"Sure. A bus is sort of like an ambulatory building, and it's there to make it clearer to people when they're successfully signed up for the next ride out, and to make it easier for the teleporter to get who's in their batch and no one else. It appears, same way we did, and whoever wants to gets on and sits down, and when everybody who wants to be aboard is aboard, it teleports to the next stop on the route. If you have preferences about who Sesati bus-riders should find it simplest to visit you can let us know, but by default I'd leave it up to the transportation department; at any rate after a few hops like that they'd be in a big transit hub and could get on a different line to go anywhere else within the service area, and then back again by the same process."

"Are you at all interested in cooperating with - I am going to go ahead and assume that if I say this as 'are you at all interested in denying slaves service?' you'll say no, but are you at all interested in denying patricides, torturers, or even non-slaves who are in debt here?"

"If you have safety concerns, or if it's really important to you that the departure of slaves from Sesat happen in some particular orderly way, we can work with you on that. But we normally don't require background checks for a bus ticket. If someone here were in debt to me, I think I'd want them to be able to travel the multiverse where they could make some money more easily and pay me back. As for people who've committed murders, the kind of person you have on this planet can be resurrected pretty easily. We don't condone murder, but a lot of murderers cut it out when they have more places to go and more things to do and the murder won't stick anyway."

"Do you have infrastructure in place already that would help force someone who went away to seek their fortune in the stars to pay their debts back home?"

"If they otherwise didn't seem inclined to do so? No, we don't have a way to force them - our financial instruments don't include the force of criminal law to require repayment - but they'd find that a lot of multiversal banks and such wouldn't deal with them till they'd discharged their outstanding debts or made some kind of repayment agreement. I think if they were having real trouble they could probably get some kind of debt relief organization to cover the amount, though, once we have a settled-out currency exchange rate with Sesat."

"Hmm. How much of a problem is it for people when multiversal banks refuse to do business with them?"

"It's inconvenient but if they aren't trying to do complicated financial transactions it's possible to operate with other means of payment for services."

"Will you object if we put a perimeter around the bus stop and screen people for outstanding debts before they get to you?"

"We wouldn't encourage it but we wouldn't interfere."

"That would be fine. And for murderers - I think for uncomplicated murders, it's simple to reverse the crime and you may resurrect any of those we executed for murder after you resurrect their victims and ideally provide those victims with something to live on now that their own belongings will have passed to others; those who were enslaved solely for patricide or matricide, I suppose we could consider some kind of deal where they're given to you to do with as you will, including taking them out of Sesat, after you return their victims to life and give the victims and those who kept them contained some additional compensation for all the time elapsed, if that wouldn't fall afoul of your objections to buying them?"

"I think we could see our way clear to an arrangement where a murderer may be removed from Sesat on the condition that their victim is resurrected first, although resurrections are among the things that are still expensive - there's a lot of people who've died, in all the worlds - and it would mean you would have less leverage to negotiate for other things you might want in a bid for membership, including resurrections for people who did not happen specifically to be murdered by still-living slaves. We're rich, but not literally infinitely rich, and we can't let would-be member states hold out for everything they think we have to offer just to see if we hand it over."

"I confess to having somewhat lost track of what you want to offer out of the goodness of your hearts, what you want to sell, and what you want from us; things haven't at all fallen into the categories I normally expect."

"Of course," says Nelen. "The things we will offer you if you're willing to host them, regardless of your participation in any other scheme of ours, are bus stations, automata that deliver lessons in science and math, and booths selling the things we mentioned, among others. The things we want to sell are - well - the stuff that goes in the booths, though as aforementioned we'll take payment in anecdotes, and some services more labor-intensive or less subsidized than the above, like local schools. The things we want to sell as membership signup perks are things like resurrections, immortality, colony planets, anything we're really limited on our ability to hand out. The things we want from you are emigration rights for all the people within Sesat and help transitioning Sesat into a wealthier, better-educated, more humane place to live, smoothly and in a way that preserves what's special about it to its people."

"I think many of us would say that what's special about Sesat is how proud and stubborn its people are, and that, if faced with someone offering to train us to eat out of their hands in exchange for us bowing to their desires, we stand ready to walk away even from paradise - Mayor Zatar, General Tana, you're not random but you're here; what do you think?"

"Oh, I'd put that second to our ambition. Given the, ah, entire annual holiday about it," says Tana.

"It's just harder to have a holiday about stubbornness. I agree with His Glory, Sesat is proud above all," says the one who seemed threatened earlier.

"I see," says Nelen. "Well, there are worse things to hang your patriotism on. Are there any things we have to offer that do interest you?"

