"I haven't tried that one yet. Maybe I'll like it too. I'm still new at sorcery, actually. I just learn faster than most people."

"Some people have all the luck. My Skills are hard-earned, the long way, and I'm damned proud of them."

"Self-taught, you mean?"

"Yes. Well, mostly. Never attended any school worth the name, at any rate."

"I used to be a, a bookworm*, before my people thought they needed, well, an adventurer. To rescue someone. I was trained in a lot of Skills I would need. But he came back before I was ready, so I didn't think I'd leave after all. But the choice was taken out of my hands, and now I'm just trying to make the best of things."

(*"paper-sprite")

"Making the best of the cards that you've been dealt is something everyone ought to experience sometimes, I'd say. Except I don't think everyone can do it, there's a degree of talent. Drive. I'm in a good position now, but probably exceptional in several ways - how many poor young kids grow up to own their own boat and live life on the water like they dreamed? Few."

"Mm. It's sad that you have to be lucky, to have a fulfilling life, but its nice that we both were, in different ways."

"Heh. I'm enjoying this conversation, would you be up for talking about the nature of good and evil, morality and power?"

"So, every major culture will tell you a very different story if you ask what makes something good and right. Not to mention different species. How are you supposed to decide who gets to decide what's good, then? Let each nation choose for itself? Well, then you get crusades, or just raiding parties, or plain old wars of conquest. So I don't think that's it."

"Ooh, I had a debate about this during my training. My teacher believed that the one to decide should be the one with the widest perspective and the most experience, but I thought it made more sense to abstract the decision-making process itself. No individual can decide what is good for everyone, but if you could somehow measure everyone's preferences accurately, then you could objectively calculate a meta-good. With math."

"That doesn't sound corruptible at all. There's probably spider people somewhere who can have hundreds of babies a day and overwhelm the world with - with - preference weight.

"It is just an academic exercise, admittedly, but it is interesting to think about. How would you solve the majority-rule problem?"

"I have no dragon-damned idea. I'd want to think about it for more than ten seconds. Take notes, do thought exercises, see where things stop making sense. It sounds impossible. But lots of things turn out to be possible later after all and maybe I'm just a pessimist."

"It's amazing what all turns out to be possible if you're clever enough. I did exactly what you said, and I was able to imagine a few approaches. I think that part would actually be much easier to solve than measuring preferences in the first place, though. It is a significant accomplishment to genuinely know the true heart of one other person. To systematize that..."

"-Would go against their preferences in the first place, sometimes! Such as mine."

"Exactly! That is one of the primary recursive paradoxes that must be resolved. Is it good to violate short-term preferences in favor of long-term preferences? Is it better to hurt someone deliberately, once, for their own good, so that you can then be sure never to hurt them again, or to avoid that first hurt but allow chronic accidental hurt? Where is that line drawn? Is that, itself, part of the meta-good to be calculated? The chain of logic eats itself."

"I'm having an attack of personal determination. The idea that my fate for good or ill is not my own, that there is some rule that has decided what is best for me, is extremely disturbing, in fact. Wait. Recursive- What? Is that the thing where the math keeps approaching a stable position but doesn't actually get there?"

Eefina shakes her head.

"No, the whole point of calculating the meta-good is to extract the 'your personal determination' force in a quantifiable form. It's not about finding a rule that decides for you, its about figuring out the rule decided by the derivation of your, and everyone's, personal determination. And the paradox is... what if the rule that is eventually derived, condemns the deriving? Separately from imperfect people hurting other people by being less than perfectly objective in the pursuit of this knowledge, I mean."

"...I don't think I get it. If the calculation of meta-good says calculating the meta-good is bad, it might still be better than whatever random stab you would try otherwise? Eh. I'm starting to feel a bit lost. Hold on, it's time to loose the sail."

He exits the wheelhouse to do that. The cloth is brilliantly shining, and probably magical. The boat starts going a lot faster.

"The exercise is rather abstract and detached from anything practical," Eefina concedes as she watches him work the sails.

"Allow me to compliment you: You definitely sound like an Astromancer."

Eefina giggles.

"Thanks!"

"I'd be happy to hear more about this, but you may have to use small words."

He is negotiating the boat through a fairly crowded river now. His little ship is one of the smallest ones here; The city swells around them like a canyon of stone, brick, wood, and glass. The great bridge coming up ahead must be hundreds of feet high.

She is in general happy to babble about questions of philosophy but at the moment she is enjoying the scenery and the skill with which Vaulter steers his boat.