"We found out you existed a month ago. I don't care what you tell everybody else, I just need one person who is capable of acting on their own interests and who has an interest in this going smoothly."

"I think you might want to care what I tell everybody else. It affects the fallout of your clumsiness."

"Perhaps I should clarify: I am sure you can tell everybody something that gets them up in arms and resentful and inclined to sabotage us at every turn, and this would inconvenience me a little bit, but I believe you that you care about your society and that is very much not in the interests of your society and so I expect you'll do better than that."

"I'm not threatening to start riots, I'm telling you that if I describe you in one way and then you suddenly behave in another because you didn't read our history or make a coherent plan or spend the last month doing anything other than polishing your accent I do not think you will like the result."

"By all means describe to me how to act to get a result I like."

"If you have ambitions other than terrifying arbitrary tyranny you will need to work out what results you will like along the lines of 'no, life in prison is not an acceptable substitute' in advance."

"Okay. We would like everybody's lives to not suck. A result in which some people endure horribly unpleasant conditions should probably be really really necessary to avoid something worse."

"But you don't care if their lives suck because their country disintegrated around them, or because you don't know how to handle people of our species once you've carried them into space...?"

"Those are also unacceptable outcomes, but there are more things we can do to prevent and mitigate and fix them."

"Oh? What are you doing on that front, if I offered you twelve thousand assorted reds and prisoners and would-be-emigrants right now what is your plan?"

"Take them to Endorë - Valinor might not have enough tolerance for disobedience and misbehavior to be a good place for your species - give them a choice of local governments there which want them and a stipend conditional on settling in and behaving themselves, assign a thousand people to helping them integrate and handling problems as they arise and identifying mismatches in expectations before they escalate, see under which local governments they seem to do the best with the least friction."

"And you have the means to do that right now without any of them suffering in the interim from lack of food, water, medicine, entertainment, law enforcement? You can deal with them wanting to go back for interminable chains of family members and their children's toys? If you get prisoners who were hoping for a turnaround at their next appeal you can soothe them? I'm developing the impression that an actual society per se is so unnecessary for your species that you only bother having one so some of you can go around holding royal title for fun."

"Is a large part of the business of your state soothing the wounded feelings of your citizens, I'd missed that. What do you do for families after you murder their children?"

"Sarcasm is unbecoming," she says. "If the boy's family were inclined to foment broader dissent they would be subject to appropriate punishments for that, too, but apparently imprisonment is torture - for most of the citizenry a day without Internet access is torture, we're having actual problems maintaining order under the radio jam, but you didn't crack a book before coming here so I suppose that's a surprise."

"That'd be true at home - well, we wouldn't have trouble maintaining order, but we'd be hearing about it. We're working on ending the war, and we wish it could be done faster."

"Since you seem to think that will take only a week and we are hardly the obstacle, maybe you should do that first and then come here, when there will be more room to maneuver."

"Will I come back to find that more people I like have been executed?"

"I don't know, who are you inclined to like besides treasonous purple teenagers?"

"Everyone I've met - not Riado, actually, especially, but I'd still be upset about his murder."

Sigh. "If it will get you to end the war and do nonzero research before attempting to bludgeon my society into something more utopia-shaped, I can probably push stays of execution for everyone in the Tower now."

"Done. Thank you."

She smiles insincerely.

"Anything else, or should I head back and end the war first?"

"I could loan you some books, if you actually mean to do research."

"I'd appreciate it. - we haven't done nothing, but technology and ecology are easier to assess from the air than history."