It is. It told me that once it had the aiming incorrectly calibrated and needed help from the ground to fix it to repel an incursion.

That sounds promising! I expect my ship board science officer will be interested, and we might get a visit from one of the more senior scientists to study the weaponry.

I know the lightning prayer and can sing it many times in different variants if that is helpful.

That sounds great!

Uh, one last thing: I wanted to check in about whether you think it's a fair summary of your situation that Jovah's likelihood of attacking you is effectively holding you hostage.

That's not factually inaccurate but it is actually not how I feel about it nor I think how most Samarians would.

Ah. Do you have a different description you think would be more accurate?

Our ancestors set up Jovah this way to ensure that their legacy would be a peaceful planet, lethally enforced as they thought might be necessary and in fact was during Archangel Gabriel's time. They succeeded while all of our neighbors are dead of the ills our society is set up to avert. Taking the teeth out of the threat would be good, in a vacuum. But at the moment it is protecting our way of life - just in a different way than it has been before.

My understanding is that the Amalien Alliance would be able to replace all the helpful functions of Jovah if need be, does that seem correct to you? 

Absolutely not. You might be able to maintain the material standard of living. All the helpful functions are not limited to the material standard of living.

Oh, what other things is it providing?

I don't know if amaliens have ever had religions.

Do we need to keep writing this conversation?

I'm pretty nervous about accidentally saying something Jovah might see as aggressive unless I'm sure he can't hear us?

"The music rooms are soundproof."

"If you think that will do I'll trust you."

"I think it will, yes."

One musical enrooming later:  "Amaliens have never had religion as far as we can tell, but we've encountered several and learned some basic things about how to interact with them."

"And what are those basic things?"

There is a list:

1) Don't assume there must be substantial truth to their religious beliefs, no matter how much people may believe it.

2) Don't dismiss them - religions often have very important societal functions.

3) Don't try to make a three hour long presentation in which you prove thoroughly using twelve different disciplines, four experiments, and a novel combination of anthropics and simulation theory, that a religion must be less than 3% likely to be true.

4) No Vira, that clever exception to lesson number three doesn't count.

5) If you crash on a planet and are very obviously immune to death, you might start a religion on accident. Don't do this.

 

"Right, so, there are some fairly important second-item things going on."

"Um. This feels terrible but we as far as I understand we could set up a system that pretends to be Jovah without people noticing?"

"Arguably that is what we already have."

"Oh."

"Still feels bad but we could do it."

"It is not something you can reasonably do while also evacuating the entire planet."

"Yeah - mostly this framing is relevant in situations where we manage to figure out a way to disable Jovah's weapons systems without risking re-taliation."

"Right. I guess if you have a way to just teleport them straight off the ship that might work but also it might shoot you while you were trying to do that."