She laughs and kisses his hair. "We have to make sure it's a good place for our kind of alien! But we really hope so!"

"I prayed to God," he says solemnly, "that Earth would be a good place for you."

"That's so sweet! Does that usually work?"

"Yes! God ALWAYS grants the prayers of people who believe."

"Wow! Then I guess the experiment with the people going camping will turn out great!"

"It will! Because God loves you!"

"What a touching and childlike faith."

The yellow smiles and snuggles the smol.

And the interview goes live. 

Statements are released by every government the Amentans talked to that the Amentans are, in fact, real, and not Gileadites with hair dye. A National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving is announced in Gilead. Marches in every city are full of people praising God for his mercy onto Gilead. 

Primly, using words that can be mentioned in a family newspaper, the Gileadite media discusses the fact that God thinks it's okay for Amentans to have premarital, extramarital, and homosexual sex. 

Every newspaper and TV show in Gilead is required to go through a process of review before it can be published. The Eyes work overtime quelling dissent on the Amentan issue. Several prominent bloggers who claim that Amentans are Satanic disappear and are never heard of again. 

China announces that it is a credit auction country. India, Japan, England, Australia, Gilead, and Canada are all two-per. China, India, England, and Gilead enforce castes; Japan, Australia, and Canada do not. 

The pope issues a condemnation of the anti-life Amentan attitude towards population control, babies, and abortion. Catholic countries announce that they are planning to take Amentan refugees, particularly those with uncredited children. 

The Cascadian government declassifies Lev's reports, including a heavily redacted version of his report on reds. The word "genocide" never appears, nor do any statements with an uncertainty of greater than one in a million. It is still the only thing that anyone on any Cascadian news show talks about, with occasional breaks for "isn't it IRONIC that Gilead supports Voa when they nuked us?"

The Cascadian government announces that it is a one-per-Amentan country, aiming for an Amentan TFR of 2.2. Additional children will be distributed by lottery. You get an additional entry into the lottery for every year above four you were once you had your first child (if you have a child) or every year over four you are (if you are childfree). 

Voa announces that attempts to flee into any country in which contraception is forbidden even to Amentans is an execution offense and that they will deny door access to any Amentan country that doesn't institute a comparable rule, and they strongly recommend to Earth countries that they form a defensive agreement that will band together to squish any attempt by any country to harbor and accumulate a hundred billion Amentans before it starts and gets even uglier to put down.

Six hundred Amentans and their camping supplies head into Montana and Saskatchewan.

Earth governments hastily form the Amentan Population Control Association, the purpose of which is to forbid Amentan immigration into countries which do not have adequate population controls. No Catholic country is a member. Neither is Cascadia, due to the APCA's inadequate assurance that it would not result in nuclear first use. 

Catholic countries announce that they will not take refugees. The pope issues a very sarcastic statement about the seamless garment of life. 

"What should we do if Mexico takes Amentan immigrants?" quickly becomes a subject of avid debate in Cascadia. Some argue that invading risks loss of life and nuclear war; others, that allowing Amentans to have children unchecked is the greater risk. 

A few Gileadite bloggers announce that they believe that children are a blessing and contraception is morally wrong, even for Amentans. They disappear. One blogger finds Lev's report on reds and publicizes it to support her hypothesis that Amentans are demons. She disappears. People start complaining that their perfectly innocent posts about paint colors or flowers get filtered. 

Montanans and Saskatchewaneans watch the aliens. 

The aliens find beautifully empty parts of their selected provinces, and they set up tents and have cookouts and taste-test Earth food (it doesn't hurt them a bit!) and are exquisitely careful about Camping Protocol Latrine Management since they didn't bring any reds. Many of them are couples, since they're going to have to endure some spring even if they do reseason; the singles hook up with one another anyway when that hits. The greens study the wildlife; the purples do architectural surveys; everybody studies English.

A Montanan homeschool coop goes on a field trip to meet the aliens!

A grey stops them before they get very close and directs them to the camp showers! After that - they don't require a full decontam, they just want to be a little careful - they are welcome to visit.

"Tell us to leave if we annoy," a mom says to the grey in phonetically memorized Voan.

"You are not annoying us!" the grey assures them in English. "We're happy to have visitors as long as we can be sure you've washed." The first sentence is haltingly constructed; the grey almost says "we" instead of "us". The second he memorized out of a phrasebook composed with Milliways help.

There are several small children in the homeschooling coop! They're running around oohing at the tents.

The Amentans all drop what they're doing to stalk admire the small children!

Some small children are frightened and hide behind their mothers' skirts! Others think the aliens are So Cool. 

The Amentans prefer the ones they aren't scaring.

Perhaps, in spite of the language gap, the aliens will be able to understand the concept of tag? 

The aliens figure this out! The aliens happily chase small children and tag them!

The homeschool coop takes pictures!

One of the moms posts them on her blog. 

A few Eyes visit journalists and strongly suggest that a human-interest story about the aliens playing tag with human children would be a very good idea for the front page.

The aliens look terribly photogenic pretending to not wish to be caught by human children.

If (freshly bathed) journalists want, they will also talk about the observations they're making of the planet, which mostly duplicates Earth research but is nice to have done with their own methods and measurements.