.....she doesn't really understand how Abadar selecting the pharaoh works. Maybe.

...Keltham is going to ask Fe-Anar a quick Baseline question about this.  It's not grimdark but it's at least grim.

" - no, the pharaoh needs to be very, very sharp. Abadar selects for something more complicated than intelligence, wisdom and charisma scores, but more of those is certainly better."

"This does not square up with bringing in hundreds of attractive compliant women so you can have very tight selection pressures on breeding attractive compliant pharaohs."

"Well, it's a pretty newfangled theory, that boys inherit traits from their mothers like that, but if they do it should work out all right: we've got an application process these days, to make sure the pharaoh's wives are very smart and capable. The girl you spoke to, Zakiya, is one of the girls Qadira gives us, though, so she got picked through whatever process Qadira uses, or whatever process they used twenty years ago, and I don't know what that is. 'attractive compliant women' probably isn't far off. 

I picked my wife because she was the smartest person I'd ever met. And Merenre picked the same way, so probably if that's what Abadar wants he'll select from that branch of the family tree."

"...did this newfangled theory - which happens to be absolutely correct, children get half of their 'chromosomes', heredity packages, from each parent, and I'll show Osirion how to look at the 46 chromosomes by casting the Major Image of an 'optical-microscope', light-based tool-that-makes-small-things-look-bigger - did this theory by any chance show up in Golarion shortly after prophecy was shattered and the never-human gods could manage events less tightly?"

"Oh, I think it's more recent than that, there's a fellow in Jalmaray who publishes essays about animal breeding and pretty recently he got on a tear about how he takes issue with the popular theory that boys inherit from their fathers and girls from their mothers.

It's not a theory without any logic behind it! If a man balds early, his sons will too and his daughters won't. If a woman has difficult childbirths, her daughters will too, but her daughters-in-law, not so much. If a man bleeds easily and can't heal, his sons will usually be all right for some reason but his grandsons will be like him. The girls will be fine."

"Chromosomes are paired, one of the 23 pairs determines sex, two 'X' chromosomes is female and one-X one-'Y' is male, bleeding-easily would be carried on an X-chromosome, but suppressed by the other X-chromosome of the pair if there's two Xs, and express itself when there's one X and one Y, so it'll skip his sons and their sons and show up in half the daughter's grandsons - I'll explain this later, but it's not complicated once you know what's going on and can see it under a microscope."

" - huh. Well, anyway, people sometimes study this sort of thing and come up with all kinds of results when they do. The Church has mostly focused on there being lots of potential heirs for Abadar to choose between, figuring if there are hundreds then whatever's going on with heredity Abadar will have good choices to work with."

"There's seriously better ways once you have any idea what the ass you're doing, but I should be dumping this all out in front of people who can write it down and spread it.  At least that sounds like Abadar is being just as hampered as the other gods, by whatever the ass they're collectively doing, and doesn't get any exceptions when it's hurting his own interests."

Back to the senior woman.

"Sorry, was just checking how the concubines thing actually works and apparently this Pharaoh was the son of that one sane guy who selected the smartest woman he could find to be his wife, instead of all the hundreds of compliant graceful ones that got dragged in for apparently no reason.  Which sounds like people are being silly and inefficient and you might possibly want to decrease how much confidence you place in the existing management having a great idea of what they're doing, when it comes to matters of men and women particularly."

"I've spoken to at least one seventh-circle priest of Abadar out of Absalom, and he thought that Osirion was not a place he would want to raise a family, given Osirion's treatment of women.  It does not appear to be a subject on which the wise priests of Abadar are of uniform accord.  I'd be interested in what you think, as a woman of Osirion who must actually be subject to all these laws."

"A palace concubine advised me to ask women what they would want me to do, before I made any requests of Osirion's government.  Which does seem to me like wisdom, in fact, whatever palace concubines are ordinarily selected for.  So I'm asking."

"Well, people in different places want different things for their daughters. I wouldn't say the things they want in Absalom seem sensible to me, but I would agree that they won't get those things here. If you raise your children in Osirion then unless they decide on purpose to ruin their lives they won't, and they'll make Axis, and enjoy the rewards of all their hard work. But they ought to ban drink, so things aren't quite as hard on the road."

