"This is what we look like! We're surprisingly similar to you except for the hair colors."

"I understand the hair colors play a very important role in your culture?"

"The hair colors signal what we call caste, which Milliways's magical translation renders in English as 'caste'," says the yellow. "The color doesn't cause the caste, though; instead, each caste has a most common hair color, and if our hair would be misleading, we dye it to match."

"Which castes are there?"

"I'm yellow - we have words that mean the castes directly, but rather than make you all learn a lot of loan words, we're just using color names, which we also do ourselves colloquially. There are also blues, greens, oranges, greys, purples, and reds."

The interviewer asks for and receives an explanation of which caste does what. 

Then he frowns very seriously, as if this were a legitimate concern he has, and says, "among humans, castes go against God's will. They limit people's potential and force them into one role or another. Are you sure God wants Amentans to have castes?"

"We're new to the concept of God. We do think it might be the case that castes work for Amentans and don't work for humans; certainly we wouldn't try to impose the system we're using on another species."

"Everyone on the first contact team has been praying and reading our Bibles about the concept of castes. We believe that God may show Himself differently to different species. For example, among humans, gender shows the relationship between Christ and His Church. But Amentans don't have a concept of gender."

"You don't?" the interviewer asks.

"We don't. We have sexes the way you do, but we're less sexually dimorphic, and we don't find ourselves to have different personality characteristics between the two, not even statistically. No profession in Amenta which doesn't specifically require someone to have a uterus reflects a sex imbalance."

"Similarly," Fred says, "humans have different hair colors, but don't have any differences based around that. We believe that God may be showing Himself differently through Amentans. As humans are supposed to behave in accordance with their gender, so Amentans are supposed to behave in accordance with their caste."

"Is there something like men corresponding to Christ and women corresponding to His Church, but for castes?"

"Work is ongoing," Fred says. "There's been an attempt to correspond them with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit-- greys are fortitude, greens are understanding, yellows are counsel, blues are wisdom, and we're not sure about the other three."

The yellow smiles and nods.

"The differences between humans and Amentans are fascinating!" Fred says. "We look so similar that it can be easy to miss how different we are psychologically. For example, Amentans have an immense desire for children."

"Surely everyone wants children," the interviewer says.

"Amentans want children much more," says the yellow earnestly. "I don't doubt that there are some humans who want as many children as the average Amentan, and as badly, but the averages are very strikingly different."

"What is the Amentan average?"

"Because we all want children so badly, and don't have an equivalent of the bitoxiphosphene crisis, we have to impose strict population controls, so our average is just slightly above two per family. Most people would have at least five if they could. Under permissions systems, people who are successful enough to acquire the option often have more than that."

"Through population controls, God blesses Amentans with the opportunity to exercise self-control and self-discipline, as we do when we regulate our fleshly desires."

"Voa, the country I am from, uses two-per-family child allocations, and occasionally awards third children," continues the yellow.

"Do other countries use other systems?"

"Yes, another popular model has the federal government auctioning off credits. It has revenue and caste balance control advantages over our system, but we think ours is superior in terms of population well-being. Some countries also have blues distributing permissions according to more or less idiosyncratic systems of their own."

"The two-per system seems fairest, which is why we plan to use it in our Amentan settlements."

"Amentan settlements?" the interviewer asks.

"Yes!" Fred says. "We will encourage Amentans to immigrate to Gilead."

"Since we're not affected by bitoxiphosphene, and would benefit so much for room to expand, this is a golden opportunity for us both," says the yellow. "Voa is likewise opening some of our northern provinces to human settlements; we don't have much bitoxiphosphene in the atmosphere, never having found much industrial use for it, and we'd never wish infertility on anyone when we could let human girls grow up on Amenta, unexposed."

"And the migration will happen through your closet door?"

"I'm planning to move out!" Fred says with a grin.

"Our end is in the office of our head of state! We're repurposing the whole building as a border office," smiles the yellow.

"If humans and Amentans have such incompatible needs, how can they both live in the same cities and towns?" the interviewer asks, as if this is a real misunderstanding he has.

"We're expecting that we mostly won't. Amentans need things very clean, in a way that humans would consider a waste of time; so humans in Amentan towns will spend some time making sure they're verifiably clean enough, and Amentans in human towns will take more showers and might wear plastic outerwear, and mostly we'll take up residence in separate places."