do you recall when the war was just a game?

The Use of Kindness in the Retention of a Population turns out to be mostly the invention of the concept of making people want to live in your country rather than having societies consisting entirely of a royal court and slaves. There are surprisingly relevant digressions into tax policy and farming techniques and how they contribute to the technical ability to have something that could very generously be called a middle class. A later scribe has added margin notes about how this relates to the very recent invention of an idea that best translates as body autonomy but is mostly weaker than and slightly skew to the Earth idea.

Feris of Leopard Hill's books go into a lot of detail about decisionmaking. When do people want to try to do something and when do they want to look like they're trying? What happens when people aren't clear on which they want to do? To what extent does it even matter? Feris metaphorically paints a picture of a society wherein people almost always want to look like they're trying and almost never care about any of the things they want to be seen trying to accomplish - want to be seen to be someone who gets revenge, when they don't care, when sometimes no one cares; or want not to be seen as backing down, when they don't care at all about any of someone's specific demands; or want to be seen as brave, when what they'd be risking themselves for isn't worth anything to them. Feris is interested in whether people can know all this about themselves, whether honor is about more than reputation, how anyone knows anything, whether all questions have true answers.

Tarwë is mostly left alone to read, but at one point when he's between books, the librarian comments that Azan's royal library is understaffed right now because they ran out of slaves and that's one reason they want to go to war.

"Do you think it might be useful for my team and the team sent to Azan to talk about what we've found sooner than later?" inquires Tarwë.

"I don't make the choices, I just chronicle them. What's it trade off against if you do?"

"Sometimes people from states that have tense relationships with their neighbors prefer not to have the sense that we're talking behind their backs. We'll send reports to the same central coordinator, but usually we wouldn't meet directly unless our host states wanted that."

"Well, I don't see why that'd be a problem, but I already said I don't make the choices around here."

Tarwë nods and sends Nelen a message to that effect. (This is invisible.) (Nelen's inquiry to the mayor and general is not.)

The mayor admits he thought they were already going to do that, and the general says he thought the same but since they're asking permission and giving Sesat the chance to set conditions he'd like it to happen on the condition that Vanda Nossëo share with Sesat what they figure out about what Azan he is thinking, because Azan was until recently very isolationist and it's hard to do diplomacy with them and Sesat at this point genuinely does not know what the war is about.

"I can't actually agree to that condition without the coordinator's go-ahead, which would only come after the other team asks Azan he about it; it's possible Azan he has already asked that our counterparts keep something confidential," apologizes Nelen. "And we wouldn't know that until we talked to them."

"Suppose you talk to them and tell us anything you can pass on - I'm not asking for the number of people in their army, here, I know that, I want to know what they want from us. Seems very unlikely that was meant to be a secret."

"I'm happy to agree that anything we can tell you that wouldn't violate a security or a confidence we'll pass along."

"Good. Talk with them, then. You'll like Azan's rhetoric better than ours but I don't think you'll like what's beneath it very well."

"Sometimes good rhetoric yields to good values, once there's more of everything to go around. But we don't count on it," says Nelen. "I'll mention in my report that we'd like to rendezvous up on the ship we have in orbit."

Azan, meanwhile, has received its own delegation.

Azan stands out, to anyone comparing reports from the region, as having the unchallenged best human rights record of this century and general area. The idea of spreading their relatively merciful system more broadly is popular both with the people and with the government; for broadly humanitarian reasons, they were hoping to conquer Sesat and enslave and maim its entire defeated army to prevent them from taking up arms again. The team Vanda Nossëo sent them did not find it hard to convince Azan he to step aside and let them handle the humanitarian outreach instead; word of this has already reached the border and is still making its way to the Sesati capital.

The story Azan tells about the war is that Azan has absolutely open borders, a Sesati chose to immigrate, and when Sesati pursuers chased her across the border they thus crossed the border specifically to attack and kidnap an Azani citizen. But reading between the lines a bit, most of Azan is tired of the refugees they take in being in the shape Sesat leaves them in, tired of taking in scarred scared immigrants who won't talk about their pasts, and even angrier about the ones who don't make it across the border. Some of Azan's key decisionmakers are intensely aware that every day they don't conquer Sesat is a day people are tortured. In the complete absence of any record of any other polity even having concepts like the fundamental equality of humanity, there hasn't been any prior example to look to to learn what happens when one polity decides to conquer another to spread ideas like that.