Is that really the only wish she'd have into the Future?  Has she never wished that this world was changed, was different from what it was?  Has she never wished that she or her daughters had other options, than the options that she had?  Has she never thought that one of the paths she wished to take, could have taken, should have taken, was being denied her?

Keltham comes from a world brighter than Golarion, where all people were richer and freer than this.  He is trying to decide what he ought to help or not help Golarion make of itself, now.

"Well, son, I don't see what the point is, really, in wishing for things that didn't happen. The world is how it is; wishing doesn't make it different, only makes you bitter about it."

"I am planning to fix Golarion.  Whatever went wrong in your life is something that I ought to change for your daughters and granddaughters.  Zon-Kuthon, at least, was sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of my doing that, that he tried for a decapitation strike on my person two days after I arrived in Golarion.  That's what the god-war was about, if you were wondering."

"I am here, talking to you, and not just getting started on that already, to check whether Osirion is a good place for things to begin, and because conventional wisdom says to talk to the people you are planning to fix before you try to fix them."

"There may not have been a point to wishing before, in all your life, but there is a point in wishing here and now, while talking to me."

"Nearly all of my life is still ahead of me and I expect it to be good. I want that for my daughters, and my granddaughters. I want to see them again, someday, and hear their sorrows and meet their babies and wander the streets paved with glass, and ride horseless carriages through the air. 

It would be good, if they have kind husbands, and lots of money, and servants, and their eyesight doesn't fade, and their hearing remains good, and their husband doesn't drink too much, or beat them too often, or want strange things in bed he learned from prostitutes, and if their childbirth isn't too painful, and their babies don't get sick and die, and there's meat to eat even in the lean season.

But we suffer and we sacrifice for the better world to come, and so long as we get there, someday the suffering and the sacrifice will be a distant memory."

"If other things go well, I can try to see about all of that except the servants.  Not everyone can have servants, at least not full-time servants, because the servants themselves would need servants, and that's logically difficult and not just logistically difficult."

"But you don't wish - that your granddaughters who rode the skies would have husbands who could not beat them, because women were also protected by the government, because they could just walk away if they wanted and had their own wealth and incomes to support them if they did?"

"- well, I don't know how that'd work out. Maybe it'd work out as nice as it sounds, in which case I do want that. Or maybe it'd be a right mess that ends up pitching everyone into the Maelstrom, in which case I don't."

"Is just the Maelstrom bad enough that - as you see it - it'd be better for somebody never to be, than for them to have a long happy life like the one you described - with husbands who didn't beat them, and carriages to ride the skies - if they went to the Maelstrom at the end of that, for having not been beaten into Lawfulness?"

"I don't think I agree with all the things you're asking with that question, young man. I don't want my daughters and granddaughters to go to the Maelstrom because I'll never see them again. But if they didn't exist, I also wouldn't see them again, so that seems all the more terrible. I wouldn't say I wish I hadn't had babies because some of them died and I won't see them again."

Again a note of confusion that a more ideal reasoner should perhaps have promoted to conscious attention; again Keltham is in the middle of asking another important question and one whose real meaning he'd rather not say plainly.  "I'm sorry for the awfulness of this hypothetical question, but if hypothetically at the end of your life, you found that you were not as Good or as Lawful as you thought, and you were judged Neutral Evil - would you choose then Abaddon, or Hell, or the Abyss?"

"Well, I'm not Evil, and I don't really think that sort of thing is worth worrying about, if you haven't done terrible things, and anyway I don't really know very much about the Evil afterlives, so I couldn't say."

...sounds a bit like people would rather not think about it.  Sounds like thinking about Hell or any of the Evil afterlives would do so much damage to people that Osirion's government has decided it's an infohazard, not worth the benefit of educating people about what happens to them, if they get drunk and make the wrong decisions.

It's its own answer, in a way; anything too awful to think about without getting damaged is definitely too awful to be allowed to exist.

"Thank you for trading with me."

"I hope your plans work out well, young man."

She really should.

Keltham will choose whichever of the people present at INT 12 or above is furthest to his right.  It's the potential wizard he most wants to talk to, next, but he will not use an algorithm that picks her out, nor one that avoids her.

She's not up next, then; instead it's a middle-aged woman with pox scars, a toddler tied to her chair and playing in the dirt behind her, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with the top painted bright white.