A ferry deal would satisfy most of their needs, although of course they hope they can come to another arrangement.

The beeple are really alarmed by how Amentans treat their plumbers and coroners! Another arrangement would be ideal, but they have heard some really alarming things on the plumbers and coroners front.

If they can find enough planets, and come up with a way to replace the reds' essential services, they could put the reds on a planet by themselves to do whatever they like. But the reds keep murdering anyone who tries to work on replacements for their services.

Well. What would they do to the reds if they had replacements for them and not a planet to put them on?

They'd stop issuing them child credits, probably.

That sounds like it would be really really unpleasant.

They'd have no way to earn money if their jobs were redundant. If there were a finite number then there are some people who might want to push through a pension deal, but not if there were going to keep being more.

It sounds like a very unpleasant situation everyone's in, exacerbated by the fact that one side has nearly all the power.

When reds exercise power it is for things like murder.

It sounds like murder is kind of the only power reds have.

The Amentans frown on murder.

So do the beeple! But the beeple also understand incentives.

Amentans understand incentives, but there aren't any reasonable incentives available for reds unless they have a planet to dump them on.

The beeple are very sympathetic. It must be so terrible to have a discrete subset of your population that you don't have the resources to do right by.

...yes. They will be so glad to have a planet to put reds on and robots to do red work. They and the reds will be so much better off. Perhaps some roboticists could work in the beeple world where they will be safe while planets are scouted.

The beeple think they might need an explanation of what robots are before they could agree to this.

Robotics is a field of study involving machines that can do things by themselves. They have some things that are in a limited way robotic, like factory equipment, but they don't have things that can respond to their environment flexibly enough to do red work yet (and are lagging behind where they should be in a few dozen related areas as a consequence of the roboticists all getting murdered).

The beeple think it would probably be difficult to work on robotics on the beeple's lower-infrastructure planet.

They'd certainly have to bring a lot of stuff, is it hard to bring stuff with their method?

It's not super hard but it's harder than not bringing stuff.

Well, they would be happy to assemble stuff with which to work on robotics if the beeple would like to host roboticists.

The beeple are not yet ready to commit to that but are tentatively willing.

They will make tentative noncommittal plans, then.

Sure, that works.

The beeple would like a more detailed explanation of why the Tapai think it would be a bad idea to talk to reds.

Reds are not trustworthy and will probably have unrealistic ideas about things the beeple should demand of Tapa even in light of war famine etc.