Everyone quietly downgrades their opinion of her value towards projections about the experimental colony. Anyway they think numbers depend on age balance.

If she goes back and forth with them on this for a while, can she get an estimate?

If they're sending families they will need more total people to handle childcare while colony-establishing work gets done. If they're sending entire districts with old people and stuff similar considerations apply. If they're just sending adults of working age in the first wave they can get by with fewer.

They aren't going to want to send whole districts until the robots are ready; they probably do want to send families, for PR reasons among other things, but they can prioritize single adults some. What does the supply estimate look like in both of those cases, families-without-prioritizing-workers and workers-only?

...PR reasons? Anyway here are some really rough numbers assuming a seasonable planet, although they might wind up giving the reds a planet that doesn't season, get them moved along quicker - might be hard to find ones with the right year length and it won't affect most of the other considerations.

And she takes those numbers to the blues, repeats the song-and-dance about how it'll be a good test case; how does it go over?

It's not gonna be a great test case because they will be reds and not caste balanced clean colonists, reiterate the blues, but it'll catch anything really obvious!

And it'll fit in the budget?

They won't be able to use any really heavily earmarked donations but the general colonization fund includes an item for setting up a red planet, sure.

Cool.

And now she can go answer the reds' questions. Yes, they are getting the first planet; she made it a condition of helping with robots, and the blues really want robots. They'll be dropped off with roughly this set of supplies - subject to change if the greens make any major breakthroughs, but the red colony will be doing double duty as a test case; they're not going to be just dumping them in the wilderness. Communication will be limited at first - a proper interstellar internet requires robots to handle the 'interstellar' part - but they should be able to send some messages home, yes. She expects the trip to be on the order of weeks to start with, with later colonists having a faster time of it as better routes are found. And, yes, she's only arranged for one red planet at this time.

Whew.

People being baffled at her treating reds as people is getting real old. Hey philosopher greens: the alien would like your help in clearing up this confusion.

What's she confused about exactly?

Not her confusion, other peoples'.

...what does she think other people are confused about?

Red personhood and moral value.

She's telepathic, y'see, and while that doesn't directly get at moral worth... they aren't different. They just aren't, except in ways that can be entirely explained by how they're treated.

The greens point out that, as an alien, she probably doesn't have a pollution instinct. That matters a lot to Amentans, though, pollution.

Well, true, but how are they getting from that to moral worth. Seems entirely unrelated, to her.

It doesn't seem unrelated to them, but they can see how it might not be obvious for someone whose entire society lacked the concept!

- so, upshot is that there isn't some straightforward thing she could, like, tell people, to preempt the confusion. Okay.

(Aliens. Bah.)

They're sorry that there isn't a more pollution-instinct-independent explanation floating around.

Yeah, fair enough. This does happen sometimes, with aliens, it's annoying but she'll deal with it.

Reds happy enough with their answers?

They are nervous but not about to riot.

Fair enough; she's still available to answer questions, if any come through the form, but probably they just need time.

She starts taking walks outside on a regular basis; she often ends up at the park to watch the sun set.

People follow her around and take pictures and occasionally want to thank her for FTL and earnestly ask why she cares so much about reds and if they can touch her space hair.

Well, most aliens just go by 'does this hurt people' to figure out what's moral and what's not - they vary in how much they care about that, but pollution doesn't come into it at all. And she's telepathic, she can tell pretty directly when people are hurt, so how reds are treated is especially upsetting to her.

(They can touch her hair, usually, if they're polite about asking. It's nice and grown out now.)

They pet her space hair! They take pictures of themselves petting her space hair!