He listens intently and immediately starts remixing them. "You can move faster if you're more confused by fiction than by reality? Your strength in the Way is you can move faster? I notice I am confused anyone can kill anyone! Therefore something I believe is fiction." 

"Full points on syntax, semantics not so much."

It's a less impressive feat when Fe-Anar is doing it in a language that actually has a type system, ya know?

He's still confused by the claim anyone can kill anyone but if Keltham is unwilling to explain it he'll just have to wait for the person with Share Baseline to try.

Okay, so Fe-Anar is now speaking to Keltham exclusively in well-formed Baseline, has mastered all the phonemes, only needs to be told any word once, and can be told whole translated sentences and infer back the words.  This is probably impressive and not just because Baseline was designed to be easier to learn than Taldane?  Keltham doesn't have any reference points here except that if Carissa could do this she probably would've.

However if Fe-Anar wants to pass as a native Baseline speaker to Keltham, he's going to need to learn some mental distinctions that influence voice tones, now that Keltham thinks about it.  Some aspects of pitch in Baseline aren't controlled by language design, they're allegedly free emotional expressions that have nonetheless settled into informal troughs.

The way that Fe-Anar is doing the rest of this perfectly makes it stand out that Fe-Anar, for example, sometimes uses an implicit tone of voice that sounds like... he's instructing reality what to do as if it were a person, or pronouncing a conjecture like it's a flat statement of fact, or saying an ought-statement at a pitch that makes it sound like an is-statement.  You can do that to make metaphorical points, but Fe-Anar seems to not be doing it on purpose?

Keltham apologizes for not being able to state explicit generative rules here.  He can just tell that some inflections sound wrong, state why they sound wrong, and say the sentence over again the way a dath ilani would.

Yes, that's how learning a language always is; you can't actually make all human behavior explicit even if you have put lots more effort into trying than anyone else. He is delighted to pick it up the slow way. 

But seriously, he wants to know once he has a bit more Baseline fluency, why is there poetry making the claim that anyone can kill anyone.

No economicmagic, no conceptualmagical medicine, no alternatephysics saying important people are mysteriously harder to injure, dead people with uninjured brains can be stored indefinitely but not brought back right away by Civilization's current capabilities, and everybody is way too creative.

Like there's probably some people who can't kill some people?  A three-year-old is going to have a hard time taking out the Chief Executive of Civilization.  That's why it's spoken with the 'this statement is literally false but in a way where it's mostly true and the exceptions are important' inflection, rather than the 'overt trolling' inflection, which would sound like "Anyone can kill anyone but they probably shouldn't."

"Huh [surprised, dubious, questioning].  <Conjectural inflection>It'd be hard to have government if most people could kill most other people.</Conjectural inflection>."

"...okay so it's not just Cheliax that thinks that.  It's hard to have terrible governments if a majority of people can outfight any minority that tries to tyrannize them.  All Golarion governments are terrible, and would thus not last for upwards of thirty seconds in dath ilan."  [Inference rather than observation; submitted for further challenge.]

...if you can't read off these inflections, or infer them from obvious-to-a-dath-ilani context, you might think that Keltham was a lot more confident of what he was saying than he'd sound like to someone in Civilization.

"Causing everyone to leave their farms and cities can only be done with a Governance that can outfight its population better than Cheliax can." [Confident, submitted for argument.]

"Too many simultaneous replies.  Please hold while I order them."  [Humorous.]

"One, it can't be done that way even if Governance can outfight its population.  That would be a negative consequence presented only in anticipation of the other's output change, 'threat'.  Which people would ignore because they don't want their predictable decision to offer a reason to threaten them."  [Unobserved, confident.]

"Two, one of the few facts passed down is that, when it was said this must be done, all of Governance quit and was never allowed in Governance again, to show that they took it seriously and didn't expect to benefit themselves."  [Reported, confident.]

"Three, I'm much more of a cognitively-diverse nonconformist, 'rebel', than the average dath ilani, and it's never occurred to me that I ought to go trespass in an old city that somebody presumably had a very good reason for hiding."  [Direct observation.]

"Four, farms are huge mechanical operations operated by one person in a hundred.  They would just change out the machinery once it had been redesigned, not give up the farmland."  [Effective certainty.]

