"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..."

"You realize people are dying trying to cross into our House, right? But actual people getting killed, that doesn't matter."

"Doesn't matter?  We've had to talk down your security representative from running off to rescue them six or seven times. We are not, by our laws, justified in invading Yvalta; the bar for that is extraordinarily high. We are not, by our laws, justified in arresting either the judges or the executioners killing people for wanting their freedom; the bar for that is even higher. Because historically it does not help unless we pour an amount of resources into it that could save a million lives somewhere else. Every resource I control can go ten trillion different places and we have mountains of literature for trying to guess where it will help and none of it supportive of invading sovereign post-industrial nations or taking their criminal justice systems into custody."

"But one lousy red gets a sword to the chest..."

"Yeah, you have the idea - the literature on arresting citizens for murders their government won't prosecute, which are a direct or indirect consequence of our presence, makes a compelling case it's a good use of our resources, not in every individual case but to have as a uniformly enforced policy. Lots of other non-member planets heard about the RIvik case and there'll be accordingly fewer cases there, in aggregate. I understand that being on the receiving end of policy decisions made at that kind of scale must be very frustrating, and we've put a lot of effort into making the procedures simple and fully explained online as soon as we make contact at all, but of course not everyone reads that - or guesses it would apply to reds. 

Someone told me once that it's approximately how distant rural farmers feel when getting the latest tax laws from the government - who are these people, who do they think they are, what unfathomable process produced this particular set of rules so divorced from the reality of the people it'll be enforced against..."

"The contract jumpers are sure an indirect consequence of your presence."

"...I'm not clear on whether you want an explanation of the law or if you're just observing that in this case the law is causing a lot of harm."

"I want to know the difference between a legal shooting of a contract jumping purple and the legal stabbing of a lazy red."

Nod. "Was there a law before we arrived which is being lawfully enforced by the usual processes of the criminal justice system - arrest, interview, execution? Does that legal system meet some minimal standards - the laws are knowable in advance, torture is not employed, evidence is introduced and considered? If so, the bar for intervention is very high. If Rivik held that it was illegal for reds to be late to work and had arrested, interviewed, and executed a red for it we wouldn't intervene beyond trying to bribe them to stop. We want to, but that kind of intervention just doesn't have the kind of track record that would justify writing our laws to permit it."

"You sound so much less like maniacs when you lay that out. You realize this law wasn't knowable in advance to that poor green - or the less publicized grey you're also keeping -"

"Yes. We're figuring out how it makes sense to publicize more specifically than 'we'll get involved in extrajudicial killings that occur as a consequence of our being here' and without expecting people to read the whole explanation - which is online in every Amentan language, and has been from the beginning, but which you can't expect people to acquaint themselves with."