Interesting. As I expected, it works for your kind. You will want greater songs of healing and Seeker's Song-Traps to store them. They could do what I did, and more, and quickly.

Perhaps I should learn about your medicine from someone...? I didn't understand most of that but it could be an important insight. Ruan?

"I can get you a medicine tutor, though you should be aware it takes well over a year of full time study to become a doctor."

I would aim to fit some of what you've learned into my own understanding. Not a tutor, exactly. A - consultant?

"Easily done."

I could continue healing the volunteers. We have not seen how far the Song reaches.

"We can bring them back in," says the nurse. He goes off and the patients return.

She explains that she's going to move around to try to figure out how much area she can cover and they should tell her when the feeling of endure stops.

It starts to fade at about twenty feet and is gone at thirty.

They identify the radius and measure it.

Ruan's found a desert; there are some ruins, from a time when the area had a different climate, but currently it's uninhabited. Occasionally rough-terrain-buses take tourists out to see the ruins but there's no permanently installed electricity or plumbing and this isn't the tourist season, generally they go in fall or winter.

A desert will be awfully dry and hot and there will be sand in her feathers but at least it'll be empty. She wants to head there after people-watching at the train station for a while again. Maybe she can get a pocket everything that has a map on it or something, since she doesn't know the local geography super well? To go there and find her way back, too.

She can get such a pocket everything, and Ruan will show her how to use the map!

Technology is very convenient.

She flies there, circling the industrial area to gain altitude and then cruising through the air, a streak of feathered green alien visible for dozens of miles around, and then she lands in the desert and does nothing. Silence. Emptiness.

...The cities are full of wonder and beauty, but such noise! Such strict artificial transformation of everything! Can this really be the will of the Onesong? Yes. Life is not without challenges or trials. She's still going to figure out how to do nice things for these weird Tailless. It'll make them want to do this to other places less in the future.

She can park there as long as she wants, as long as it's not so long that the Baravic government gets nervous.

Bloom flies back from the desert after six hours, and settles into the routine of people-watching, visiting the garden and the desert, learning Baravic, and talking about fiddly hormonal system details with whichever greens they find for her to do that with.

Meanwhile, the Seeker finally read about Olvala's test city. He waits for an opportune moment and asks Amseli, 

Does Tapa have an official stance on Olvala's expulsion of reds and the rotation program?

Our official stance is that the experiment is worthwhile in some form, but the handling of the obsolete reds was irresponsible both on pollution and on population control grounds. We're accepting imports from them under a special label with reduced tariffs to compensate for the lower price they command due to the former concerns.

...I'll have trouble following the logic of tariffs and economics, perhaps I'll look into it later, but why is it a concern on population control grounds?

Some of the reds are believed to have dispersed into the wilderness where it will be difficult to monitor them if they find some way to persist.

I see. I find it concerning on... Philosophical grounds, I suppose. They were once essential, but when they become redundant - driven out, discarded. They are few in number compared to Amentans as a whole. I see parallels to my species and begin to wonder what will happen if Amenta learns to build your own FTL engines.

We don't have any reason to think that the Draak aren't clean. And you do have skills we seem unlikely to acquire on our own to do with the telepathy, if that's more reassuring.

It is, a bit. Not really enough.

I imagine that if I worked with teams of greens to adapt the projection technology to be controlled by Amentans and the technology was deployed and the reds all killed without any harm to non-reds, most Amentan countries would find this a satisfactory course of events. It would certainly be a decisive end to the current, unstable system - the system that drives unthinking cruelty to people who are more similar to you and the greens I have been learning from than Bloom is to me.

I struggle to make what is displeasing about that idea sensible... It's related to the objection to factory farming. And slightly related to the objection to wholesale destruction of natural areas. I suppose it is simply not right that one's fate is to be replaced and die, simply because one is red, just as it's not right that one's fate is to eat, grow, and die simply because one is a cow in a factory farm. And it's no more right to kill all reds than it would be to kill all blues. Something irreplaceable would be lost, something awful and irreversible will have been done, either way.

I do hope we'll be able to reconcile our philosophical perspectives eventually. I'm not sure I agree that we're more similar to reds than to you, apart from the matter of species.

I cannot see how you are not, but I will not argue it with you if you don't wish to.

Those I spoke to at home are confident that meat-bearing plants could be made with a few years of work, possibly as little as two or three seasons. Such a thing could probably end factory farming and make meat more plentiful and cheap all at once, and that is a very pleasing prospect, a perfect example of making the universe greater when two peoples meet. Is there no way to benefit Amenta while also bringing things more in line with Draak views in the matter of reds, too?

I'm not really clear on what you want us to do with reds. Or what you envision for the meat animals - the producers will stop breeding them, once the meat plants can outcompete them, and then there won't be any more.

My kin may decide to make an end to animal-based meat farming a prerequisite of substantial sharing of technology. The end of the meat animals as species will still be - quietly tragic - but it's better in our perspective than allowing the current situation to continue. The goal is no more animals being born, living their whole lives, and dying in a metal box.

Reds are less clear-cut. I don't know myself, perhaps. Exterminating them feels wrong. Forbidding them children so that in time there will be no reds also feels wrong, and with your springs is perhaps even more cruel than a quick death. Keeping things as they are is not an option - Olvala has done it, others will do so in time. I have to wonder, is there some other option? Can they be sent to Newhome and kept there? Can they be cleaned?

As far as I know all the things that could clean pollution from a red wouldn't be survivable. And - I'm not sure if we could be confident they were adequately contained on your world, either as population or as pollution.

Implementing population control and strict cleaning procedures is not something my kind would be very good at, no.

He sighs, which is a fairly momentous event for something so big.

It would not be the worst thing that has ever happened. Wars have killed more people than there are reds in both our histories. But I should at least talk to some theologians about cleaning reds.