"As a one-time thing I think, economically, we absolutely need something to replace the labor. As an ongoing thing - a medal's the wrong genre of meaningless thing... there aren't marginal cases between slavery and fines, they'd be between slavery and execution. I don't know. I had a thought that slaves were probably cheap for you because you're astonishingly rich and if you paid in something you have more of than us and pegged the amount to last year's prices you'd never have to say you were going to stop paying but it'd stop meaning anything."

"We can handle replacing the labor. Same way we'd do the math and science lessons." Nelen presses a button on his tablet. "Charp please," he tells his tablet, and it beeps in acknowledgement. A moment later his door opens and there enters a metal construct. "This is a Charp," Nelen explains. "They're nonsapient, but they can take verbal instructions and give verbal reports, they have perfect memories, and they're stronger than a human without needing to eat, sleep, breathe, use light to work by... They won't do the trick if people are currently using slaves for sex or, uh, massages or something, but you can put one to work on a farm or something."

"I expect they'll probably do well enough. You're right that they won't cover everything but we'll be able to handle the rest of their practical use without anything you wouldn't do anyway. And - do you normally compensate victims of crimes, anywhere else in Vanda Nossëo?"

"Under standard circumstances, yes. I'm a little worried that we'd find a lot of nonstandard circumstances and quibble over those - I noticed an emphasis on patricide, which might or might not correspond to it being particularly common in Sesat for what we'd consider child abuse victims to turn on their parents?"

"Assuming, which we should not in fact assume, that I understand what you mean by 'child abuse', it's illegal and sometimes itself punishable by enslavement."

"We don't have a single legal definition of child abuse because it's so terribly cultural and dependent on individual people's values and children themselves vary enormously, we just cover it all with the freedom of emigration, but I'm curious what you define it as."

"Well, it sounds like you mean things like rape or torture, done to one's own children, but I don't think emigration would be at all good enough for it; so much can happen so quickly, for one thing, and for another no one's born old enough to go to the stars alone. So I think you mean something else - maybe something like any violation of a guardian and trustee's duties to a ward."

"Rape and torture are separately illegal, yes, we just cover - emotional abuse and such with the emigration rule."

"That sounds paradoxical, I don't think it translated usefully."

"Emotional abuse? Uh, it covers things like - making someone doubt their sanity, belittling them, threatening them, withholding support and affection in whatever degree is healthy for the species, killing their pets, sabotaging their opportunities to do things the abuser disapproves of..."

"So, generally behaving like an annoying boor, but to children in particular? Patricide is still illegal if your father is strict and rude to you."

"In Vanda Nossëo too," Nelen agrees, "it would just tend to make a court less sympathetic to a petition for compensation."

"...In Sesat you're understood to owe your father a great deal of respect if you're so lucky as to have one. Even if he's a boor. So much so that I can't imagine a court being sympathetic - patricide gets you enslaved by default, in general murder doesn't do that if there wasn't something worse about it, and I can tell that that's not straightforwardly what you do but harsher, but I don't know how not."

"The usual understanding is that if you murder someone you know, you probably had some kind of reason - seldom to never a good reason for murder, but a reason - and murdering a stranger is likely to be a violent impulse. And if you murder, specifically, a parent or guardian, someone who had authority over you while you were vulnerable, the presumption is often that you may have had a very good reason, that it's easy to seriously damage people by mistreating them in their childhoods especially if they can't trivially walk away from the situation and that kind of damage is both the sort of thing that makes you a more murdery sort of person and that makes you have an understandable grudge against the abuser."

" - It'd be a defense, in Sesat, if you could prove your supposed father was... but that's not the most interesting thing. What do you know, about how people being damaged in their childhoods works?"

"I haven't made a particular study of it but the broad understanding is that - kids are still learning how to be people, learning what kind of person they're supposed to be in their situation, and if the example they have is of a - boorish, as you put it, or violent, or cruel person, then that's a form of education whether it was intended as such or not, and they're less equipped to be peaceful productive citizens. I do want to be careful here to draw the distinction that someone having a background that might predispose them to any particular vice doesn't reduce their worth as a person or their rights under Vanda Nossëo, they can learn better and deserve the opportunity to - it's just one of the many reasons not to abuse people."

"An argument I think you might want to make here is that children seeming to take after their parents is an illusion, and the appearance of children born to no free person being worthless is because that's what they're taught, not inherent to what they are."

"- unfortunately children do also tend to take after their parents. That is, I'd expect a child born to Sesati slaves and adopted by some nice random people on, oh, Casentar, to grow up to be a fairly normal citizen of Casentar, but that's mostly because I think it's unlikely that you've filtered strongly enough for the traits that would make someone growing up on Casentar to be an incorrigible criminal, not because I don't think that might be possible in principle."

Feris makes a face. "Sesat isn't filtering strongly enough because half the most important men in any town have kids without mothers - that, ah, that usually means with slaves, kids without fathers doesn't usually - sometimes it does, though - and it's not as if all of them get claimed and raised, either. But it's one of those things you can't bring up, because no individual person wants to admit their absent mother didn't just die giving birth, and there's no accurate recordkeeping about it, so - I don't even know that I'm right, that that's what it usually is. Maybe it's rare. But you see how, if you suggest you've noticed it's common, it'll unbalance something."

"I admit it's - odd to me that you're having trouble maintaining your population and substantial amounts of the birth rate are driven by factors like that. That's unusual in human societies at your tech level, usually there's a tremendous amount of child mortality and plenty of adult mortality to boot but that aside people don't have this much systematic trouble forming and raising children in two-parent households outside some marginal sub-populations, as I understand it."

"Just going by the numbers there are a lot of serfs and free farmers and artisans who mostly don't have slaves and do have wives who can't afford enough silphium to really have much choice in the matter, and don't have anything better to do with themselves if they could. You won't've heard much about them because they're not very important as individuals and I don't imagine you'll've spoken to any."

"Oh, silphium being in heavy use could explain it. Anyway, if it will help to assert that I believe that a child of two slaves could grow up to be a normal productive citizen on Casentar and leave the notion that only environment affects personality implicit, I can do that."

"It might help. And - I don't know what you can possibly say that'd be honest, given..." Feris glances around at all of the incomprehensible grandeur. "...everything, but if there were a thing you could say that was honest and at all plausible and sounded like 'we're very glad Sesat freely chose to deal with us, because it would have been totally infeasible to force the issue and we're much better off with Sesat's alliance than we would have been otherwise' that would also matter. A lot."

"- is 'infeasible' important compared to, say, 'illegal', or 'unconscionable' -"

"Yes. Not that the other two aren't good news."