"It's been implied we only have slavery as a punishment for crimes or voluntarily, and he might in fact break with us over having it more than that."

"Well, at least that makes it easy to be more palatable than almost everywhere else in the known civilized world that has a political administration that stretches back further than fifty years. - well, I guess there's Lastwall. And maybe the elves. And maybe Hermea. And maybe Holomog? Anyway, we can do it, but it's a major departure, and we'll want to keep an eye on it at every level of this mess.

"...what exactly do you think are the bounds of the thing that Keltham finds objectionable enough to break with us over it."

"Any slavery, in countries where people are Chaotic Evil or Neutral Evil, because then they don't meaningfully have a reasonably-appealing alternative in suicide. He'll also object to slavery in countries where people are Chaotic Neutral or Neutral, I guess, once he knows suicide is Evil. Slavery of children, because dath ilani are ridiculous about children. He didn't ask about that but I think only because he failed to imagine anyone might do it. Slavery of - innocents, I guess maybe? 

- what does Osirion in fact do -"

"Apart from buying slaves from traders, and from taking them in war - which I don't think Osirion has had any of, not recently enough - traditional Osirian slavery is mostly debt bondage, I think. You sell yourself, your wife, your children and all of your possessions to pay off a debt you otherwise can't, or in exchange for food and shelter. Sometimes - varies by era - that status wears off in some years, or a generation, or two; at other times, it's been permanent across generations, which produces a larger, more consistent slave class. Either way, slaves are commonplace."

She sighs.

"I don't know which Osirion is doing now. I have reason to believe that they still have slaves, but detailed, current, accurate information on other countries is extremely filtered. If you want detailed reports on the current status of what other countries are doing politically, the wall team needs people who have been permitted to follow foreign affairs, and ideally unfiltered access to foreign books. A lot of foreign books. Although I'm not sure we'll have time to read them."

" - but, uh, also, before I forget, I was actually asking about whether his sense of what slavery is might be more expansive than ours, and he might recognize things that we don't think are slavery as being in the same bucket. Like - does he think that all of our children are actually slaves because of compulsory education, or something."

"We actually do have foreign intelligence officers visiting now!  And some foreign books!  Which I've now had any time to interrogate and read respectively!  And Sevar cued me to look at Lawful Neutral treatment of slavery in particular."

"Osirion has now phased out enslaving people except for debt or crimes.  It doesn't free other countries' slaves when they pass through, like Andoran, or attack ships carrying slave merchandise, like Andoran.  If you get a female slave pregnant you have to marry her and then she's no longer a slave.  By their supposed law, children of slaves aren't slaves themselves, but the intelligence officer I talked to wasn't sure how much of Osirion is actually obeying that law."

"The fact that Osirion has a law they're not sure people will obey says they're putting a pretty high priority on it, though.  Osirion doesn't want its people going to the Boneyard instead of Axis because they disobeyed rules, so they try not to have rules their people will disobey.  I'm guessing alterCheliax should be pretending to meet that standard - children of slaves not being slaves - if we don't want Keltham getting upset?  But it's Sevar's call."

"...I have no idea what exactly Keltham counts as slavery.  Possibly all of us are, even if we're getting paid?  Asmodeus certainly thinks so."

"Yes, I think that if Keltham were cued to actually think about it he'd consider any situation objectionable that a person couldn't freely exit, if they weren't warned of that in advance and able to decide freely not to get involved at that point. And children of slaves are definitely going to have to be free because otherwise he'll think about children being slaves and then he will explode on us.

Do we understand, theologically, why Osirion has that policy - does Abadar have teachings on it - my best guess would be that Abadar just likes voluntary transactional relationships, and dislikes slavery for not being one of those, but maybe He's said more than that -"

"No. Not the real version, as Abadarans would really explain it, because real Abadaran theology is censored."

"Voluntary transactions were the theme of the uncensored Abadar theology books I read.  And - it's implied by the Keltham lectures we got?  The Abadar holy books I read didn't mention slavery any more than Keltham did, but yes, it's all about people all being better off because they coordinated their decisions - the Abadar books didn't talk about that, they just talked about trade, they didn't derive trade and property from the first principles of multiagent coordination like Keltham did.  But I frankly think that's just because Keltham is smarter than the people writing Abadar's current holy books."

"If Abadar chose Keltham and dropped four cleric circles on him, it's a good bet that multiagent coordination is what Abadar is about, and trade is just the part of it that pre-Kelthamian mortals could understand.  Slavery is not multiagent coordination, it's not people choosing to act in ways that make them all better off, and that should be more important to Abadar than slaves being wealth and property, because the principle of property is derived from multiagent coordination according to Keltham."

"...we've probably got considerably better understanding of Abadaran theology at this point than Abadarans do, just from being around Keltham for a few weeks.  Weird thought."

" - Keltham did not actually himself derive trade and property from the first principles of multiagent coordination, he lived in a Civilization that teaches it in pieces so you can follow how you get there, and he's not smarter than everyone in Osirion, though the people in dath ilan who figured out how to teach children those things almost certainly are."

"Understood."

"Though, also he's just teaching us stuff he got taught as an 8-year-old, and probably could rederive it himself from scratch on account of being a dath ilani adult.  I - sort of feel like I could, if I had more Law and more practice..."

"Okay, the next question I have then is: which things count as agents, and is he going to be mad about the control of horses, or familiars, or children by their parents, or serfs by their lords, or plants by farmers, or undead by necromancers, or subjects by their queen, or everyone who was born in a country that doesn't give them license to leave."

"I'm not seeing the Law that governs it.  He's probably upset about people not being allowed to leave their countries, at least.  Sevar, do you...?"

