"You wanted me 'cause I'm small and cute and it doesn't matter that I don't remember anything 'cause you can tell for sure by looking. But I don't remember anything and if stuff I don't remember was this one way then you wouldn't want me but you can't even tell by looking so I'm here but that's dumb if you might decide you didn't later."

"I want you no matter what and will never regret having you in our lives."

"If you lead the aliens in a terrible bloody conquest of the planet I guess I will regret not parenting you better."

"But it would be really really awful for you if you thought I might have ancestors who did stuff."

"Yeah. And I'd figure out how to stop feeling awful. Reds have the same mental architecture as us and they don't disgust one another, it is possible to cope better than it has currently made sense for any of us to figure out how to do."

"Why doesn't it make sense?"

" - well, I think part of it is exposure and I can't just have reds around to acclimate myself to, and it would take a long time and be unpleasant and hard, and it would probably only get me to not-awful, and I can't think why I would want to. But if it affected my daughter of course I would want to."

"Mm."

"I do not make decisions about red policy by considering whether I feel icky about them, and I never have to see them, so the feeling icky about them doesn't matter much."

"There were ones in your office."

"That was actually mostly unpleasant because they were scared, it was only secondarily unpleasant because they were icky."

"Were they scared of freezing?"

" - well, before I invited them inside I guess they were scared of freezing. After that they were worried I would change my mind about inviting them inside and kill them."

"...didn't you say you were not going to do that once you knew they were scared of it?"

"Of course!"

"Did they think you were lying?"

"I think they thought - that if in five minutes one of them sneezed I might well change my mind, and that if I did it wouldn't occur to me to care that I had promised, nor would anyone else think less of me for breaking my promise if they found out about it."

"Oh."

"If enough people break promises then they stop being useful to make."

"...because there are a lot of people and they can't pay attention to whether you ever did it?"

"At least, when they meet me for the first time they have no reason to think I am very different from everyone else. And if I did try to get them to trust me, well, I worry that something like the conversation I had with Shavanti Neli would happen in public and they would stop trusting me and be even less trusting of people like that in future."

"...it's mean to talk about people like that especially if they could hear you."

"Yes. It makes it pretty much impossible to have a trusting relationship with them. And yet if I did not talk like that then there would be no visas and people would die."

...nod.