"Oh, yes. I would like very much to make this work. I just couldn't face my people and tell them we all must appease foreign conquerors - but as you come here out of the goodness of your hearts, for peaceful trade and to spread prosperity to the corners of the earth, your task here is very simple: only do not appear to be something you are not. You come here asking us to give up our slaves, and you sound hostile; but you can't mean it like that, and I see you aren't tempted to want them yourselves, so speak to me instead of why you aren't tempted. You come here asking us to let our debtors run off and cheat us; but you don't worry about that yourself, so speak to me of why you don't, and perhaps then I won't either."

"Of course," says Nelen, slightly relieved. "What we find is that slave labor is generally inferior in quality to free labor - a free employee you have to pay, but a slave you have to feed, and supervise, and worry about rebellions from, and the cost savings is pretty negligible when you price that in. That's even if you don't value the freedom of the slave directly, which we do. You're using slavery partially as an alternative to prisons, which makes more sense, but to the extent you're trying to save money on prisons we're happy to take on that expense ourselves and to the extent you're trying to deter crime - people still don't want to be prisoners in Vanda Nossëo, even if their living conditions look very cushy."

"There was that one time when some people just kind of kept having kids in that one prison," says Zanro.

"Right, but then someone terraformed a moon for them and they moved there and they didn't cost much in further supervisory labor," says Nelen, "and their sentences expired and the moon joined up in its own right - I'm not claiming that nothing weird ever happens, it's a big multiverse, but by and large people prefer to be free, and prefer to follow the law provided the law isn't terribly unjust in some way. As for the debt part - my team doesn't have a Dwarf, they're very good with finance and commerce, but I'll give it a shake. Whenever you loan someone money, you have to assume there is some risk they won't pay it back - they'll die, for example, or be kidnapped by bandits or have all their money or their tools stolen before they can pay you back, even if they intended all along as sincerely as you might want to make things square. The way loans work with us is that the risk of nonrepayment is just something the lender has to price in, regardless of why it might occur. They can guess the risk with each loan, and adjust the rates of interest they charge accordingly - do you have interest here -"

"In practice," says Cassiel, "Vanda Nossëo citizens get a payment periodically just for being citizens, and it's enough to live on and then some, and in most remotely normal situations a lender can get some of that money diverted to them until the loan's paid off."

"Yes, also that," says Nelen.

"Aha. Let me see if I have this right. There's no need to interact with your debtor at all, because Vanda Nossëo will handle repayment; there may not even be a need for the debtor to remember to pay. Vanda Nossëo uses monetary payments to recognize the basic dignity of all those who have done nothing wrong; another effect of this is that there's no need to raise a hand against those that are worthless, because they can simply also be paid what they're worth. The rest is a purely practical question of keeping the ones that are dangerous away from people and - ah - how did you ensure that the people on that moon weren't themselves worthless?"

"- we don't have a practice of considering people worthless," says Nelen, with somewhat more deliberate patience than he's manifested before.

"Prisoners actually get the universal payments too but usually some of it gets diverted to prison costs," says Tarwë. "So they have some incentive to pick prisons that are efficient instead of the ones that spend the most lavishly."

"...Hm. I find this startling enough to be suggestive of a deeper gulf in understanding than I imagined. If possible, Ambassador Utopia, Envoy Tarwë, I would like to table further discussion of justice and migration for now and ask you to instead find me a book on political philosophy to present to one of Sesat's philosophers. I can do likewise for you, and we can then return to the topic later; and right now, I would have you speak further with General Tana and Mayor Zatar about the implementation of your plans to provide education and sell enchanted things, both of which you have my permission to proceed with, and about anything else that occurs to any of you as immediately urgent."

"That sounds like a good next step, your splendidness," says Nelen. "The specific magic we're using for translation will let us read and write, but the solution we have for translating books quickly is less good; we can have one of us on hand to consult the original as necessary, or we can offer your philosopher a copy of the same translation we use, or both, as you prefer. Where should Tarwë meet the philosopher? Should we continue the meeting with the general and mayor here or somewhere else?"

"You may remain here - I'll have to send for a philosopher but Envoy Tarwë may have someone show him around my library now. I extend to you also my hospitality; you may have beds made for you here, for when you tire, or elsewhere in this city."

"Thank you, we might take you up on that," says Nelen cheerily. (Zanro smiles.) Tarwë gets up to be shown to the library.

Tarwë can be introduced to a cheerful librarian who points out the political philosophy - a few old books titled Kings And Cities, If Gela Smiles, The Use of Kindness in the Retention of a Population, and Musings of Azan volumes one and two - and speculates that the most sensible philosopher for the Star-of-Stars to send for would be Feris, who lives in Leopard Hill and wrote these two books over here, On Minds and On Meaning.

Sounds good. Tarwë can start reading the books in the meanwhile.