"Animals no, I don't know why, familiars yes if he realizes they're not just animals, children he will explode about nearly everything to do with children it's just a very dangerous subject in full generality, serfs yes, plants no presumably because of how even Good people don't care about plants if they aren't specifically druid types, undead.... my intuition is that anything that can talk to him and say "I wish I was free instead of a slave" is a problem and anything that can't talk isn't. 

Subjects by their queen, yes, if he understood what that actually means. Countries that don't let people leave, yes."

Said like that it does not seem like her corrupting-Keltham project has gotten very far.

"I am not sure there is any way to reliably hide from Keltham that ours is a world where, as a rule, strong entities control weak entities and shape them to their liking. We can... try... but it's kind of foundational."

"Would they say so in Old Cheliax."

"Pass to Korva, I've been focusing most of my attention on the modern world."

"No, I guess not in those words."

What does someone from Old Cheliax believe about power. This feels dangerous, but it's not like being wrong is any less dangerous.

"I think that in Old Cheliax, at the end, there was a sense of - no one with eyes is going to deny that in practice, in the world we actually inhabit, the strong often defeat and control the weak whenever they can. It is, actually, self-evident that this happens really frequently. But I think a person from Old Cheliax might believe that it doesn't have to be, or at least that it doesn't have to look - arbitrary, the way it sometimes does for us. That mortals are something special; that we, at our best, outsmart and outshine the law of the jungle; that we hold within ourselves a spark of what the gods concern themselves with, the way that Keltham talks about us containing shards of the law. Something poetic like that. And that - if we don't like the way the world is, then we possess the ability to make it be as it should be. So if we think that it's silly that things are decided by whoever happens to be the strongest, then we can, as a society, become stronger, and make the world however it ought to be."

"Which rhymes decently well with what Keltham is on about? Maybe? And I guess suggests that we can excuse the instances of control that we would fall apart without, as distinct from the instances of control that we do because we realized that pouring effort into avoiding that was stupid. If we can figure out which are which."

"Going through everything in realCheliax and figuring out which parts could be done without strong people controlling weak people, and then re-envisioning everything the other way around, and all the consequences of that, sounds like a nightmare even by the standards of my nightmare of a job.  I frankly think I can't do it."

"I think there's still something there you could say to Keltham and have him not run away screaming. Yes, nobles can abuse their power, sometimes, because the system isn't perfect, but we know it should not be so, and we think there is less of it than there used to be. Yes, many people who aren't slaves nonetheless don't have too many choices, but they have more, because Cheliax has such good education. Yes, there are various situations we're solving with power because people are very stupid and make very bad choices otherwise and we don't know how to fix that, but, you know, maybe when they all have headbands. 

- 'people are very stupid' is our coverall here, in part because I think it's just true. A society with an average INT of 16 and a lot of natural 22s - and with genuinely good education in Law - is going to find it much less obvious that everyone is irreparably worthless on their own and needs to be kept in line. If you meet a bunch of INT 10s it's obvious - maybe even to Keltham - that they should not be deciding how things work."

"We could attempt to approximate what our alter-Cheliax ought to look like by looking at which things we do that other countries don't, but - it wouldn't work that well, right, because Old Cheliax was a society with a vision in the same way that we are a society with a vision, they were all trying to bring about a golden age of lawful neutral human perfection, or whatever. Osirion might be doing some of that, with less intensity because they're not doing the golden age thing. Lastwall might be doing some of that, again with less intensity, organized around Iomedae. Hermea might be, organized around I don't even know what. But everyone else - they're mostly not actually trying that hard to adhere to some lofty ideal, they're doing what works, which is mostly coercion, they're just lazier about doing what works than we are."

"I guess we did move the timeline up, in terms of when Cheliax became Asmodean. So - maybe we're working on it and we're just not sure which pieces of our old coercive system we can do without. And we don't want to end up like Galt."

"That's why I moved the timeline up, wanting to be able to explain lots of people and norms being shaped by - things we weren't going to be able to justify."

"Though in retrospect, it would've been worth the potential hit on misaligning the start of alter-Queen Abrogail II's reign with its realCheliax counterpart, to have it have been just ten years or seven years ago, instead of fifteen.  Checking every coin with the Queen's face, to make sure it doesn't look older than it should've been, would've been worth it.  To have the additional explanation for how, say, Ione acted as afraid of the government as she did.  Why so many Chelish people act afraid of so many things, in general, when they first get to the Fortress."

"I think we can still make that work. So - Evil, as Keltham conceptualizes it, is probably less coercive than Good, or at least more - we dangle actual carrots in front of people instead of just telling them that it's necessary for the good of all society? But alter-Cheliax has a bunch of legacy systems that don't run on carrots, left over from when we were Lawful Neutral, and therefore felt that it was more often necessary to override what people wanted to do for the good of everyone else. And we would like to remake them, especially now that Hell is making us stronger and wealthier, but we're aware that radical reforms risk our stability, and, again, we don't want to end up like Galt. So we're going slow."

" - do we have a story abut why Galt and Andoran rebelled, in alter-Cheliax? Did Cheliax shatter several ways during the civil war, and House Thrune was only able to turn this corner of it to diabolism in the first place? That might make the most sense."

" - we don't have a story like that but I've been assuming something vaguely like that, yes. If provinces left after Abrogail took power, Keltham'll want to know why. 

- and also I genuinely think they wouldn't have left after Abrogail took power, that was mismanagement by Infrexus. I know you're supposed to believe that but also I think it's true. And Abrogail being that incompetent would have correlates."

"I register my opinion that Galt is one of the best places we can turn Keltham's attention, if it has to leave the Fortress at all.  They illustrate very clearly why Intelligence 10 people can't run their own lives the way dath ilani can."