Elsseth's position is three cities away from her mother's. This isn't uncommon, but it can occasionally be inconvenient.
She has a matter she would prefer advice on, and now is a good time to travel; she calls up a set of dancers, and--
everything should have gone fine. But someone came in with a minor emergency, not having been notified of her visit, and ran right into a key definer.
She vanishes.
She does not reappear in her mother's city.
This is instead a city street. The technology implied is fantastic, it's very clean - it looks a little run down, as though it's all years old, and there's a mix of new flimsy things and more banged-up sturdy things that suggests poor occupants.
The buildings reach to the sky.
It's evening and not too crowded, and most people don't even look the queen's way, but someone with purple hair sweeping the sidewalk shrieks at her and lifts his broom and thwacks her with it.
???
She shrieks in surprise and raises her arms reflectively to fend the broom off.
Thwack thwack thwack!
"What are you doing?" she demands, trying to wrest the broom away from the crazy person.
The broom-wielder yanks it away from her and thwacks her more, yelling in a foreign language. The handful of passersby look at them, and seem alarmed, and respond to this by interacting with glassy rectangles they pull from their pockets.
She continues to attempt to relieve the crazy person of their implement of violence (why is no one doing anything???) until an unlucky blow clips her on the head, leaving it spinning and her crumpling to the pavement.
Thwack! Thwack. ...thwack.
The police arrive a bit later and shovel her onto a stretcher and dump her in the back of a plastic-lined truck and haul her away.
She is not coherent enough to register any of this except for the pain stopping getting worse.
They put her in an interview booth and wait for her to wake up.
She does this. Slowly. When she opens her eyes she looks around in confusion.
She is locked in an interview booth! A person with grey hair barks a question at her.
"I don't speak this language," she snaps at him.
He repeats the question LOUDER.
"I still don't speak this language," she snarls.
He yells something else! Threateningly!
She just looks at him contemptuously.
Turns out the floor is electrified!
She shrieks. She has no idea what's going on except that it hurts.
When it stops he HAS LOUD QUESTIONS FOR HER.
She whimpers.
LOUD! QUESTIONS!!!
"I really don't speak this language."
Eventually, after some unpleasant hours, they bring in someone who tries other languages.
She speaks none of those either. This takes longer to determine than it needs to; she is not at her most intelligible.
Eventually they give up for the time being and she is left in the booth for a few hours alone.
A little while after that, a group of about twenty people of indeterminate gender appear, some in the booth, the rest outside of it. They all seem dismayed when they see the state Elsseth is in. One of them gently helps her to her feet.
Alarms start going off.
This is alarming! People close to the booth door on both sides attempt to open it.
Nope.
They try breaking it down.
They can bang it up a little.
Another door bursts open and grey-haired people bearing bizarre weapons burst in.
...they mostly pause, confused, but one fires wildly and wings somebody.
One of them asks Elsseth if these are the people who hurt her.
On confirmation, it becomes abruptly relevant that these people have swords and know how to use them.
There is a lot of shouting and as soon as a sword hits a grey there's a lot more gunfire.
This is pretty unfortunate for the people outside the booth.
Eventually a grey manages to disarm enough aliens and shout down the other greys that the violence can cease! She hollers at a few of the other greys and they apply field-medicine-type first aid to the gunshot wounds while making sure all the aliens are thoroughly restrained.
The aliens inside the booth begin dancing.
...that's strange?
A grey gives them a little zap. There is more shouting about that.
This causes minor stumbling but they keep dancing.
And then vanish.
All of them?
Not the ones outside the door. Everyone inside the booth vanishes.
The remaining ones are given tentative medical care and restrained and moved elsewhere.
A person with green hair comes in and tries to figure out the language.
They are extremely pissed off, but relatively cooperative wrt language-sharing.
The green haired person would like to apologize!
They are not super impressed by this apology. These people attacked, abducted, and tortured a queen.
The relevant greys and the purple have all been arrested! It was a mistake. They didn't realize they were aliens.
Why were they attacking abducting and torturing anyone.
Locally, red hair marks a category which is supposed to stay in designated areas. The last time they were allowed to be places they didn't belong there was a huge war and famine! The purple absolutely should have called the authorities and the greys absolutely should have tried translation sooner.
And the torture?
They are so going to punish the greys for that! They were very alarmed at the apparent teleporting on the security cameras - no one would ever be able to feel safe in their beds again if reds could teleport - and wrongly believed that the queen they had taken for a red was deliberately uttering gibberish instead of explaining the teleporting. They are really really sorry about that. The greys are in so much trouble. If the queen's people would rather punish them themselves, that can absolutely be arranged.
Well that would be up to the queen they tortured, having been captured did not somehow give them more ability to set policy. Anyway what's with their bizarre phobia of red hair and why is the response to uttering gibberish torture? They do know that torture is bad, right?
Absolutely! There are international laws against torturing people. It's not about the hair! They will be totally 100% happy to welcome the red haired queen with all the respect an alien queen is due if she ever deigns to return! Nothing would make them happier! The hair is just the legally mandated indicator for the class of people who mustn't go wandering around or else war, famine, etc. Laws about torturing people don't apply to reds in case it's ever necessary to get information from a red; reds are really uncooperative with the authorities.
Okay but why mustn't they go wandering around?
Yeah they expect they'd be really uncooperative with the authorities too if getting apprehended by the authorities was liable to result in torture.
They mustn't go wandering around because they spread pollution. They are also very sorry about putting the queen in a booth intended for reds! So sorry!
They...spread pollution? What? How?
They seriously don't care, they don't have these peoples' phobia of red hair and even if the place had been dirty, which it didn't especially seem so, that would be waaaaaay less important than the torture. Seriously. Torture: bad.
And they are so sorry about it!
It's really not about the hair though, reds work unclean occupations and have for generations.
