"I do think there may be an extent to which you need to decide on a narrative between 'one day, aliens came to Amenta and made things unambiguously better' and 'one day aliens came to Amenta and made demands and wouldn't take no for an answer'."

"We'll never make demands. We'll sometimes arrest murderers if the murder is obviously instigated by our presence and the local government can't or won't enforce the law. Joining is voluntary, spaceport's voluntary, you can tell us all to go away and we will. But 'aliens came to Amenta, people got murdered over it, their murderers got off' doesn't ring to me as 'made everything unambiguously better'."

"I don't think you can assume any given dead red especially in Rivik wouldn't have happened anyhow."

"They were late for work because aliens spooked them into hiding, they got murdered for being late to work. By our standards of evidence that's enough for a strong presumption. And Rivik can't kill two per day on a regular basis, they'd run out of 'em."

"It's not a newsworthy day, even if it isn't typical."

"If there were some country where murdering purples were legal and some got killed for talking to us and we made a fuss, do you think people'd get where we were coming from?"

"Sure. Especially purples. But that's not what you're dealing with here."

"Mmhmm."

"You're throwing around very big bribes. But you could still stand to be at all concerned with the optics."

"I know. Or - less the optics and more wanting everyone to feel safe and confident in the predictability of their lives, that's important. If you have advice on how to sell the rules we work under, I'd be delighted."

"I don't really understand why you can't just bring the reds back to life somewhere else, since you can do that, and keep them somewhere nice enough to suit you and not let them touch anything we need to touch."

"Because three hundred worlds will scream in unison 'you're holding these innocent traumatized people prisoner to appease the assholes who've spent centuries systemically terrorizing them?' and file lawsuits which the courts will immediately uphold because it's not, in fact, legal to confine indefinitely for reasons of expedience people who haven't done anything wrong. Amenta could of course say they can't visit here, but we were told that it'd be devastating if we let them go about freely in the places that would be happy to have them."

"You can't - come offer us the universe and then tell us oh, by the way, it will have a healthy layer of pollutants all over everywhere, but other than that it's very nice - well. Manifestly you can, but."

"I don't want to do that. I may not understand what it is you think is wrong with them but that'd be a tragic way for this to go. But - it's also a tragic way for it to go if the entire universe is closed to them. And there appears to be literally no one in the universe who both agrees that the second thing is a tragedy enough to be credible to us in proposing solutions and believes in pollution enough to be credible to you in proposing solutions."

"If you believed in pollution you wouldn't want them touching your things in the first place."

"Are there any people who believe in, like, the pollutedness of actual gross things but don't think it makes any sense for it to be hereditary, or at least for it to be indefinitely hereditary - or at least that if we resurrect the Rivikni reds the resurrected ones wouldn't be unclean -"

"Edgy university students, I suppose."

Sigh. "And that Voan fellow who started a war over it."

"...no, I don't think that's implied, I think he just thought the food was safe. It more or less was."

"What's the mechanism by which resurrected reds are polluted, exactly?"

"Aren't they just like they were before? I don't know how your process works."

"It's a new body. Made from new atoms, just configured the same."

"I'm not a theologian. Maybe it'd be all aright."

Nod. "Should we leave, at least for a while while people are stressed about the Rivik prosecutions? It's not a yearlong process, you could start as late as the end of summer and still have a planet before you're setting credit allocations."

"Not in the south."