Fine, she will go play with uncles.

They are blissfully ignorant of Biyan!

That seems to be working out for them.

After a while Nertel turns off the television and gets back to work.

Lintalai follows her.

"Hello, honey. How are you doing?"

"I'm okay. What are you doing?"

"I've been reading the news."

"What is in it?"

"People trying to make sense of Biyan, mostly, and worrying about what will happen next."

"Make sense of it?"

"Understand what they should do in order to not have riots and stop having reds."

"That sounds hard."

"Uh huh. Somewhere to put them would do it but there aren't a lot of candidates."

"Why do people care about not having reds when they don't have to touch them anyway?"

"We promise to have a certain number of people in our country. If we didn't have reds we could have more babies. And as long as they exist they might be touching things, the Voa thing discomfited everybody in that way..."

"Oh."

"And when they attack, like in Biyan, people want to attack them back."

Nod.

"Aitim and I have hoped for a long time that we could maybe convince people there's a way to clean reds. But we wanted to wait until he was politically powerful enough to - well, to suppress dissent over it, really - and we wanted to wait until people didn't remember so vividly what happened last time some people tried to change peoples' conception of pollution."

"There's a way to clean reds?"

"I don't know. Nobody thinks there is a way to clean reds but maybe everybody is wrong and hasn't thought about it enough."

"People have a really hard time thinking about reds."

"It's not very fun. And something like claiming they could be cleaned...it'd be awful if you were wrong, and awful if it was tried and then people decided you were wrong..."

Nod.