Unclean occupations?
Yes, they have established they were sorry. They have not established that they realize that torture is bad even when it isn't happening to alien queens.
They don't torture anyone else but reds and even that doesn't come up often and if it will make the teleporting aliens happy they will de-electrify the floors in the booths that have that installed!
Unclean occupations having to do with sewage or dead people. The aliens probably handle this in some other way but this is what the locals are stuck with until they can invent machines to do those jobs.
Uh. They handle this by having plumbers and coroners. They torture people for being plumbers and coroners, what the fuck.
No, they don't torture people for being plumbers and coroners, perhaps the translation is imprecise, the green is very sorry about that.
They invite the green to clarify.
Most plumbers and coroners obey the law and are never even arrested! Most of the time, if a red is arrested, they are either then let go or sent to prison without any zapping! It is very rare that a red is arrested, and knows something the police must know for public safety, and cannot otherwise be convinced to tell.
Okay but would this escalate to torture if someone who was not a plumber or coroner did the same thing?
No, in general people who are not reds (it's "reds", not "plumbers or coroners") have other incentives available, a higher baseline cooperativeness, etc., and so it is in everyone's interest to make that option unavailable.
They are so confused.
...well, they are aliens and it seems likely that they will have traits that confuse each other! They definitely won't torture any more of the dancing aliens.
Okay but it kind of seems like they are going to torture more people with red hair???
Not aliens! They will never ever do that again, they will make really sure.
Torturing people is bad even when the people aren't aliens!
It's reds, not just anyone. They're different species and it does not seem likely that they will understand everything there is to understand about each other today. But like he said, if it will make the aliens happy they can uninstall all the electrified floors.
It would take a lot more than that to get them to happy but that seems, uh, obviously better than not.
They will get right on that. They are really, really sorry.
Well the aliens are really really worried about the coroners and plumbers!
It would probably be better if the alien coroners and plumbers stayed home.
Uh, yes, they are not bringing people to the crazy torture place that might get tortured by crazy people.
They would really like to meet more aliens, though. They are really REALLY sorry about how first contact went and would like to make up for it.
That seems like maybe a bad idea.
They are maybe higher tech what with swords being obsolete and trade could make the aliens really rich!
They're not sure they understand.
The aliens use swords. The locals used to, but then invented things that do sword things more efficiently for all purposes except sports. It seems likely that the locals have invented lots of things that the aliens don't have. But they can't teleport. And they would really, really like to. The aliens could teach them to teleport and then receive stuff.
The aliens are definitely not going to teach them to teleport without being a lot surer than they currently are that this is not going to increase the amount of torture in the world.
It won't. How can the locals assure them of that?
Well, it's not their decision, it's the queen's decision, but it would help them make more accurate reports to the queen if they understood the torture.
It should definitely not have been used in her case. They are very, very sorry.
See, they get that, it's the "in her case" part that's worrying them.
Reds are different. But they now understand that the queen is not a red, even though she looks like one superficially.
They're really unconvinced that it's possible for someone to be so different it's okay to torture them. Torture is bad.
That is why they are signed on to the international treaties against it, yes. They are very similar looking to the aliens, but they are different species! Reds are members of the local species and they understand how they work.
And they torture them.
They are going to de-electrify the floors. Because they are so sorry.
That seems like a real case of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Also, the fact that they're doing it because they're sorry rather than because having torture floors is horrifying is not very reassuring.
The green thinks the problem is that the aliens do not understand reds.
The aliens think the problem is the green does not understand torture.
They definitely understand torture and have international treaties against it. Reds are a special case.
If they have a special case they probably do not understand torture well enough. Torture is bad.
And they are very sorry and wish that they had not gotten off on the wrong foot like this.
Are they under the impression this adds new information to the conversation? The words "I'm sorry" are not mind control to make people do what you want or magic words to stop torture from happening.
The green would like to find a way to explain reds but it is proving very difficult. Perhaps the aliens could agree that everybody is experts on their own species and they don't understand reds.
The aliens have no particular reason to do that. Like, they understand these are just random guards, right? Literally the only influence on policy they have is reporting what they learn here.
Well, they can report that the translator thinks the problem is that he has not found a way to successfully explain reds.
They are definitely going to report that. (The way they say this does not imply that they think the translator's opinion is going to be very convincing.)
It would be a terrible pity if the possibilities of contact between their planets were cut off because of a misunderstanding.
They assure the green that torture is a much more likely cause than misunderstanding.
The green is not sure he has made himself clear.
The aliens think it's horrifying that torture floors are a thing that exists.
They're going to get rid of them.
But they had them in the first place! Who thinks that's a good idea???
They were only for reds and the aliens don't understand reds, reds are different and bad.
Because they're coroners and plumbers?
Reds have been doing unclean work including wastewater plumbing and undertaking for many generations. The reds themselves are unclean, and it's very, very important that they obey the rules that prevent them from making more things unclean, since that will make people sick and miserable and cause famines and wars. Nobody else could cause famines and wars just by walking into the wrong room. Usually there is no reason to electrify a red, but they kept the option open because reds are not subject to the usual rules about torture and it could be famines-and-wars level important to get one to talk.
See, the fact that they're not subject to the usual rules about torture is worrying.
Also they're not sure why the fact that they've been putting all the red-haired workers on unsanitary jobs for generations is supposed to have a cumulative effect? They don't think cleanliness works that way, like, at all.
It does though.
How???
This green is not a theologian and trying to translate their papers into a foreign language would be a little much, but experts agree.
So uncleanliness just sort of...accumulates around the color red? That sounds implausible.
It's not about the color. Actors can wear red wigs, and some reds do not have naturally red hair and have to dye it so nobody mistakes them for clean people.
...If they don't have red hair then what exactly makes them reds???
That's just what they're called because most of them do have red hair. But they're a caste. The children of reds are reds.
