Cam hands over the letters.

Aitim reads. And sighs.

"Is Kantil actually funding the island in an ongoing way?"

"The government gets paid off the interest from an endowment they set up."

"...can he withdraw it?"

"Depends how he set it up. Probably, if he were highly motivated. Kantil knows the laws around that kind of thing inside and out and the laws around that kind of thing usually have loopholes for if you really want them."

"Isn't that similar to the complaint Telkam has about blues?"

" - not particularly. Telkam doesn't like people having power over other people, but I don't think he considers 'not paying for people to do things you disapprove of' to be a kind of exercising power over them, definitely not when they've got a basic income. His complaint about blues is that everything is set up to enable blues to hold and use power at little cost to them and therefore they end up doing it all the time."

"I mean, the availability of a loophole to cut off everybody's money that they're relying on if they don't run the island how he likes."

"If he were around I would argue that with him but I think he'd say 'they can set up their own island if they want one with an aristocracy'."

"Can they?"

"He did teach them summoning, so I guess so?"

"Well, 'teach'."

"You'd know more than I, presumably. The island was demon-supplied and has stayed supplied."

Nod.

"Might be hard to pay for a different one, I suppose - I'm not even sure whether to expect this to come up, people certainly want the country to have a nice normal blue government but they seem to be getting along fine despite the sanctions..."

Nod.

"That's how we got a universal blue aristocracy in the first place, you know, a few rich places had it and then blues elsewhere realized a revolution would probably have external support and smart rulers of other castes either deliberately married blue or else just married their children to foreign rulers' children for all the usual reasons and ended up with blue grandchildren..."

"It's weird how much you game this system while being so wedded to it."

"People are very good at rationalization."

"Yeah."

"And most people don't really know the history, if you asked around they'd just tell you 'it outcompeted all the other systems'."

"Which it did, just not in a well-leveled playing field."

"In international politics there's really no such thing as a level playing field, everything's all interconnected. It could as easily have been - not any other color, there was already some differentiation at that stage that'd have made it hard for there to be a cascade of orange coups, but certainly several other colors."

"Which?"