"I can't help but think your job sounds awfully boring. Governing people who will just uncomplicatedly do exactly what you say?"

"Well, there's figuring out what to say, that part's challenging."

"Do they really uncomplicatedly do whatever you say -"

"I mean, I have no idea what would happen if I tried to have someone beaten to death in the street for being rude to me - yes I do, I would be very kindly carted to the hospital and other people notified they should make decisions while it was determined what had caused my temporary insanity -"

"So then maybe you can model 'treat reds like everyone else and forget about pollution' as an order that would be received about as well in Anitam as 'beat that person to death because they offended me' would in Valinor - Voa tried it, there was a war -"

"Yes, I know, we got there in the middle of it, Voa explained to us at length how hard it would be to treat their citizens better -"

" - I can't really think how I'd improve Voa -"

"The first Voan we met was a purple kid who'd built a radio dejammer out of spare parts and radioed to talk to the aliens and hit it off with my father and told us to come visit Voa and hear their side of the story on the war. When we arrived Voa had executed him for treason."

" - I mean. You really can't be building radio dejammers to circumvent ceasefire terms in wartime."

"So you take the dejammer away!"

" - and then Tapa thinks you're not treating the ceasefire terms very seriously, wink-and-nod at your citizens who break them -"

"The whole problem here is that Amenta just agreed on killing children when game-theoretically appropriate but if you instead agreed on not doing that it would be equally game-theoretically appropriate - Tapa wouldn't take a non-execution as provocation - they could've at least delayed what with aliens arriving -"

"You don't stop the workings of the justice system because of aliens arriving, people'd pile up in jail -"

"There is something very wrong with you."

"This is like a weird TV show," says Ladah, "if we ever get home I'll pitch it to my screenwriter friend."

"People yelling at alternate universe versions of themselves?"

"She'd probably think of a catchier title."

"I just - you've gotten in the habit of thinking about executing children in strategic terms instead of thinking how to make that never happen -"

"Anitam has separate courts for under-fours that don't hand down death sentences - and we set up to allow for stays of execution for pregnancy -"

" - what -"

" - you literally kill babies. I don't even know what to -"

"Tapa kills babies, that's why I ran to Anitam, where they don't do that."