They do this to queens???
...no, queen is a blue job?
Are they maybe confused about the meaning of the word queen?
A queen is someone who rules a country.
...Not all queens are, you know, Queens, that would be unsustainable.
Perhaps he has mistranslated this word! What do they mean when they say queen?
...People who can bear children?
All Amentan females - that's half of them - ages of four to twenty can do that.
...Half their population is queens????????????
Half their population can get pregnant, and the other half can get them pregnant. They have some species that work like the aliens, though. See, they are really very different.
Uh. Wow. Having everyone be either a queen or a consort sounds...messy??? How do they keep their population from growing out of control.
They have strict laws about it and medical birth control.
That sounds awful.
They don't like it a bit. That's why they're so excited about the teleporting! They would like to teleport to other planets, and live there, and have room for more people.
That seems reasonable but the torture thing might be a sticking point.
They are happy to stop!
It seems like the problem might go deeper than that but they are not queens so.
Yes, the locals would love to talk to their queens about how to productively interact with the aliens.
Assuming anyone comes back. These aliens were all plausibly dead, after all.
And they can't teleport?
Well, they could, but it might not be a good idea.
Why not?
If the Amentans can teleport and they see the aliens teleporting home they might be able to follow them.
The Amentans would love to visit, but they would much rather wait for an invitation than drop in uninvited.
(Elsewhere, someone pulls security footage of the dancing aliens in the booth with the queen.)
They are not sure they want to trust the people who thought torture floors were a good idea.
(The dancing aliens: totally dancing, except for two holding up the thoroughly-battered red-haired queen.)
If they would like privacy in which to dance home the green can leave. Unless they have any further questions.
They are not confident they would not be spied upon.
If they would like an open field to dance home from they can do that too.
They are really not getting how much the torture thing is dinging the available trust here.
They are very, very sorry about that. If there is anything they can do to make it up to the aliens they would be so happy to.
That is really not the point!!!
The green is very sorry he is not better at translating.
The aliens suspect that the translation is not the problem.
It was when it was about queens!
Okay, they suspect it is not the only problem.
What do they think the other problem is?
They're not sure of the details but it probably has something to do with the fact that they think torture floors are a good idea.
The green is sure there is some way to explain that which makes sense but doesn't know enough about alien culture to find analogies.
Alien culture does not have circumstances under which torture is acceptable, they're really not sure how this isn't getting through.
Well, right, they don't have reds. Do they have domestic animals?
Yes.
And there's seldom a good reason to deliberately hurt one, but if there is for some reason - birds pecking each other, trim their beaks? Excessively breeding animals, castrate some of them?
...Or you could just. Separate the animals.
A lot of animals are also better-behaved castrated and the locals operate under really serious space constraints and can't just separate all the animals.
Castration is not literally torture though.
All right, Amentans also have a history of branding and tattooing animals for identification. That's painful.
They also find it wildly implausible that being coroners and plumbers for generations turns off your ability to person.
It makes them unclean for theological reasons that alas this green did not major in in college.
The bit where uncleanliness is hereditary they find mildly dubious but are willing to take the green's word on; the bit where it makes it okay to torture them is far more specious.
He did mention famines, wars, etc., right? The stakes are really high when reds start misbehaving and they are not very well-behaved all on their own.
They would probably not be well-behaved either if their government was sufficiently adversarial to them to find torturing them okay.
They have a sort of circularity problem there but definitely can't make anyone like them, because they are unclean.
You do not have to like someone to not torture them.
The reds aren't specifically badly behaved about the electrified floors. Which, has he mentioned, they will remove. They are generally antagonistic and uncivilized and poorly educated and violent and often murder scientists, and solving this problem by treating them better, even if the entire problem were all about how they were treated, would run into a natural limit because of the uncleanliness.
If the aliens can teach them magic that would allow the reds' jobs to be handled without reds, the reds could all go somewhere else! Then everyone would be happy.
They continue to not be policymakers but he suspect the policymakers will want to talk to the reds.
That sounds like a terrible idea.
If aliens had shown up and declared that another kind of alien was horrible would they take the first aliens' word for it or would it occur to them that people sometimes say things for reasons other than their being true and the sayers being objective, focused truth-seekers.
They would certainly want to know more about it, but the aliens would be the experts for the time being, and they wouldn't go talk to the other aliens if that would be dangerous or something.
Skepticism.
Really! If they met friendly aliens who told them that some other people they had a lot of experience with were hostile, they'd be circumspect about going and poking them. There's a lot of downside potential to talking to hostile aliens.
There is a difference between "saying they are hostile" and "saying it is okay to torture them."
Yes, those are different concepts. They think it is a bad idea for aliens to meet reds.
The aliens are unconvinced.
Do they think it is definitely impossible that there is no one in the world they just shouldn't talk to?
They think that crazy torture people are unlikely to be authorities on who, if there are.
The green is very sorry that he is not able to make himself understood about the torture but his people are not crazy.
They understand about the torture! They understand that torture is bad, which the green seems unable to grasp.
The green agrees that torture is bad. The green just thinks that reds are different.
And the fact that the green does not want them to go talk to the people who get tortured doesn't seem likely to be because it would actually be a bad idea.
Would the aliens maybe like to to talk to some people from another country, which does not have electric floors in the first place?
Couldn't hurt.
Will it help? For complicated local politics reasons, it is very costly for their host country to do this,
These people do know that these are just random guards, right? They really don't have any power to make promises.
They don't seem to want to go home and fetch someone who does.
Want, yes, think it's a good idea, no.
They don't seem to be planning on it.
They whole reason they're not going to is because they don't have the authority to decide to teach Amentans to teleport! It would be completely stupid to teach Amentans to teleport anyway and then continue to not go home.
It's very important that Amentans be able to live on more planets. They are in a lot of pain because of not having enough places to live.