"One of the facts in your banned history books is that people do not actually ignore threats, that is not how people work.[Unobserved, confident]. Some people would bravely ignore the threat and then they would be executed in front of everyone else, and the government would go on down the line until they ran into some people who had realized about themselves that they did not actually ignore threats. [Unobserved, confident]. Your government can just lie to you about whether all of Governance quit or not, if all the books and records from the time are banned. [Effective certainty.]

It is possible that instead of mass executions dath ilan did mass Suggestions which produced an entire population that would not go look at cities so long as someone told them 'someone had a very good reason for hiding this city', but that is not a result that can be achieved without powerful mind-control or mass executions. [Unobserved, confident]. If we go ask a hundred Lawful people in Osirion, at least twenty of them would go try to dig up an old city if this would not be punished severely. [Effective certainty.]"

"I'm not getting it.  People did a really huge amount of work and spent a lot of money to preserve those cities, they had some very strong reason I don't know, why would I wreck all their hard work and probably endanger everybody on my planet?"  Inflections of puzzlement are much the same in Baseline as in Taldane.

"To find out what's there!"

"...a bunch of old cities?  I'd understand if you were curious about why we had to do that, but what's inside the cities is just going to be, like, people's old tableware.  And museums with all of our lost art and history from the last thousand years or whatever, I guess.  I'd go look if that were costless, but it's not costless."

"I would go to learn their languages myself. My wife would go to see their art. My son Masaharta would go to hear their music. My son Merenre would go to learn how economics was invented and whether the path we are on is the best one or just the one we ended up at by chance.

My son Telcar would go because the government told him not to."

"There's one particular preserved city that's supposed to be super super forbidden, for no declared reason, and my guess is that one is just a trap for people like your son.  Possibly where they manage to cleverly make their way past all the defenses, search the city, learn some plausible incredible secret, and get to go home and be smug about being the only ones who know, and never realize how obviously they were being manipulated.  Not that I'd be saying this out loud if I were still in dath ilan, of course."

"For the rest of that, sure, that's all very reasonable if it's free.  Do you also - just eat cookies, 'cookies', because they're tasty, and not consider that you're supposed to pay for them?"

"What does super super forbidden mean, they kill you more slowly?[Sincere best guess expected to be wrong]. The reason you pay for cookies is because another person's labor produced those cookies in anticipation of a market and there would be no cookies in a world where we steal them instead of paying for them.[Common knowledge]. It is not because if someone says something is costly you should care about that."

"No, that they tell you very emphatically not to do it.  We literally never do the 'torture' thing."

"So to me it feels obvious that you want to be the sort of planet where, if something weird happens, people can successfully coordinate, 'coordinate', to deploy an appropriate weird response, in much the same way that you want to be a planet where people can produce cookies and not have them get stolen.  There should be some procedure for figuring out whether you need to bury all your old cities and then everybody does that, which includes sensible aspects like firing everybody in your government, occasionally sending somebody on a one-way trip to the pole of the world where they report back using codes on whether the real reason seemed legit, that sort of thing.  If there's no possible procedure which does that then your world is defenseless against any problem requiring that response, and probably lots of other problems too."  [Attempted chain of valid inferences with overtones of moral inveighing.]

"To me it seems - to protect against some classes of danger is to make yourself more defenseless to other classes of danger. [Assertion with defense of it upcoming.] A strong king protects against external threats, but risks becoming a tyrant.[Common knowledge]. A compliant populace protects better against some problem where you need to ban all of the past, but protects worse against some problem where the government decides to ban all of the past not acting in the interests of the people. A society that is inhospitable to people like Telcar is more likely to be making errors that being Telcar prevents. A society full of Telcars will of course barely be able to solve any problem that cannot be solved by shooting it or running off to live in the wilderness or overthrowing the government. There is no society that is defended against every possible direction of danger.

So then there is only the question, how frequent are good reasons to ban all of history, compared to how often will kings manipulate the populace to that end when it weakens the people? I think probably one king in ten would do that if he could, maybe one in five. Certainly Cheliax is attempting it. So good reasons would need to be frequent indeed, for that trade to seem wise.[Attempted chain of valid inference]."

