"Oh! Huh, you're younger than me! What a strange thing - to have such a young world, but know that you're not going to die. I can't even imagine what kind of society that would produce. If there are enough people, is that expensive enough in itself that you can eventually stop following all the laws?"

"Maybe? Depends. There are certain categories of actions that create friction between the gears of the universe, and the resulting excess energy is what sustains life. If people do enough of these friction-causing activities without any direction, then the laws will probably become obsolete. I don't know if this is the case, though. My interest isn't theology, so I have only a vague grasp of it.

How old are you, actually?"

"Sixty. Too old to do nothing, too young to do anything, we like to say."

"That's an interesting expression. Most sixty year olds in my country either have children or are about to. Are you married?"

"No one gets married until at least a hundred fifty, here. Why do people marry so young in your world, if they live forever?"

"By no one," Gimlith says mildly, "she means no one Elrosian, the rest of us only live eighty years."

"We marry 'young' because people used to die frequently and unpredictably. A new plague or war or drought would sweep through, and half the population would keel over. It was considered important to get your baby-making out of the way with while you still could, and if you were still alive later, then you could do whatever else your life was going to involve. Plus it was hard to wait to have sex and, before there was contraception, the best way to deal with that was to get married. So, for most of our history, people got married and started having children some time between twenty and thirty. Nowadays, in our world of contraceptives and antibiotics and twenty year courses of education, there is pressure to wait longer and longer to have children. However, the starting point was so low that it should be quite a while before people think one hundred and fifty is a natural time to start a family."

"We do it to imitate Elves, and because if your children are fully grown and only a little younger than you then inheritance doesn't work very well."

"As in monetary inheritance? You inherit wealth while your parents are still alive?"

"No, mostly positions and titles and responsibilities, and you inherit them when your parents die but if you're only fifty years younger than your parents then the titles would change hands all the time, it'd be horribly destabilizing."

"Heh. Imagine living in a republic. The public trusts of my country change hands every three years."

"No wonder you've had so many wars. We've never had an internal war, and we've been around three thousand years as a nation."

"...Actually, we've had fewer wars as more of our nations have become republics. My country has been a republic for about hundred and fifty years, and only had one serious uprising during that time. Before that, we were a monarchy for seven hundred years and, in that time, there were nineteen violent power-struggles for the throne, plus a bunch of local ones. Whatever difference has made our world more inclined to war is almost certainly unrelated to our (relatively recent) republicanism. I would be more inclined to blame food insecurity, which I suspect is greater for obligate-predators than for people who can eat plants."

"Maybe. But we've been a monarchy for thousands with no problems. Monarchies work badly if the transitions in power are frequent or if the King isn't obviously legitimate. Maybe your problem is that your Nashi didn't say who should be in charge."

"Well, Zifartas are only a minority of my country's population so, even if he had said who should be in charge, the rest of the country probably wouldn't have listened. Anyway, republics generally solve the second problem well enough. Very few people would claim that the republican leadership was illegitimate, unless they believed all government to be illegitimate. However, republics require that their leaders be weak, lest that leader try to replace republicanism with monarchy. In addition, by devolving some amount of power to ordinary people, it makes each citizen very concerned with defending their slice of power and liberty. Hence the frequent replacements, and the fact that our only uprising during the republican period was to depose a government we considered too controlling."

"Presumably if your Powers made an appearance everyone would listen to them, right? How could they not? And a weak government has lots of other disadvantages, like that it'd be bad at handling external threats."

"Possibly? I'm not sure. Nashi is supposed to have appeared to three different tribes, and had each of first two reject his proposed covenant.

It's funny you should say that, given the fact that the rise of republicanism in my world was driven by external threats. Frequent wars between countries made it important to arm and mobilise the entire population. However, it turns out that, once armed, peasants are a lot less fond of being commanded by nobles. The countries that became most militarised also became the first to put constitutional limits on their monarchs or to overthrow them all together. In recent times, the republic of citizen-soldiers has been the most militarily formidable state, and its neighbours are wary of attacking it. On the other hand, it's less likely to attack its neighbours, because the people deciding whether to fight also have to do the fighting and dying and paying and rationing."

"Hmm," she says. "But if, you know, Sauron or Melkor attacked, wouldn't you want a leader who could take the nation to war, instead of a public debate over whether it was worth the taxes?"

"Republican nations are general very eager to fight invaders, so I doubt that would be a problem. What they're less predictable about is supporting their allies at war. However, even then, they're no less reliable than a fickle king."

"Fickle kings are bad," she says, "you need kings of good character."

"Of course. I'm sure we could have avoided millenia of conflict if we had only realised that, and taken a trip to the Perfect King Store at the intersection of Neverland St and Fantasy Ave."

Calm down. I can't go alienating the royals by being too dismissive of lucky-dice approach to statecraft....

"Right, so Nashi should have appointed him," she says as if this is blindingly obvious.

"You may be overestimating Nashi's interest in deciding who our rulers would be, or overestimating people's willingness to listen to him. After all, there must be some reason why he didn't do that. There have been lots of kings and emperors in our world who claimed to have the favour of various gods, and who were accompanied by a retinue who swore they'd seen the signs and heard the prophecies. Mutually contradictory claims of divine favour, mind. So I'm still sceptical of how far anyone would have gotten on Nashi's word."

She looks confused. "He should probably also punish people who lie about having divine favor, the Valar'd be furious if anyone did that."

"Nashi isn't allowed to harm any human being. The deal he made with the Azura was a specific kind of unbreakable vow, called a symmetric oath. It requires that all parties make the same pledge and compels them to abide by it. Both Nashi and the Azura pledged not to mess with the universal machinery themselves (which the Azura wouldn't have done regardless), and Nashi and the Azura all agreed not to harm humans. So now he can't go around smiting liars."

"Oh. Well, if he just said 'this person is falsely claiming to be acting on my will', then others could know not to trust or allow that. The Valar manage to make their will known without harming anyone. In fact, they usually help."