People are also in a lot of pain when they are tortured.
If it matters, the reds are also having the not enough places to live problem.
They have only the Amentans word for any of this. Also why would it not matter.
The green is having a hard time figuring out exactly what matters to the aliens, since apparently it's not people being in pain in general e.g. because they cannot teleport.
It's not that people being in pain doesn't matter to them, it's that they have only the word of the people who tortured their queen for it, and also these people torture people sometimes and "two" is a stupid number of inhabited planets for there to be so since they still don't understand what about "reds" make these people think it is okay to torture them they might torture aliens who don't have stuff they want and then there will be more pain.
Those greys were not making endorsed decisions and this green doesn't work with them and they won't torture any aliens.
They have only the green's word for that.
They are going in circles. Do they have any ideas about how to stop going in circles?
The Amentans could learn that torture is bad?
The Amentans understand that torture is bad.
Not enough, apparently.
This is part of the circle they are stuck in.
It's kind of hard to avoid having circles when the guards aren't stupid and the Amentans torture people!
They are going to stop.
They have only the green's word for that. And are only guards.
So how would it even break the circle if the aliens decided that Amentans do as he claims understand that torture is bad?
It probably wouldn't. Oh well.
The green goes away to confer with some other locals for a while.
Another batch of aliens appear in the infirmary. They converse with the injured ones and then all of them vanish.
They have video of that too.
They decide to wait a week in case aliens come back of their own accord.
In six days, another batch of aliens arrives.
One is probably a queen--she has the same definitively female figure that the red-haired one did. Her hair is black with golden streaks. She is accompanied by forty gender-ambiguous workers, some of them holding swords, some of them holding weird contraptions that might or might not be weapons, some of them carrying bags, and five tall slender consorts.
The street is full of bustling pedestrians and a skinny delivery vehicle. There are startled shouts and some people take pictures.
The queen glances at pedestrians and turns her eyes back to the building, inspecting it.
It is a tall glassy building with an ambulance bay to the side and a regular entrance into a lobby in the front. It has bridges from some upper stories to adjacent buildings.
She, the consorts, and as many workers as will fit enter the lobby.
The people in the lobby are confused and many seem injured or sick and are being looked after by orange haired locals.
The queen looks around and walks out again, followed by as many of her people had entered.
Someone has called in someone official; a vehicle festooned with lights and sirens screams onto the block and the translator green hops out. It is followed by a small convoy. "Excuse me! Please get in these cars and come with me so as to not block the street."
The aliens inspect the cars. How many of them will fit in each one?
Three, or two in the car with the green.
Each of the queen and her consorts gets in a car with one worker holding a sword and one holding a maybe-weapon-thing. The rest of the workers get in the cars at near-random.
The cars zoom off.
"Welcome!" the green says to the workers.
One of the workers is not holding a weapon. They pull a piece of paper out of their bag and scribble something on it.
"I'm so glad you decided to send an envoy after all."
"Not our decision," the one holding a sword says neutrally.
"Do you have a separate 'you' for multiple people?"
"Yes. But even if you substituted the plural you, it would still be a grammatically incorrect sentence, because we weren't part of the decision-making process," the one with the paper and writing instrument interjects.
"That's interesting. I was attempting to refer to the species or polity as a whole regardless of who in it made the decision in question."
"There's a separate you for that."
"What is it?"
They name it.
The green writes it down. "I'm actually a linguist, not a diplomat."
"Well, you need to be able to talk before you can diplomacize," the worker reasons.
"Yes, that's the idea. I did my best and I was getting help from a diplomat but I'm not sure how well I was understood."
"Starting translation from scratch is a difficult problem."
"Very!"
"It's impressive you were able to get as far as you did."
He smiles. "Are you a linguist?"
"I dabble, as a hobby. By trade I'm a scribe."
"Who else is here today?"
"The queen's name is Naissa, and her husbands' names are Orreth, Kassin, Arta, Lyvol and Qorin. I wasn't appraised of the full roster but I couldn't fail to recognize them."
"How were the participants selected?"
"I think it varied."
"I was called up for this because I've worked in speculative xenolinguistics and my cousin knows some blues."
"Blues?"
"Blue is one of our castes. They do rulership, judiciary, and land ownership."
"'Caste' isn't translating."
"It seems like you divide your society by - sex or something like it? We have caste instead. Everyone can have children, and people's children are the same caste as their parents."
"..."
"Does some of that need rephrasing?"
"...It's a bit much to wrap one's head around."
"Have you ever thought about meeting other species of people before? We have a whole genre of fiction about it."
"Not really. That sounds fascinating, though."
"We're actually surprised you're so similar. You look a lot like us."
"It's strange," they agree.
"When actors portray aliens they often dye their hair brown or black to cheaply indicate that, but some of you aren't even as different as that."
The worker makes a face. "I've been made aware."
"It was probably smart not to bring anyone with red hair this time - we know you're aliens, now, but you appeared in the middle of the street and we haven't told the public."
"It would have ended less well for any attackers, this time," the one with the sword notes darkly.
"They're already going to have a hard time containing the story about a bunch of people appearing in the road, it's a good thing there's not also a death to explain. If somebody landed in your world and looked like a - giant predatory monster or something - they might not do so well even if they didn't eat anyone, right?"
"If someone showed up looking like a giant predatory monster people would back away slowly, not attack them."
"I'm not very good at analogies. It might be that your species has less of a natural aggressive response than we do. Do you only eat plants?"
"...You eat people with red hair?!"
"No! Absolutely not, never, no. I'm just wondering if you're an herbivorous species, because those are less likely to consider attacking suddenly appearing startling things and more likely to hold still or run away. We do eat animals."
"You might attack a suddenly appearing startling thing if you had a sword, but most people don't. Hitting an apex predator with a broom would be dumb."