"That stakes Civilization's survival on never being wrong in advance about how often some weird situation actually comes up!  Instead of having a weak government so that it can't become tyrannical, we have a somewhat stronger goverment with emergency weapons behind locks not controlled by the same people who can use those weapons, and run the Annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival to rehearse the motions needed to overthrow it if required.  We don't have a population that goes along with anything the government says, we have a population that will tell the government it will go along with weird things but only if the whole government quits and we use a paper-cryptographic-protocol, 'mathematically trustworthy procedure everybody can carry out using paper', to recreate a new government entirely from scratch in a way that would be very difficult for a conspiracy to manipulate.  You can optimizedly-design being able to defend against more situations instead of just saying, oh, well, I guess there's a tradeoff, let's stake everything on guessing the right side of the simply-formed tradeoff."

"If you have a population that will not go look in the hidden cities because they were told they should not, you have staked everything on guessing the right side of the tradeoff."[Confident.]

"Not seeing why.  Life goes on, people continue earning money and spending it, almost nobody dies for real and nobody ever gets 'tortured'.  What goes wrong if we don't look in the hidden cities and should have?"

"What goes wrong? [Rhetorical].

Your government is lying about the frozen people and if they come back, everyone dies for real.

Your government is lying about no one gets 'tortured', you have afterlives and they are bad, or some are bad and you don't know enough to avoid those ones.

Your people had invented something much much better than 'life goes on, people continue earning money and spending it', but some powers wanted to stamp it out, and now instead of trading with every star you are stuck poorer and they will do it again if you rediscover it.

This is the eightieth time it has been done to your civilization, by some power that wants you at your current level of strength but not bigger or stronger. 

You are ruled by a secret cabal of aliens that are mind controlling your government and you do not learn it. Maybe also they eat people, if you do not mind being ruled by a secret cabal of aliens.

There is some terrible threat to your world that sealing away history means you do not know of, and might now unleash.

Your world does have gods and magic, but in sealing away history, you ensured that only a small ruling elite will know of them.

You would have been able to figure out Cheliax much much faster, if you had known how history is. Oh, I wasn't supposed to talk to you about that. [Apology]."

"...I think our people could legitimately not optimize for their True Dead ending up in worlds they'd decrypt faster if they knew the hidden history.  That seems like a legitimately hard call.  By the same token, you could say that there is an afterlife in dath ilan, which most people didn't know about and our Keepers probably did infer in a very general way, namely, people like me ending up places that turned out to be here.  It's not Hell, but I'm not having much fun right now.  And Civilization did the correct thing about that by cryopreserving almost-everyone so that they almost-entirely wouldn't end up in places nobody could predict."

"I think - this is hard to describe.  Our world's physics, 'laws of reality', is much more closed, 'systemically closed', than Golarion's physics.  We know all of it, it is a single equation.  It is contrary to the character of that physical law for us to easily trade with other stars.  There's - when I came to Golarion, I didn't worry about the correct things, because Golarion was such a different place.  If you were suddenly transported to dath ilan, you wouldn't worry about the correct things either."

"Civilization thought of possibilities like your worries, as appropriate to dath ilan rather than Golarion, and defended against them.  There is a powerful beacon far away where it would not be easy to destroy, emitting an invisible force akin to light but wider.  That beacon, it's been passed down, marks the moment when history was erased, and sends signals spaced in a way that makes it easy to identify when that moment was.  There is only one beacon like that, not eighty, and it's very loud so we wouldn't miss the others.  If somebody said we had to erase our past again and destroy the beacon, I think people would be a lot more suspicious at that point.  That's the point where it starts to look like somebody is trying to hide something, or fool future generations, and not just respond to a strange threat in a way where they're happy to let you take all the precautions required to make sure nobody's fooling anybody."

"I think the basic idea you're missing here is possibly something like - the degree to which it's possible for a huge number of people to make a decision, and know that it was their decision, using paper-cryptographic-protocols and so on.  You think in terms of a small number of people being able to command the rest.  Not in terms of an argument where everyone evaluates it and comes to the same answer because everyone has been trained in the same rules of generally valid argumentation, and then people can act in unison from there."

"People want very many weird things! If aliens came to Golarion with an alien mind-virus, even if everyone were sure the decision was theirs, the decision would not be close to unanimous, even if they followed the same rules of reasoning. It is true that they don't because all people except me and my wife and some of our smarter children are idiots. But even if they did, some would say 'submit to the aliens' and some would say 'destroy the aliens' and some would say 'unleash Rovagug' and some would say 'have sex with the aliens' and some would say 'screen off our history' and some would say 'evacuate the planet', and they would not agree, even if they followed the rules of arguing, any more than gods agree even though gods follow all the rules of arguing."