They told Sesat it was about the immigrant. The correspondence about it was... confusing. They did not choose to make sure they had come to a mutual understanding before they attacked.

Azan's probably not going to be as thorny as Sesat. Its king insisted that they keep their magic healing easily avoidable - not gatekept at all, just avoidable - and needed the concept of voting on membership explained to him, sure. But the human sacrifice is all consensual and they're not very attached to the idea of staffing their library with blind former soldiers and so far they're mostly taking Vanda Nossëo's diplomatic overtures as an opportunity to get paid to stop doing things they didn't like doing anyway. Kind of a lot of things they didn't like doing anyway, but.

Azan's diplomatic team are really not thrilled about the maiming (though they are thrilled to have arrived in time to prevent it!) There will be no trouble at all about making magic healing avoidable; they can have a few hundred medical alert bracelets sent in about it by tomorrow to be distributed to anyone who wants one.

Assuming none of this is sensitive information they okay the coordinator sending the Sesat team a copy of their report. Nelen reads it and then does his best to explain the story they're telling, at least to Vanda Nossëo, about whence the war.

(Well, mostly prevent. They took one prisoner in the first battle - well, two, but one killed himself - but the vast majority of Sesat's army will be fine now.)

Tana frowns thoughtfully. "I'm curious if that's how you see us, too."

"We have - more exposure to a wide variety of examples to learn from," says Nelen. "Almost everybody goes through a historical period where they have to learn by doing - and in particular have to learn ethics by doing atrocities, it's really common. You're doing what you can with what you have. But you do seem to be in the historical period with atrocities in it, if that's what you're wondering."

"Which things are the atrocities and what do people learn about ethics that makes them stop?"

"Slavery, torture - Azan maiming prisoners counts too - on my own planet there's a caste system, since retrofitted to be less abusive and restrictive. Believe me, I understand that these things are solutions to problems that are very real and serious in a scarcity economy without good luck and good examples - if a lot of societies got through their development without having to resort to anything we'd call an atrocity it might be another story when we found one with slaves, but as it is Sesat doesn't stand out for the tech level. As I said, you're doing what you can with what you have. We're here to see if you can have more and then use that to develop into a state that doesn't maltreat people. - Tarwë says he likes your book about kindness in retention of a population. That's basically what we're doing, on a larger scale."

"I've noticed," Tana says dryly. "So - worlds get richer and then decide they don't need slavery, and since they don't need it they don't bother to have it?"

"That's often the way it goes, yes. On my planet we had slavery for a while, but for species-specific psychological reasons the slaves were normally not allowed to have children, so once the practices that added new slaves slowed down and then stopped it didn't self-sustain. But that's not to our particular credit - there was an ongoing oppressive situation that Vanda Nossëo had to dismantle, it just wasn't specifically construing people as property. And we were much farther along the technology advancement sequence then than you are now."

Tana pulls his mouth to the side and thinks about that.

"It doesn't sound like an improvement," says Zatar. "If - what's the worst kind of crime, to your people?"

"Putting someone in a hallucinatory torture simulation for millions of subjective years while also forcing them to have children who will be cannon fodder in the army of an evil god," says Nelen. "- it comes up surprisingly often."

Zatar makes a face. And then another face. "Right, well, so. I haven't done that. And so I imagine if someone treated me and that creature equally, that'd be insulting. Not to say that the insult would be the worst part or that you should take it into account before you've stopped them, but afterward, what's a society for if not acknowledging that - hm - I suppose I don't really even know how I, personally, not being able to trap anyone in a that thing for millions of years, could get any worse than the worst we already do to slaves, and now I want to, and now I understand why you'd want to leave room at the bottom to get worse. But you see my point, right?"

"I'm not sure I do. - if it matters, we just kill that particular brand of evil god whenever we turn one up, that's our stated policy."