"We're discussing places for you to go. I should talk with you about all of this at some point but it can wait, time runs funny in Milliways."

"...okay." She pets Cricket. Cricket purrs.

"Questions about the history books?"

"It says I'm not queen. Why?"

"You decided a democratic system was stabler. More - the sort of country where people could be sure they'd wake up to the same thing the next day."

She frowns to herself and nods and reads on.

They pass notes.

We can sit on the new world for a few years, we don't have to rush it, but she needs to be living with Amentans by the time she's four. Most ways of handling the Empire which come to mind do require my government, we'd need an army to stabilize things in the aftermath of dismantling it.

Even with daeva?

Daeva can win the war part with no casualties inside an hour. For the aftermath - I would like Calado not to exist, and that requires a persistent stabilizing force of some kind while new governments set themselves up. Maybe we can do it without an Amentan army, and it'd be better if we could, but I can't think offhand how we'd get that many people.

The Elves?

Don't know much about them. Have the advantage of being ours, I guess. Have the disadvantage of being weird.

What's the deal with Calado?

The Oahk Empire does child credits on a permissions system. I think they'd keep that up even if they had enough space they didn't have to do credits at all - they're such a useful tool for coercing your populace, you see - anyway, perimissions systems get you lots of people vying desperately to come to the attention of their peers or of their government, because it's the only way to get kids, which gets you constant policy lunacy and everything that fails can be pinned on someone lower-down. We're handling them in our world by letting people emigrate but only because war is really bad and not justified just because a place is a complete fiasco, it'd be much safer for the universe if it never got to be a fiasco in the first place. If Calado got daeva I would not expect the world to last two weeks.

Oh dear.

It's a catastrophe. Doesn't make sense to let it happen again. But - 'occupying soldiers, new rules, you're safe if you follow them' is something everyone understands. 'daeva, new rules, not clear how they're monitoring or enforcing' is terrifying and less effective and also just less tried. We know how much force you need to pacify and stabilize a place by conventional means. With daeva we'd be experimenting. 

What's the casualty rate in the standard version?

Depends on troop discipline. With ours, the overall murder rate will be down from baseline for a permissions-based system but it's pretty rare for bad soldiers to get into real trouble. Daeva forensics would reduce that.

Are there farther-reaching implications, if Calado and other countries eventually learn how you handled this earlier Amenta?

I'm sure everyone'll get even more upset about not having Milliways access to go interact with their past worlds. They might worry we're tempted to do it in the present.

Wouldn't you be?

Doubt it. We're in trade negotiations with the Federation and they'd be deeply unimpressed, it'd up the odds of someone else figuring out daeva in desperation, no one currently existing is anywhere near as bad as the Oahk Empire and we have more nonviolent avenues to make them better...

What's the Oahk/Calado relationship exactly?

Calado is one of the states the empire disintegrated into. So is the Free State of Oahk itself, but it's - slightly less of a shitshow on the international affairs level, I am not sure if it's actually any less horrible to live in. 

Gotcha.

This Amenta has probably already been derailed if Avalor is a politically important figure.

Crucial. And I wouldn't want to not derail it, forty years is a really long time to make people suffer just for - some small measure of hard-won political maturity. We've got to figure out some other way to get it.