"Reds aren't apex predators. It's not a perfect analogy."
"Yes, it's much more reasonable to attack an apex predator than a plumber."
"People are very frightened of reds. We feel awful if we have to be around them, which is why they live separately."
"That really doesn't excuse torture."
"That's never been commonplace. How much of our conversation did the guards I spoke to relay home?"
"I don't know, I only picked up bits and pieces."
"So, we don't have great lines of communication with reds because no one wants to interact with them, but if one decides to start committing crimes it can be very high stakes. A handful of reds went places they didn't belong in another country and there is now a war with millions dead and a famine with billions hungry or in financial hardship trying to buy food. That could all have been mitigated if everyone had known exactly where the criminal reds had been and what they'd touched. With clean people there's all kinds of normal incentives to get them to report crimes - you can offer them reduced sentences or something. With reds that just doesn't work, we know from experience. So some places are set up to have a way to convince them to answer questions without anybody having to touch them. It's not fun, we don't like it, and we are deeply sorry that a queen was mistaken for a red, but it's just not practical to stand on principle if a red's been arrested for going somewhere they mustn't."
"Okay, except I also heard that someone had the idea to get the reds' side of the story and was told it would be a bad idea."
"Remember how we're not telling everyone about you yet? We definitely can't trust reds with that information. They're not trustworthy in general. We can get you in touch with social workers who interact with reds, if that would help."
"I mean it's up to the queen but that sounds like a terrible idea."
"Why's that?"
"Okay, our species used to have slaves in the grim dark annals of history. If you had shown up on us then and we had assured you that it was fine that they were slaves because they were this particular ethnicity, and when you asked to get their side of the story we had recommended you talk to some overseers, I hope you'd be skeptical."
"We used to have slavery too, and it's been abolished," the green assures them. "The reds are a caste, not an ethnicity - every country has them."
"...That is like the complete opposite of the point."
"The problem isn't that they have red hair. The problem is that they're unclean and that makes them dangerous and they're antisocial and untrustworthy."
"I'd be untrustworthy too if I thought people were going to hit me with brooms and torture me."
"They're left alone as long as they stay where they belong."
"Yeah, and an overseer could say that the slaves only get whipped if they don't do as they're told."
"Escaping slaves don't cause war and famine."
"And it's possible the queen will look at all the facts and declare what happened approximately justified but you do realize how this looks from the outside, right?"
"I have an idea but I really think the problem is rooted in not understanding about reds."
"Okay, but how do you know that the problem is us not understanding and not you being wrong?"
"Well, all of our countries do the same thing - not the details with electrified floors, which we've had removed, but having reds and considering them unclean and requiring them to stay inside. When we had slavery, some people were against slavery even at the time."
"And nobody is against mistreating coroners?"
"People disagree on the details. And there are thirteen billion of us. But you'd have to look very hard to find anyone who thought it was wrong for a startled purple seeing a red where one didn't belong to lash out."
"There's a difference between 'lash out' and what happened."
"The greys should definitely have known better."
"I mean, there's that, and then there's the difference between, 'was startled and alarmed, thwacked someone a few times' and 'literally beat someone until they couldn't stand.'"
"- I reiterate that we are deeply sorry about what happened. But from the purple's perspective she continued to look like a red the whole time and they would only be safe if she couldn't move."
"And from our perspective, it's fucked up that beating a red until they couldn't stand sounds totally reasonable."
"This is also something that might have happened if a clean person had pulled a weapon. A red out of neighborhood is already hostile and willing to hurt people."
They make a noncommittal noise.
"We're very sorry about what happened to her."
Another noncommittal noise.
"Do you have any questions?"
"Not at the moment, thank you."
"You're welcome. Perhaps you can clear up some vocabulary for me -"
This is a thing they can do!
And eventually the cars get where they're going and everyone can disembark!
The workers and consorts re-assume formation around the queen.
And they can come meet more greens and some yellows and blues.
The queen casts a critical eye over the assembled representation of hair colors, and nods. "Hello," she says, her tone cool but not quite outright unfriendly. "I greet you on behalf of the Nissfaran Web."
The green translates this. The yellows take notes.
"What is the Nissfaran Web, please?"
"It is the nation I represent."
"Were the people we met before also citizens thereof?"
"Yes. The queen you previously encountered was my niece."
"We wish to formally apologize on behalf of the nation of Tapa for the treatment she encountered. All of the culprits are being held and if you want them extradited we will be willing to turn them over."
"That would be a very good-faith temporary measure."
"Would you like them brought here or would you prefer to collect them?"
"The former would be more convenient at this time."
"They'll be fetched over presently. Is there anything else we can do for you?"
"We would like an overview of the socio-political structure of this nation and its neighbors, if that would be convenient."
They are happy to explain Tapai democracy to the visitors, and the neighboring systems.
The aliens are missing some concepts the Amentans might find pretty basic, like "caste."
They can explain caste! A long time ago it was found that talent runs in families, and you can get a lot of efficiency out of training people for things you can guess they'll be good at from early on and have them specialize. People mostly have children with other members of their castes - it used to be that they weren't allowed to have intercaste children - and so it is very common for everybody to have their caste hair color by now. Tapa is matrilineal, but their neighbor Anitam is patrilineal, when the intercaste thing comes up. Blues do governance and land management and judiciary, greens do art and science and academia, yellows do bureaucracy and programming and clerical work, greys are police and athletes and soldiers, oranges are doctors and caretakers and teachers, purples are farmers and laborers and manufacturers, and reds are undertakers and garbagepeople and plumbers.
Fascinating. The beeple do things differently; the queens seem to be the equivalent of blue, and the consorts are green, and the workers are everything else (although some workers are effectively green, since there aren't enough consorts to fill out the whole caste).
Amentans don't divide by sex like that but it seems like it makes sense with their biology!
