"Lots of unwanted spiders would be more upsetting? Anyway, I have the instinct, I just can imagine how anyone not from Amenta would see 'so then we basically kept them as slaves for centuries' and it's ugly."

"...we have slavery - not here, the species has it - but at least people are not tempted to throw babies that slaves have touched."

"The not wanting to touch reds isn't really the problem, if we didn't want to touch them but we didn't horribly mistreat them things would be okay."

"It does seem emblematic nonetheless."

"A bit. My home world was nice in most ways but the few problems we hadn't solved yet are very acute and intractable ones."

"Are we making any mistakes like that which I haven't noticed?"

"I don't know, how do you feel about the places that have slavery?"

"They suck?"

"Petted animals understand language - is there any indication that's because they're somehow now people, instead of the orders being conveyed magically somehow?"

"Nope. They can't use contingent orders at all, no 'nod once for yes'. If they're not under any orders they act completely normal including if people talk about them or subjects that ought to interest them."

"Then I can't think of anything obviously terrible to outsiders that passes for acceptable here, except the sanitation, and I think you'll fix that if you're rich enough. And the babies dying, and that one is hard."

"To a point, anyway."

"It shouldn't smell like sewage and garbage should get disposed of instead of piling up and dead bodies should get cremated, I'm not going to worry if you as a society never take five-hour showers after touching a dead person."

"Five hours?"

"It really does take that long to feel properly clean.  - my shower does have a waterproof touchscreen so I can get work done."

"I suppose that's less of a senseless waste of time."

"It's not as if it comes up much."

"It comes up enough that you have fancy things installed in your shower."

"I was outrageously wealthy and had lots of things I didn't need just because I could."

"Aha. How'd you make your money?"

"Blues don't make money, we just take it from other people."

"For shower accessories?"

"I'm being a bit too flippant but our aristocracy mostly inherits wealth, makes money by renting apartments to other people and so on, and even if you have a legitimately necessary job that creates a lot of wealth, like negotiating good trade agreements with neighbors or designing and approving infrastructure projects or setting workplace safely laws, most of your money comes from, and gets spent on, social status things unrelated to that.

And I was busy enough that reading things in the shower was a good use of money."

"Inherits - oh. That's weird."

"I cannot imagine how weird it would sound, yeah."