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And, of course, the immediate effect is that Altarrin notices several ways in which he's been reasoning stupidly. 

(This spell by itself continues to be - actually pretty unpleasant to experience - but on its own, he suspects it would feel less like waking-up-after-dying than it did when combined with the headband. And he doesn't think he needs the working memory boost as badly; for one, he's caught up on sleep now. And it might matter that he can bounce ideas off Carissa, who has substantial context on dath ilan that she hasn't conveyed to him yet, even if she too is seeing it at a remove.) 

There isn't an obvious answer, is the first thing he notices. He just doesn't know enough; he's making inferences based on shadows cast on a wall and then reflected across a hazy mirror, and anything he can come up with is fundamentally a guess, filtered through his own priors and understanding of the world. 

But, even taking that into account - 

 

- what is dath ilan trying to achieve? 

The same way that the Empire tries to teach all of its schoolchildren to read and write, dath ilan tries to teach all of its schoolchildren to - what. To use the decision theory gods use, is how Carissa put it. To shape themselves and their minds such that their precommitments would show up in Foresight, legible to the gods. A way of thinking about one's own decision-process that Altarrin recognized, and Carissa didn't disagree with his assessment. 

(And they their children into cohorts, which might or might not matter, it seems self-evident to Altarrin just in terms of good pedagogy, but Carissa brought it up specifically, and he suspects it wasn't self-evident to Cheliax– side point, he can worry about it later.) 

When a young dath ilani winds up in Cheliax, and the authorities order their best and brightest to learn from him, this results in more heresies than most projects would tolerate. Up to and including a student of Keltham's deciding to defect and personally oppose the god they once served. And Altarrin suspects Carissa isn't saying everything. 

Corollary: the Eastern Empire, for all that he wants to argue that it's a better place to live than a country under the dominion of the god of Hell, is similar in enough ways. It would destabilize things, if you tried to run a single important project that taught its members these reasoning techniques, let alone if you taught them to all schoolchildren everywhere - 

 

- but dath ilan isn't unstable. Dath ilan is tidy and organized, prosperous and technologically advanced beyond what he could have imagined possible before now.

They taught them all to question society but they all ended up at the same answers, is what Carissa said. 

There are a lot of possible explanations, including that dath ilani natives only look human but have fundamentally different minds, but, but even holding that in mind - 

- it feels like a civilization that was skillfully built to be a certain way on purpose. 

What purpose. 

 

Well, if everyone is taught to reason - the way that gods do, (that's not quite right but he's going to keep using it as a mental shorthand for now), they're going to notice discrepancies, you couldn't run a stable Empire off propaganda and incentives to lie, but at the same time your people are more legible and more predictable - 

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And so if you have sufficiently precise control of what the people can perceive in the world around them (for example, if your civilization has destroyed all records of its history, at presumably an absurd cost) - and if the 'Keepers', the elite class in power and working behind the scenes and still allowed to know the secrets of the past, also know even more of the relevant 'decision theory' - then maybe it's not surprising or hard to imagine at all, to have a society where everyone is taught to question authority and notice when things don't make sense, and also they predictably come to the same answers. 

Setting up an education system on that scale is expensive. (Altarrin should know; he's tried it.) Concealing all records of your history has to be even more expensive. And on the surface, it feels like those should be in tension, why would the leaders of dath ilan invest in both...? 

What does the universal education in 'decision theory' achieve: making people legible to gods, giving them a path to grow up into the kinds of entity that can cooperate with gods.

(but Keltham didn't think that dath ilan had gods)

(but Carissa thought that could be the point of the history-concealing, that dath ilan did have gods, and wanted to shut them out) 

(but if you wanted to prevent gods from affecting your civilization, to do the better smarter more thorough version of what it turns out he's been trying to do all along with the Eastern Empire and failed at, then why would it help for your citizens to be painstakingly taught to be more legible to those gods -) 

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And it's suddenly clear (though his mind is still flagging that this is only one possible explanation among many). 

A clever strategic leader might both of those things, if their goal was to build a more human-aligned god, while avoiding interference from an existing set of gods that could see through and work through every mortal alive. 

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That's brilliant and, if it's true, he's incredibly impressed that they pulled it off. 

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Aaaaand he should actually communicate this to Carissa. Ideally while he still time left on Owl's Wisdom, but he didn't think to ask for time-markers from her and he has very little idea. 