The beeple find the idea of everyone being a queen or consort kind of distressing but understand that it probably works for Amentans. Except the population control thing, wow, that sounds unpleasant, beeple queens of course have lots and lots of children, they only need to control the number of new queens.
Beeple queens are so lucky! Amentans have various systems of population control; Tapa uses a credit auction, which is the most popular method, and abides by international treaties about controlling population growth.
Oh, yes, the beeple have those too. International treaties about population growth, that is, not credit auctions.
That's good to hear.
They only apply to queens, though, if one country has a sudden increase in workers for some reason--well, it's not like the swell will carry on to future generations. And queens are always the bottleneck on reproduction, so it doesn't matter how many consorts there are.
That makes sense if they have a means of sex selection.
It's random whether a given pregnancy will be a single reproductive baby or several workers but they need a special nutrient to have queen babies instead of consort babies.
Coooool. Amentans have randomly gendered babies, although they can do sex selection if they have some reason to want to, like a sex-linked genetic disorder.
If they can do sex selection why do they have the same number of queens as consorts?
Well, if they decided to have a lot more men than women, the men would mostly not get to have children and they would be very unhappy about that, and many of them also wouldn't get to have sex partners and they'd be unhappy about that too. This way most people can find sex partners and have at least one or two children.
Having several men married to each woman works for the beeple but they suppose it might be different for Amentans.
Some people do that but it's difficult to make it work.
Really? How so?
People find they have incompatible lifestyles or romantic jealousy and smaller households are easier. Three-person arrangements are not too uncommon though.
Romantic jealousy? What's that?
Many Amentans prefer that their partner not have any other partners.
Weird.
It can be inconvenient, yes.
Sounds it.
Workers aren't reproductive, but they do have erogenous zones and form romantic and sexual relationships.
And it doesn't bother them that they can't have children?
No, they don't have the reproductive drive that queens and consorts do. It would pretty much suck to be them if they did.
There are some Amentans who don't spring, that being the reproductive cycle they go through on an annual basis during their fertile years, but this is widely considered undesirable in one's children since then one won't get any grandchildren. There are a number of efforts to make Amentans happy with fewer children but they all have very small and slow effects. In the medium term what they really need is a way to get to other planets.
That makes sense.
The accident of choreography that allowed them to make contact with Amenta was novel and is going to have to be studied very diligently before they can be confident of reaching other planets, but even if they decide they can't trust Amentans with teleportation--or Amentans just can't do it, that also seems plausible--they could probably arrange some sort of ferry deal.
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.
The beeple do not have a history of torturing reds, maybe reds will be less untrustworthy to beeple than to non-red Amentans.
The reds may pollute them, or try to hold them hostage, or something.
Beeple are difficult to imprison if you don't know how.
Yes, but surely if they tried it would be distressing, and they do consistently murder roboticists and might murder beeple if they thought beeple would help roboticists.
The beeple do not have to tell them that.
Nobody ever is supposed to tell them about roboticists but they find out anyway.
Well, if beeple get murdered by reds they won't be able to say the Tapai didn't warn them.
The reds might tell them anything they think will work out well for them even if it's not true, and it seems like the beeple want to talk to reds because they don't trust clean Amentans, who would be the only way they could double-check.
It's not that the beeple don't trust clean Amentans it's that they have a policy of communicating with both sides of any dispute before intervening.
The clean Amentans will be happy to let them confirm with reds that reds would like to go live on their own planet but really don't want there to be any unrestricted chat.
See, they don't have any reason to mistrust clean Amentans by default, but not wanting unrestricted chat seems really suspicious.
Reds are just really awful.
Beeple are skeptical.
Maybe Tapa will look really hard and find some less terrible reds?
Having Tapa filter what reds they talk to completely defeats the point.
...they definitely should not go into a red district.
Possibly they could go on the internet if they learned to read Tapap.
Why shouldn't they go into a red district?
They would have to decontaminate after. They're already overlooking the thing where the queen and some workers were in a red interview booth in the same way they have to overlook birds landing in the red district, to avoid adding insult to injury, but they normally do take that excruciatingly seriously. Also, if the beeple were in danger in the red district (as the Tapai suspect they would be!) and danced their way out, reds might see how the dance goes. That would be AWFUL. Reds might go ANYWHERE.
Maybe they can start by checking if Amentans can teleport at all, it seems like knowing that would simplify a lot of things.
They can bring in some dancers to learn!
They're not going to teach the dancers how to teleport in full generality but there's a relatively simple one that can be performed by one person and teleports you five feet to the left.
Some dancers (grey) come in and attempt the steps.
The steps are fairly simple! No challenge at all for a trained dancer.
The greys do not teleport.
That is very sad.
The beeple are genuinely sorry that Amentans cannot teleport.
The dancers go away. Very sadly.
Poor dancers.
Everyone is very sad. They really really wanted to teleport.
It is very sad and beeple are sad for them.
Maybe they can work out a deal where beeple teleport them around.
Probably yes.
And this cuts out one of the obstacles to visiting red districts.
...one of them.
What if they sent coroners and plumbers, would that remove the other objection?
The Amentans have kind of been trying not to think too hard about the existence of integrated beeple coroners and plumbers.
Yeah, Amentans are weird like that.
...well, at least they can't have generationally unclean beeple because of the way their sex-based castelike system works!
Yep. They're still unsure how coroners and plumbers get that way for Amentans, like, showers exist.
Showers (long elaborate showers) are fine if you haven't been doing it for generations but after a while there's just no cleaning a red.
Yeah, see, that's where the beeple get confused.
None of these greens are theologians but they can get one if they like?
...What does theology have to do with hygiene?
Oh, it doesn't have to do with bacteria or anything, it's just how they standardize their understanding of pollution so there aren't competing intuitions making trade impossible.
???what???
