see the value. If it were a very specific genre of romance novel there would be an entire chapter on him inventing the concept from scratch. Merrin has no idea if this is plausible or not for an actual person from an actual low-tech fantasy world with magic but it's certainly romantic. 

:Okay? I guess that sounds nice except for the part where they can decide to make everyone stop studying history, that sounds bad:

"Why do you think that's bad?" 

:I told you Leareth has an extensive library, though I couldn't read most of it, but it sounds like if a library at all like it existed in your world you wouldn't be allowed to? And you don't know why?:

"I - um - wait, sorry, recalibrating." 

Merrin closes her eyes and tries to think for ten seconds. 

"....Sorry. I hadn't previously been thinking of Leareth as - basically a Keeper? Or as, um, whatever would replace Keepers if that wasn't an institution that exists locally. I - honestly don't know why not, it - maybe shouldn't be that surprising. ....Anyway, I - don't actually mind. I guess I might mind more if I didn't trust the Keepers to be much, much smarter and better at reasoning, and also to - care about the same things I do." By definition, almost, since Merrin is pretty sure that's where she learned what was important to care about. 

Pause. 

"...Does Leareth keep a lot of secrets? From most people, I mean, not from you. ...Um, this is slightly a romance-novel-trope prediction but it's mostly not that." 

:...yes:

It seems bizarre and concerning for a world to only have one Keeper– or, no, nevermind - to have only one person fulfilling the role that dath ilan calls 'Keeper' - which is a cluster of traits and responsibilities (and cognitive abilities?) that may not, in fact, need to be so clustered...

...actually she should probably stop trying to map what she knows and understands onto fragments of Law that she herself doesn't even, mostly, understand.

- that kind of only leaves one avenue of safe reasoning, which is 'romance tropes'. 

"I - sorry - how sure are you that he's not also keeping a bunch of secrets from you?" 

:I am pretty sure I know the big ones but he probably has some opsec stuff I don't even care about that I haven't picked up? Plus like - details where I know the broad shape of the contents but might be surprised by smaller stuff, since he's nearly two thousand years old and we haven't known each other long enough for me to go through all his notes even if I could read them all and would want to. Uh, the lifebond does involuntary empathy in both directions, so I think he's probably not just keeping secret that he's keeping secrets. Why do you ask?:

"...I didn't have much logical reason to ask, that was more just a - random romance-tropes prediction...?" 

Pause. 

".......He's two thousand years old???"

That's so many years! Merrin...is pretty sure that sheer number of years should mean something, but she's kind of falling down, right now, on making specific predictions. 

:It's quite the age gap, yes:

"It really is! Wow! Is that...weird?" 

:Not as much as you might think. His memory over time is lossy, and he didn't have any specifically romantic experience before so that's equally new for both of us. But yeah it's kind of weird:

"Did he seriously go two thousand years without being romantically involved with anyone? - I know I made a prediction that based on romance tropes you would be the first person he ever truly loved, but that's so long!" 

:Well, you know, if he got attached to people they'd eventually get killed by the gods. Or just die of old age. Plus the asexual except for me thing:

"Aaaaaaaaaah? That's - the sort of thing that I guess would be a romantic kind of tragic in a book but it's actually just horrible if it's happening to a real person!"