"Sounds good. But it might be a couple weeks or months before you have a result."

"We checked with someone who'd been sentenced to death."

"- doesn't come up very often."

"Congratulations."

He looks slightly confused. 

"My country executes people for lots of things."

"Spellbinder murderers who've got something that'd make them impossible to contain."

"More things than that."

"Amenta has some virtues," says Cam, "that's not one of them."

"What're they good at?"

"They're fine with gay people and other irregularities in that vein, which my world took a while on and Elves haven't figured out either. Aitim's particular country is pretty good at incentive-respecting policy, if not, like, mercy or anything fancy like that. They don't hold with everybody personally owning an automobile and driving it around, even rich people."

"I'm not even sure that'd be faster than the train and it'd be so obnoxious. I think Amentans are good at collective action problems. Some places have gender discrimination and skin color discrimination and so on, we don't have that. We go to war way less often than our incentives point to war, though still sometimes."

"You don't have skin colors. Not consistently, anyway."

"Okay, if we had them we would probably manage to discriminate off them."

"I don't know what a train or an automobile is. What objections do you have to mercy -"

"Well, until recently resources were very zero-sum. Now we're - conducting a trial of not executing people for manslaughter, we'll see what it does to deterrence."

"Isn't manslaughter the kind of crime you'd hardly expect to be - responsive to the sentence - since they didn't deliberately kill someone in the first place?"

"We will see."

"They're obsessed with babies. His dad tried to convince his mom to have another one and it was like watching him wave a slice of cheesecake under her nose or something. They sell the right to have kids and everybody who survives committing a crime is some sad family - I found this incredibly maudlin painting -" He pulls up a picture of it on his computer. Purple woman, purple husband a bit taller behind her; his head on her shoulder and hands over her flat belly, her arms cradling nothingness, both of them palpably miserable against a beautiful springtime background with flowers and butterflies.

" - huh. ...how would you even sell the right to have kids -"

"Uh, they've invented birth control. I can make sure your world's humans are similar enough to copy preexisting human solutions while I'm investigating malaria."

"That sounds really useful! - are there seven of you," he asks Aitim.

"Yeah. We could afford a lot of credits."

"Seems a little antisocial, honestly, think of the maudlin paintings."

"Some people who could afford a third or fourth stop so other people can have a chance but you'd have to be awfully altruistic."