Aren't there any things that beeple find really gross that won't literally infect them with pathogens?
Yeah, but you don't have to worry about getting reproductive incest on your trade goods.
Well, Amentans have instincts that do involve worrying about that.
Is siblings fucking on top of trade goods a serious problem Amentans have???
No, pollution is. The incest thing was just an analogy.
Oh. Okay, good, Amentans are weird but that would be really weird.
Amenta does not have a significant reproductive incest problem.
Beeple don't either, they just think it's gross when it does happen.
One of the beeple wants to know how Amentans do population control since they can't just restrict access to queen-making nutrients.
They have various medical interventions that people can take to prevent per-act or per-spring or per-part-of-spring conception.
How do they enforce it, though?
They're not gonna like it.
...Oh?
Most places what they do is they take the unauthorized baby away and put it up for adoption.
For historical reasons, Tapa once found it necessary to have extremely strict population controls to avoid a terrible war, which they successfully avoided. This resulted in the lowest worldwide per-capita rate of population control violation, and the policy has been kept since for that reason despite controversy. There is a statute of limitations associated but they kill unauthorized babies.
One of the non-linguist greens pipes up that as long as the beeple remain secret, they could teleport babies slated for infanticide elsewhere and leave them on doorsteps to be adopted out and no one would be able to notice.
...The beeple are very much in favor of preventing infanticide but it also sounds like every other nation on Amenta could use their taxi services.
Yes, it's not efficient, it would just be an option if they really hated the infanticide.
They really hate the infanticide! It's infanticide! But that doesn't necessarily make secrecy a good idea. Maybe they could give the babies-to-be-infanticided to the beeple and the beeple can figure out what to do with them that doesn't involve letting Amentans know they were not infanticided.
Sure. They will do that next time they find one. It is still the time of year for that.
Okay. Good. Infanticide is terrible. Why on earth was it necessary to avoid war?
So, before they had worldwide population controls, somebody decided the way to make them happen - which was genuinely important if badly executed - was to take over much of the world and prioritize places with looser regulations. Tapa did not want to be invaded and got some diplomats to allow that they wouldn't be if they literally killed unauthorized babies. They went through with it and the empire backed off.
That's awful.
They do have a very low noncompliance rate, so very few babies per capita die and fewer parents make stupid choices and lose their children.
Still. Aaaaaah.
Yes. They don't enforce it on their protectorates.
Good.
Any other questions?
They would appreciate tutoring for one of the consorts and a handful of workers in Tapai and to discuss trade deals.
They can provide that!
Excellent.
Tradewise: Things the beeple want: modern infrastructure. Things the beeple have to trade: food and taxi services. There are other things in both categories but those are the big ones.
Food is a short-term need and in the long term not a great use of beeple transit capacity but they could definitely use some of it to alleviate rationing till the war is over. Tapa would love to send them a labful of roboticists and some infrastructure teams and get underway on finding habitable planets they can dance to.
Okay, sure.
They will take some time to assemble the roboticists. What would they need to know about the locations of planets to get there? Can they dance in spacesuits?
...They would need to try it to be sure. They're working on that, they have some vague specifications but will need more specific ones when they figure out which ones.
They can get some spacesuits and they can see if it impedes them on shorter trips.
There are some tests and it is reported that dancers should expect to need a lot more practice to be able to dance sufficiently well in the suits than out of them but it should be doable.
Suits for anybody who wants!
It takes a lot of beeple to do interplanetary dancing without taking too long so yes let's have lots of those suits.
Many many suits. Some of these suits are decommissioned and no longer vacuum-tight but should be the same for dancing practice as long as they don't go to space.
The beeple are very careful to mark the practice suits separately.
They can stay in a hotel if they would prefer that to just dancing home at need.
The dancers prefer to default to being at home but thank you.
The main diplomatic staff will stay in a hotel.
Would they like to try local food?
Sure, okay.
Local food! It's clean. Although if it would be convenient to the beeple to trade unclean or unverifiable food in exchange for their clean food that would suit the Tapai.
The beeple don't care if food is clean by Amentan standards or not as long as it's not pathogen-infected.
It's not pathogen-infected and they have lots of it and it's not even long-term polluting to eat it.
The beeple will cheerfully trade beeple food for "unclean" Amentan food.
Hurray!
Honey seems to be the favorite sweetener for beeple food, appropriately enough. The beeple have lots of honey.
...do beeple produce honey or do they have otherworldly bees for it?
Beeple have otherworldly bees! Beeple are very fond of their bees. Bees are such good smol fuzzy bumblers.
Awwww. Well, they don't have a ton of unverifiable Amentan honey but they have some.
Oooh, alien honey. Nice.
Some beeple are interested in doing study-abroad in Tapa to learn about Amentan bees and other ecology.
Well, the news is out now (video of them appearing exists; people are gonna wonder where the food came from) so sure, though they will want to have some security or be undercover so people don't bother them about being aliens.
Would undercover be difficult?
They don't look that unusual. Their accents will be strange but if they don't talk to linguists most people won't expect to be able to place them, and if they avoid talking about their families too specifically they can avoid scrutiny for that too.
Some beeple will go undercover to university, then.
University students are friendly!
Beeple are also friendly! So friendly! Isn't ecology so cool?
Yup. Although fieldwork anywhere with much diversity means permaspring. Ew.
Beeple don't have to worry about permaspring and are delighted to do fieldwork.
They can tromp around rainforests and arctic areas!
Oooh.
Political beeple continue working on trade.
Tapa is delighted to be rid of unverifiable supplies and have tantalizing alien ones. Everyone is really excited. They assemble roboticists.
Aliens are likewise enthusiastic about exotic foreign food! They are polite enough not to talk about how exciting eating "polluted" food is in front of Amentans, for the most part.
If they do mention it they will get winces.
They are careful not to send any plumbers or coroners or red-haired people across.
