Fred has the vague sense that he has failed at apologetics.

So he changes the subject!

"What are our next steps? Talking to our respective governments... I'd like to take a volunteer Amentan as proof, we can bring you a human if you want."

"That makes sense, although assuming we actually look the way we appear to relative to one another it won't be very impressive proof and I don't think the linguists have much in the way of translation down. The Voan election results will be in two days from now, whereupon I will most likely be Governor without the qualifier 'Acting', and then I'll be able to make more promises on behalf of my country, though anything relevant to population will still have to pass international review."

"I was assuming the reproductive systems would be obviously different, for one."

"What sort of medical examination am I going to need a volunteer for, here?"

"Medicine-y? I assume there is some reasonably non-invasive way to tell apart two species even if they appear oddly similar on the outside."

Avalor summons the Amentan reproductive biologist and the human biologist and tells them to figure that out.

Fifteen minutes later they don't have anything more obvious than the fact that Amentans don't menstruate.

"Great. Wonderful. Maybe you have technology we don't...?"

"Maybe. Do you have these -" She pulls out her pocket everything.

"Yes, we call them smartphones. I don't know, do you have self-driving cars or VR tech that handles smells well...?"

"We're probably behind you in automation and we don't have very good VR. We probably have better cleaning technology than you do, being more motivated, so I suppose you could haul a washing machine through?"

"Maybe you could have someone bring us the specs for a bunch of cleaning-related machines, we could copy them out in Milliways, and then they'd be in English? --That's a terrible solution but I don't have anything better." 

"There may be something else but I'm blue, not purple or yellow or green, so I don't have a hand on the pulse of modern engineering. And our greens here are not inventors and our yellow is not a programmer or a tech journalist. I could have someone else fetched?"

"Sounds good. If you like, I can get someone to bring you a robotics textbook, unless there's some reason like the cleaning thing that you object to delivery drones and self-driving trucks."

"The problem with automation is that the reds start murdering people who work on it."

"Uh. Okay. ...is that a reason I shouldn't get someone to bring you guys a robotics textbook?"

"It's a reason we'd have to move very carefully with any attempt more conspicuous than 'reading it' to implement its contents. We'd need to be careful in prototyping, and in the announcement, and in figuring out what to do with the obsoleted reds."

"You can't move them into other jobs because of the pollution thing... Can't you just... pension them or something... I guess it is a wildly unpopular policy to try to pension murderers..."

"We'd also have to stop them from having children. And there will be enormous demand for the land their districts sit on; the districts are mostly old and close to the city centers and if they were burned they would be clean to develop on again."

"There's no way to get them clean? Like, extra-long showers?"

"There isn't. They're more pollution than polluted, if that makes sense."

"Maybe we can put them in Montana, since we're not bothered."

"They'd still have to be contained to allow any trade between you and us, and they'd still have to be population-controlled, which you don't have any experience doing."

"Surely they can implement their own-- but I suppose not, if they often commit other crimes."

"They have the highest crime rate of any caste."

"Are reds... different from other castes, psychologically?"