"Then let's reroute all traffic through Heaven as soon as we can clear a satisfactory spot. Think at that point we should be putting Warp colony planets in Space where you can shine them up? There's still no access to Limbo."

"No access to Limbo is annoying, it'd save us on resurrections. "

"Save on resurrections and also I vaguely suspect the best way to make them give up the death penalty is to have it totally ineffectual - not in a 'we'll get everyone back someday' sense in a literal 'all it does is transplant them to a nice place where they're indestructible' way."

"Ha."

"It means getting a bunch of planets terraformed for us in Revelation but maybe Macalaurë has a plan for that. - once we're ready to handle daeva learning about the multiverse I do also think we should invite Revelation into the fold and apologize for having kept them on a low-information diet for so long, they'll be a valuable resource and one suspects mlldly annoyed. I would be, if I'd been living in a nice post-scarcity society and it turned out I had starving neighbors."

"We need to get ready to handle that. And then, yes."

"So," says the guy in Celenta, "once the reds are gone I think there'd actually only be a couple things to qualify for membership."

"What things?"

"Same penalties across the board for crimes or a vote within each caste in favor of the current setup, raise the minimum age for the death penalty and for extradition of people under that age to countries that haven't raised it."

"Extradition one's a bit of a coordination problem, can't do that unilaterally - well, we could, with the defense agreement, but -"

"But it's better not to burn bridges, yeah, of course. The minimum age is five and three-quarters but six might be cleaner."

"Why so high? You never even met our species before."

"You mature like humans and that's what the humans that still execute people settled on. You could try to argue Amentans don't mature like humans, but at a glance you do. For Elves it's a hundred eighty five, not that it's come up."

"Huh. On the criminal penalties one - see, most crime is intracaste. I can imagine purples preferring that everyone's penalties be as harsh as theirs - so the people who harmed them or other purples they know would be punished - while I can imagine most blues and greens would rather let a few purples and greys off lightly than risk suffering such penalties themselves -"

"Well, as long as it's the same for everybody it doesn't have to be put up to a vote at all, but if you think there'd be consistent differences in what people want then that's what the vote mechanism is for."

"I'm not sure I follow."

"If blues and greens will vote for crimes against blues and greens to have light penalties, and purples and greys will vote for crimes against purples and greys to have stiff penalties, and everyone will be okay with other castes doing that, that's the system working as intended from our standpoint."

"Not all crime is intracaste and some crimes have multiple victims."

"Could you have consistent penalties and a lot of weight given in sentencing to the wishes of the victim, and then castes which care to have a norm against stiff sentences for their members could directly request those when relevant?"

"- I'm not sure I've correctly communicated the - when someone's been, say, defrauded, they will probably prefer harsher penalties for the perpetrator if those are available. But if they're voting on general policy, I believe that purples and greys are likely to prefer harsher sentences for any castes they can vote on, and blues, greens, and yellows are likely to want lighter sentences for themselves even if in so voting they grant the same to other castes. I'm not sure about oranges."

"So you don't think you can come up with any proposed sentencing law that will have majority approval within every caste?"

"Right. Disparate sentencing like we have now will poll fine with the higher status castes but poorly with the lower, making everything gentler would be similar, making everything harsher would be the reverse."

"If everything's equal you don't have to put it to a vote."

"Well, then I suppose I can disappoint some vengeful purples and greys."

"It helps that lots of crimes are remediable now."