Father had three advantages in stopping the art raids now. First was the song, which really was a wonderful tool. It made people stop and think. We’d been trained to fight, but we’d also been trained to think and debate, and the song broke the cycle of raids and revenge by making people question why they were fighting and whether it was worth it. Secondly, because people generally liked and respected Father, and because he had been so vehemently in favor of vengeance for so long, his renouncing that now was very powerful—especially at home in the Remnant, where everyone had seen the force of his madness. Everyone had also heard what he’d done to Kebes, from those of us who had been there. To go from that to singing about peace and civilization and excellence made a powerful statement on its own. And thirdly, there were the Lucians. The specific way the Lucians were falling into timarchy was easy for us to see—the bloodsports and torture, and their focus on the physical side of life over the intellectual side. But their horror at our wars made us see that we were doing the same thing in our own way. The existence of the Lucians, and the need to do something about them, provided a new factor that made everyone refocus.

The people who really needed to be persuaded most were our own people at home in the Remnant. Most of the art was still safely there, and people had no desire to part with any of it. People tended to be especially attached to the art in their own eating halls. It wasn’t difficult to get people to agree that the art in the temples and streets should be shared, but they tended to feel that the art in their eating hall belonged to them personally. I had heard Mother talking about this since the art raids began.

What Father proposed was that there should be an art conference, combined with a Kallisti-wide conference on deciding what to do about the Lucians. This was clever, because the Lucians were, or could be made to appear to be, a common enemy. Everyone in Chamber agreed on the foreign conference, and Father and Maia made the art conference seem like the thing that would make all the other cities agree to come.

We went to Sokratea first. Sokratea was our closest ally. They had never been much engaged in art raids against us, though they had raided the other cities. I had been there before, on a mission with Mother. This was not all that different. We sailed there on the Excellence, which remained in the harbor there while we stayed in a guest house.