Derrin listens, processing as best he can, as it goes.  It seems like mostly confirmation.  "It is not meaningful to say of Earth that it as a whole has made any choices" seems more scathing to him than anything Thellim has yet said.  Presumably they have, in a sense, made the choice not to set their whole planet's land areas ablaze; but a charitable interpretation of Isabella's statement would be that this is only because people have individually not wanted to set those fires, not because coordinated Earth made a decision apart from those individual choices which could effectuate those individual choices.

Then one point jumps out at him.  "You are yourself a precognitive psion?"  In retrospect Derrin should have prioritized asking about this point much earlier, but he is smart, not wide; he is juggling a very large number of balls.  "Is this conversation, itself, one that you have selected from among many possibilities?"

Derrin listens, processing as best he can, as it goes.  It seems like mostly confirmation.  "It is not meaningful to say of Earth that it as a whole has made any choices" seems more scathing to him than anything Thellim has yet said.  Presumably they have, in a sense, made the choice not to set their whole planet's land areas ablaze; but a charitable interpretation of Isabella's statement would be that this is only because people have individually not wanted to set those fires, not because coordinated Earth made a decision apart from those individual choices which could effectuate those individual choices.

Then one point jumps out at him.  "You are yourself a precognitive psion?"  In retrospect Derrin should have prioritized asking about this point much earlier, but he is smart, not wide; he is juggling a very large number of knives.  "Is this conversation, itself, one that you have selected from among many possibilities?"

Derrin listens, processing as best he can, as it goes.  It seems like mostly confirmation.  "It is not meaningful to say of Earth that it as a whole has made any choices" seems more scathing to him than anything Thellim has yet said.  Presumably they have, in a sense, made the choice not to set their whole planet's land areas ablaze; but a charitable interpretation of Isabella's statement would be that this is only because people have individually not wanted to set those fires, not because coordinated Earth made a decision apart from those individual choices.

Then one point jumps out at him.  "You are yourself a precognitive psion?"  In retrospect Derrin should have prioritized asking about this point much earlier, but he is smart, not wide; he is juggling a very large number of knives.  "Is this conversation, itself, one that you have selected from among many possibilities?"