Amentans really appreciate that.
The red-haired queen who was the first point of contact has been given an extra daughter-allotment for her suffering, by the way.
That seems like a reasonable thing to do and they are glad there was a way to compensate her and if they can help they would be glad to.
Maybe later.
Okay.
Beeple figure out what they need to know about a planet to design a teleport dance to get there.
Tapai astronomers throw themselves at this problem with intense enthusiasm.
Meanwhile several beeple now have good enough Tapap to deal with the prisoners.
The prisoners have been milling around unhappily eating honeyful food and talking amongst themselves.
The interviewers would like to discuss what the fuck they were thinking.
The purple thought it was a red! She acted in self defense! The red was not in its neighborhood and was way too close and wouldn't stop trying to do things!
"Things" is too broad a category for someone to reasonably not do.
It kept trying to move around and wasn't even wearing shoe covers and she thought it was a red!
They realize Amentans have an irrational dehumanization of reds but could she please at least use pronouns she would use for a person for her victim now that she knows her victim is not a coroner or a plumber?
She thought she was a red.
They can understand having a violent startle reaction but beating someone until they can't move is a terrible idea.
Once she couldn't move she couldn't spread pollution anywhere else.
She could have died.
...well, she didn't.
Why didn't she get away from the presumed red and call the police sooner instead of engaging in vigilante violence?
It - she - if she had been a red, the hypothetical red would have spread pollution more places!
What would she have done if her victim had been able to get her implement of violence away from her?
Run away in case it touched her!
Wouldn't that have been a reasonable first recourse? Their studies of Amentan culture suggest that if her victim had been a plumber instead of a queen she would have had to burn the broom.
Yes, she would have had to get rid of the broom. But hiring cleaning crews to deal with pollution is expensive too and they charge by the square foot.
If her victim had been a red, and she had killed her by accident, would she have expected to face legal consequences for this?
She'd probably have had to sit an interview about it but unless the judge really had it in for her or legitimately thought she was responsible for dragging a red to the location in the first place not really.
They apologize for not having a more legible judiciary process for her to interact with but their systems were not set up with aliens in mind and they are having trouble adjusting on the fly. Also, she's going to be in prison for at least a while longer. On the bright side, she's definitely not going to be executed.
Well, that's something, she guesses.
...They bring in an adorable one-Amentan-year-old who insisted very loudly on meeting the person who hurt his mommy.
The purple's reaction to the child will depend strikingly on whether he takes after her in the hair color department.
Nope.
Then she thinks he's very cute and mumbles apologetically.
They interview greys.
There's a bunch of greys; they have been supplied with most of a police department. They vary considerably. Some of them are really apologetic! One of them opines that if you are going to teleport to another planet you should avoid looking like a red on it.
The beeple ask that one how the fuck the queen was supposed to know that Amentans demonize her hair color.
By doing any research before showing up.
Was the grey not informed that this whole thing was an accident?
Maybe people who look like reds should be more careful not to have those.
Beeple do not demonize red hair.
It was really implausible that they would have arrested an alien. Reds, on the other hand, there are tons of.
The fact that they arrested her is not the problem.
The grey doesn't have anything new to add to this discussion after a while.
Torture: what the fuck.
Gotta make the cagey reds spill if they might know shit. They're not like people.
...Not like people.
That's what he said.
That's not how anything works.
It's how reds work.
Torture will magically teach reds languages???
No, see, it seemed like it was just playing dumb.
That seems like a terrible conclusion to draw.
That's what it looked like.
Has it occurred to anyone that reds might be less cagey if they weren't interacting with a system that thought it was fine to torture them.
No, people in other countries have this problem too.
The beeple decide to classify clean Amentans as having a collective mental illness with regards to reds.
Fits the data pretty well.
Yep. How's progress on upgrading beeple infrastructure coming?
It's going well! How much cargo they need depends on how much they can use local industry to get parts to spec.
Not zero but not a ton.
Well, they can focus on getting that up to where it needs to be first so they don't have to import every pipe and fitting.
That makes sense!
How are roboticists doing?
They're making progress! This field should have been far more advanced than this long ago but it turns out they still have to do all the intermediate steps.
The beeple would like detailed progress reports.
Sure. Right now they're working on balance and computer vision, in parallel.
Cool.
How do they feel about children visiting, a lot of beeple children are very excited about aliens.
They can do tours for kids!
Cool!
Beeple kids are not spaced like Amentan kids, they can have a creche visit with a wide variety of ages in gradients from almost-five to baby.
Awwww, babies. Here are robots, babies!
Babies babble and wave their arms at robots.
Robots wave back!
This encourages the older kids who are carrying babies to bring them closer to the robots.
Robots can carefully poke people in the nose, but not the babies because they do sometimes misjudge things and it's an own-risk proposition.
Some older kids want to try robotic nosebooping.
Boop! No one is robotically facepunched today.
Oh good! Do roboticists want to hold babies?
Yes. Hello beebies!
Beebies are just as soft and smol and good as Amentan babies.
Eeeeee!
It may become apparent that this entire creche is the offspring of a single beeple queen. And only her youngest, she has older children who are no longer in creche.
Beeple queens are so lucky.
Yep.
The kids go home to creche.
Roboticists work and infrastructure people work.
The envoys are informed of an uncredited baby.
The envoys are very glad they are around and the baby doesn't have to die!
Now, this is a red baby. Its hair is coming in orange but it's a red baby. They have to handle it appropriately and make sure nothing and no one it touches affect Amentans without being properly decontaminated first.
...Okay, sure.
Here are the international guidelines on that.
Okay, fine.
They acquire Amentan formula and transport the baby to a creche where her new adopted siblings can coo over her because she is so good and smol and preciousl
She has a hard time adjusting and cries a lot.
Poor baby. But at least she's alive, and that's what matters.