"Carissa, I have a hypothesis about what dath ilan is doing and why - how much time left on the spell -?" 

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"Three minutes." She should learn Extend Spell, if she's the only wizard in the world; it's going to get annoying otherwise.

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(Altarrin is, again, not going to know what she's thinking unless she communicates it out loud to him. He badly misses previous lifetimes when he had his own Thoughtsensing Gift, right now, though mostly because having projective Mindspeech would make it feel much easier to communicate his current thoughts to Carissa.) 

"Right. So - this is obviously only one way of putting together the fragments we know, it might be obviously wrong to you since you know more than I do, but I think we should both remember that neither of us knows enough to be confident -

- Having noted that. It seems that dath ilan invested very heavily in training all of their people, starting from early childhood, to be - more legible to gods and more able to cooperate with gods, which inevitably involves being more able to cooperate with other mortals. And, separately, they screened off all information about their history before a certain point. That must have been an enormous sacrifice even for a very wealthy civilization. And...observably they do not have a problem with - with dissidents and rebellions. So it seems those forces balance out, but both would require significant ongoing resource investments." 

(He still doesn't want to use the word 'heresy', it's too strongly tinged by religion and gods.) 

"The obvious -" pause, "- at least, one potential obvious explanation, is that the Keepers are dealing with some existing, less-than-ideal god or gods, and are working on building a new god, more aligned with mortal interests. And so they need their populace to be - prepared to work with that god - but they also need to hide all of their activities from the current gods. If their pre-existing gods had Foresight or something equivalent, I think that screening off all historical information, as well as concealing the project's existence from the general population, would be enough to protect them. ...Enough, but not overkill, whereas it seems excessive for any other goal I can imagine."   

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" - huh. 

That might be it. We threw the idea around, but lacking prophecy in our own world, we didn't make the connection that the history-screening would suffice to protect against it. I still don't see exactly how."

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"I am not sure it would actually work, or be sufficient, or whether it would be the best solution for minimizing cost while maximizing effectiveness - I suspect that calculation relies on specifics of their world that neither of us know - but, in my own experience, at least in hindsight, banning active worshippers of any gods substantially reduced Their disruptions, and further excluding knowledge of the gods, even among people who hated Them, had additional benefits."

He stops. Frowns. (Tries to think faster, because he's about to become much less able to think at all.)

"- I was never able to go further than that, in practice, but. From what I understand, or at least my guesses, of how Foresight works, it leans heavily on - accessible causal history. Even deep within the Empire, our gods can still nudge events, but I suspect this is because They have prior information. And that if we burned all of the books," (MISERY AND HORROR), "and raised a new generation without any of that background, in an area that the gods could already see and affect less - then I think that would leave Them even more blind." 

(This is the point at which Owl's Wisdom runs out, and he's suddenly even more exhausted - and he feels helpless, in a way that cannot possibly be strategic-)

Sigh. 

"Probably. I - would not previously have thought it could possibly be worth the cost." 

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"I don't like what it made dath ilan, but it was - very wealthy, very safe. They even let people read their banned books! They had special banned bookstores for them, and called them just 'ill-advised' books. Mostly, of course, they shaped people to not want to read them, but they must've been very sure of their shaping, to allow that."

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"....Huh." 

Mostly what he's thinking right now is that he hates it. 

(And yet it's not worse than anything he's seen in the last seven hundred years in Velgarth)

Dath ilan's leadership is more competent, sure. He wishes his people (or he himself) could be that competent - and he still doesn't fully understand what dath ilan was doing differently, and it seems important, knowing how to succeed at a project on the level of "destroying all records of history", whether or not it's a good strategy, it's at least a good - test of a civilization's tactical skills - 

 

 

(He wants to read all of dath ilan's banned books, which is perhaps one of the most pointless desires he's ever had.) 

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"Well, it seems that I could learn a great deal from dath ilan - whether I agree with their general ethical philosophy or not, and I suspect I would not. But - whatever you remember, I think it could be potentially valuable for solving the problems we face here." 

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"I took very good notes. I can walk you through it starting today, if you want, if we're safe here - are we safe here?"

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Altarrin starts to answer, and then stops and actually thinks about it. 

