"We almost voted against, back when it came up for us. People felt like too many things were changing too quickly."

"Aren't you the flagship member?" asks one of the grandsons.

"There's an as-yet-unexplained phenomenon whereby different universes sometimes contain the same worlds - at different stages in their history, or sometimes with minor variants. We haven't found any other Amentas yet, but it would not be surprising if they existed, and if they did they might well have all of you living there. A world much like mine, with my family ruling it, was the flagship member, but my native world made contact with them later."

"If they were just like you..."

"Well, you know, founding Vanda Nossëo is more appealing than joining it. - and more importantly we'd just come out of a particularly awful war, some people wanted a few centuries of peace and quiet before we took on lots of new obligations."

"If you find other Amentas what are you going to do with them?" wonders Soyok's daughter, cutting her lamb into tiny bites.

"Well now we have lots of Amentans on the civil service track, they'll almost certainly be the best equipped to handle it."

"You do?" asks the other grandson.

"Yes! We put out job listings - sorted them all by caste, with the help of some local consultants, though it's legal for people to take out-of-caste work - and got lots of interested applicants. The language fluency is a pretty significant job perk, I think that contributed, and lots of people want magic, and then for any given planet there are always lots of people who want to be involved in policy and oversight, making sure their concerns get adequately represented."

"You have such a participatory government," says Soyok's wife.

"It seemed like a bit much to me, at first, but the thing is that different species care so intensely about such different things that you really can't have much trust in government if people don't feel like there are people involved in decisionmaking who are like them. We can say 'yes, we're taking the pollution precautions your theologians requested' as often as we want, but that's never going to be a fraction as reassuring as some Amentans on the relevant oversight committee deciding to move their families abroad. And it's the same for everybody, and there's a lot of us these days."

"Because you obviously all think pollution is nonsense we'd forget about if you bombarded us with enough shiny objects," Soyok's daughter says.

"Would you? Our evaluations were all 'Amentans born elsewhere would not re-derive this but the ones we've got will not give it up'. But you have exactly the general idea - aliens are different from one another, profoundly so, and scrupulous adherence to procedures we don't really care about can't possibly be as reassuring as involvement by people who do care. You can't get there just with adequate magic cleaning procedures, because people care about more than their government technically fulfilling its obligations, they want their government to agree that the obligations matter. So you've got to have representation everywhere, for everything."

"Which means a lot of alien meddling in our affairs."

"I'd be interested in how you think our prioritization system should have handled Amenta - you were a few thousand down the list, because the anticipation was that you wouldn't appreciate contact with people who didn't share the pollution thing. Some people have told us very emphatically that we should have been here sooner, but of course the ones who think we should have stayed away might be less likely to say so."

"Everybody has always wanted planets. But on our terms."

"Planets are extraordinarily expensive. We're not withholding something we can offer effortlessly in order to extract concessions, we're giving a desperately scarce thing to our own people before we give it to strangers. It's reasonable to feel we shouldn't have interacted with you at all until planets were cheap, though."

"I went to visit that Rivikni green in prison," says Soyok's son-in-law. "They won't let her alone with her daughter."

"Do prisons here do unsupervised visitation in murder cases?"

"Our prisons are less nice in general, I'll give you that. But anyone here even thinking about making that call would know that if someone kills a red they're not any more dangerous to a green child."

"The considerations in favor of supervised visitation during prison sentences for violent crimes also include deterrence and reduced risk of persuading a child to assist in escape attempts or similar."

Blues pick at their dinners.

He is not remotely sorry that the murderer is in prison and rather wishes she'd be there longer, so he does not comment further on that.

"So I'm a little confused about how citizenship is going to work," says Soyok's daughter. "Blues don't have contracts quite the same way, he can't just sign on my brother like he can every runaway purple."

"We try to be hands-off about things like that but if there's some resources of ours that would be helpful..."