The hiring manager for the oversight councils thing has silvery fur and a bone spur on the top of his skull that flushes pink when he's worked up and barely seems to register whether the people in the room have Amentan-traditional hair colors. "All right, I read all your applications and you're here because they looked great, except those of you who speak Valtaz should know that the grammar came through kooky and someone should twiddle with your Allspeak settings. Welcome to oversight and monitoring. We have half a million employees, we work in six hundred different polities, and our job is to ensure that every single election, every single state use-of-force incident, every single violation of membership terms and every single complaint are meticulously and transparently monitored, evaluated appropriately, and escalated whenever that's warranted. You with the lavender hair, do you have a question."

"Is there separate per-polity training?"

"First four months in a new place you're shadowing someone who's been there a while. Average length on an assignment is six standard years but that's misleading, most people either request a transfer before training is out or they stay a real while. People transfer for culture fit, mostly, though there are a few places we have trouble staffing because of the weather."

Lavender hair doesn't have another question.

They go through example investigations and conduct standards and transparency rules and how to report attempts at bribery or intimidation. Bone spur occasionally pinkens at particularly upsetting case studies. Does anyone else have questions?

Nope.

Amentans get assigned to shadow observers. Amentans get taught magic (which won't work on their colony planets, the hiring alien explains with annoyance, it's in the next dimension over.) Amentans can trade in more conventional goods. Amentans can get tourists once agreements for that are negotiated (everyone else feels very strongly that Amentans had better not execute random tourists for drunkenly peeing on the side of a building or something.)

...aliens pee on buildings????

...it's not a normal thing to do but it gets you, like, a ticket for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct or something, it's weird to react to it like it's some kind of atrocity.

That's horrifying. Why are aliens gross???

Well, aliens think they're evil, so it's even.

...they're not evil.

"Look," the guy says, "I help compile lists of destinations to advertise and make sure Atazzat's people will be safe while they visit, I don't really want to get into the question of whether you're any worse than your average slaveowner. But to people from a halfway decent society, uh, the question is whether you're worse than your average slaveowner, not whether you're evil at all."

"But we outlawed slavery decades ago," says the chair of the tourism board of Cene.

"Yeah, but you kept a brutalized and oppressed underclass who was prohibited from striking and would be murdered for not showing up to work, how is that not slavery? And you execute people for drunkenly peeing on the side of the road, and you sterilize people for crimes and don't give them access to counsel - which we invented long before we invented electricity - and you don't let anyone descended from farmers run for elected office or serve in the judiciary and you think it's an advantage of your population control system that poor people don't get to ever have children."

"...can we get a different tourism person who will be, uh, more interested in showing off Amenta to best advantage..."

"Are you okay with not executing tourists. If you can swing that I'm sure we can find someone who thinks you're great but if you can't then we can't in good conscience let anyone visit anyway."

"I don't think we have a punishment on the books for peeing on buildings in particular because that's... I think literally never come up... but we can just charge tourists for the cost of cleaning to local standards if they cause pollution violations and fine them additionally if they aren't prompt in reporting."

"That sounds a whole lot cheaper than a resurrection. Fine. We'll advertise for people who are really impressed with your gender politics or something and they'll get in touch."

"...our what politics?"

"Gender. Like, you don't have fields with gender disparities, you don't have disparate sentencing, that stuff."

"...if that's what attracts tourists."

"It helps counterbalance the other stuff."

Someone announces intent to resurrect any babies Tapa kills.

"...and then do what with them?" the Tapai liaison to Vanda Nossëo wants to know.

"- maybe the parents will want to immigrate? Let someone adopt them, otherwise - look, the aim here is to get you to stop killing babies, not to acquire a lot of Amentan babies, but if we get a lot of Amentan babies out of it I think they'll do okay."