(This would have been way smoother if he still has the WIS-enhancement, but he's trying not to get into the habit of - framing it such that his real self is the WIS-enhanced version, that seems like an unhelpful direction.) 

"...I am quite confident that we will be safe here for at least a day or two, if all we are doing is thinking. My sense is that the gods do not respond quickly even to threats that show up clearly in Foresight - which I am not sure this would, as long as we are only thinking and talking, and not making plans or passing messages to anyone else - and we are rather hard to access here via any of the less expensive-god-intervention methods that involve working through Their followers. I suppose They could still cause an earthquake, but given my Gate-reaction-times and your general resistance to injury, I expect we could survive even that." 

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"Am I harder to injure than a powerful spellcaster generally is, here?"

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"It appears so? I had been guessing it was something to do with innate shielding, but of a type that was not clearly visible to mage-Sight. You were not obviously shielded when I took down your - I am not sure what you call it - the concealment spell that made you appear as though you were an air-elemental? - but you were not injured nearly as badly as we expected. ...Also my Healers told me that your life-force was unusually bright and vibrant, I was especially unsure what to make of that, but - it seemed to point in the same direction, that you are somehow unusually resilient." 

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"I'm almost a fifth circle caster. I am, at home, about as resilient as that implies, which is - much more than a commoner, certainly. In dath ilan no one was particularly resilient, it was like they were all commoners from how Keltham described it."

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"I see." Again, he looks animated and alive and like this might be one of the most interesting conversations he's had in the last century. "...I think this is another of the differences between our worlds that I expected we would continue to encounter! Our magic does not work that way at all. Healers are more physically resilient, and of course mages are harder to injure in the first place, but - it sounds as though your world has something separate from that?" 

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"Keltham was going to study it and probably figure it out, before - before we damaged him too badly to really believe in truth at all. The fact it shows up to your 'healing-sight' as 'life-force' is interesting. You get more of it through using magic, if you're a caster, in dangerous situations, with your life at risk. I also made some progress while my life wasn't at risk I was just being tortured a lot."

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....Now is not the time to ask questions about the part where she was tortured. It's - not even particularly new information. 

 

It's probably also not - 

- no, actually, that does seem important. 

 

"...I apologize, I - suspect you find this hard to talk about when it is so recent,"

like he finds it hard to talk about the Cataclysm, not that it was recent at all, it was seven hundred years ago and Carissa's experience was within the last month,

"- But. What did you do to Keltham, who was raised in dath ilan, to - to cause him to stop believing in things being true as a concept? That - if I am right about how dath ilan trains their children, that ought be incredibly hard to do?" 

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" - I mean hopefully he won't be like that forever but we lied to him comprehensively about almost every feature of the world he lived in, for months, and concealed what Hell was like for him, and then when he tried to leave manufactured a fake escape that would've kept him in our power. So. It makes sense, that he was very very damaged, by the end."

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"I...

 

"- I am noticing that this thought seems questionable, and might be obviously wrong if I still had the Owl's Wisdom enhancement, but - on some level I think I would handle that better? As - even as someone who did not grow up in dath ilan and did not learn any of their 'decision theory' from anyone else, and had to figure it out on my own - 

 

"- I suppose I would not necessarily have handled it better, overall, in my first lifetime. I would have handled it differently but that is not even an interesting claim." 

 

(And Carissa's description feels off and - incomplete - maybe if he still had Owl's Wisdom he would be able to pin down how or why. Obviously some of the how-and-why is that Carissa's relationship with Keltham, and the ending to it, were deeply traumatic for her, but - he doesn't understand enough to back out what she would really mean in the absence of that...) 

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"I would take a different angle if I were in charge of seducing you, yes. I think - most people would've been harmed differently from how Keltham was. But I could've predicted how it'd hit him if I'd thought about it."

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Nod. (It's not a priority right now to ask her what angle she would take, if she were seducing him, though if he had Thoughtsensing in this body he would absolutely be reading her mind about it.) 

"- That makes sense. I think this was a digression, anyway - I had asked you to explain what you learned from Keltham, you said you had notes, but you wanted to know if we were safe here and I explained my current sense of our safety. If you have further questions about safety, I can answer them, but otherwise I do still want to hear what you learned from Keltham," 

His body language is noticeably more closed-off than it was a few seconds ago. 

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