It's not as if every inch of ground in the world has been tread by a cannibal. But this is your concern to manage, not mine.

To distract myself and try to keep tensions from rising I would be willing to lecture purples on good ways to refine deuterium from seawater and synthesize helium-3 for some reasonable lecture fee, since ship power plants need the stuff. It will be a good investment unless things spiral to the point where we break off contact entirely. I may teach you about the reactors if this pollution scare gets resolved well. You can't perform FTL travel with only them and they're one of the hardest parts of really capable ships.

"I'll get you an audience of purples," says Miamoto.

He does experiments in his ship. He teaches some purples. At one point he flies the ship to the most isolated piece of ocean on the planet and just swims around for a whole day, then comes back. He waits for the theology conference to come up with something or have questions for him.

The theologians think enough radiation will do it; here is their paper on how much and why.

...That's enough to very definitely extremely kill an Amentan in the normal course of things.

...Would this work on reds if they were somehow kept alive through it?

Uh.

Somehow like... how.

A Song of Healing ongoing the whole time is the obvious option, but if constantly repairing the radiation damage the whole time messes it up, maybe their mind and soul could be held in stasis - Song-pattern and magical energy only, no cells or atoms - until all the radiation has hit them and then they get healed only after the entire body is thoroughly irradiated. No rush on thinking about this.

He's going to get one of the cannibals to come back and be irradiated and see how people feel about that. He could build a radiation machine but perhaps one made by Amentans would be more reassuring.

They have some for use with food and can make it oomphier. Who's the biggest Draak they'll need to irradiate?

Among those who are likely to volunteer or ever want to set foot on Amenta, that would be the possibly-former movie star Sunwind, at nearly thirty feet of wingspan fully extended and thirty-five feet long.

They don't have to be irradiated wings out, or tail extended, so that's not too outrageous. They build a big irradiator.

Sunwind's studios are paying a lot of money for cleanup and pretty grumpy about that but they're not unwilling to talk to him about resuming. After he gets cleaned, not before.

He can't speak for Sunwind, obviously, but from Sunwind's perspective he was surrounded by people who were suddenly disgusted and angry at him, in foreign territory and outnumbered, and that kind of thing induces really strong fight-or-flight responses. So running away and not landing anywhere except the conference was probably close the best outcome that could reasonably be hoped for. Wasn't the cleanup going to be publicly funded?

Anyway, he might be gone a while managing the politics at home. He needs updated information about what the Senate and other Elders feel about all this and so on before any more serious talks can happen.

The cleanup is publicly funded but the lost time while they can't use the studio isn't and neither is anybody's distress bonus if their contract says they get a distress bonus for having been exposed to pollution on the job.

He privately thinks that if they try to deduct anything from his pay, Sunwind might just call the whole thing poisoned and have nothing to do with it anymore, but has no further comment to the studios.

He tells Amseli (within metaphorical earshot of some other blues) that he hopes she keeps the job - Miamoto's perfectly fine, but he's gotten to know her - and promises to Voa, Cene, and some smaller countries that he'll give a few batches of their purples the same lecture the Tapai got at some point if they want to arrange that, and leaves.

Draak ships appear once more only when the northern winter and southern summer is well underway. There are four this time. The new one is littler, colored red and purple, lurks waaay out in the edge of the solar system where you can barely see it, and transmits a transponder code calling itself Fang #1.

Seeker's ship wants to land at Tapa's conference site with a few cannibals, is that fine?

They have the irradiator ready, so if the cannibals are all ready to be irradiated, yes. What's the deal with Fang #1?

The militia pooled their resources and commissioned it from the Draak's growing skunkworks, to escort other Draak ships. They're forbidden by the Senate to approach the inner solar system without permission or a clear and obvious threat to Draak lives.

Seeker's ship complies with the descent path given to it, nice and slow, and four Draak including Sunwind and the Seeker pile out. Seeker breathes hot flame over the exterior of his ship and the ground near the exit.

The Amentans appreciate that. Here is the irradiator. They will not need to touch it for it to work apart from the ground and they made it so they can do the fire thing to said ground to make sure they're not tracking anything external, and when they pop out they'll be certified clean!

Sunwind goes first. He wants to see if he can stand it without any active help from the Seeker. How long does this last anyway?

Three and a half minutes.

That's all? He can withstand anything for three and a half minutes!

...He's a lot less cheery and confident after three and a half minutes, but walks out under his own power, then flops sedately lies down in the dirt, refusing to complain.

Would he like someone to email his studios for him?

Uh. Sure. He's probably not up for talking much for a while, though. He is in kind of a lot of pain. He'll live, but ow.

They might be able to revise down the consensus about how long this has to take later, they're just sure that three and a half minutes is enough, but as long as he never eats anybody again he will not have to redo it.

The pain bothers him a lot less than it would bother an Amentan. Because he is a very strong Draak. Who is not thinking in words at the moment, sorry about that.

(The other two cannibals who want to be cleaned accept the Seeker's offer of magic to toughen them up during their irradiation and go through it without incident.)

Then they are all certified OK to go about as they were doing before this unfortunate business!

The other two don't actually have any business they want to pick back up. They just found the state of not being allowed anywhere on Amenta infuriating and intolerable.

Seeker emails Ruan and tells him that Bloom is having trouble finding prospective students.

And then finds Amseli-or-Miamoto. My peers and my kin in the Senate are much cooler on the prospect of full technological sharing now, out of fear that more unexpected conflicts will be found.