[Sequel to city lights on the water and ohana means family]
Lucien hugs Meelia, retreating with her into a private room Keetim sprouts from a building on the outskirts of town. They speak for some time.
"Yeah. Prolly the way to do it would be to implant a bunch of things like that 'round her body. Maybe in a way that circ-ulates things through her blood after heating her up, I don't know. It would help but I think she'd need to do definitely more than one jump every ten minutes to keep up with a thousand starships that can scout new places in ten days each. And getting it so something e-venly heats her up enough to un-do a freezing solid like this amount of cold in less than ten minutes .... sounds really hard."
"Yeah. Uh, the starships will in fact slow down as they check all the nearest systems, warp still takes amounts of time proportional to distance and they don't have anything managing past warp factor three yet, but if it gets worse the farther he jumps then - yeah. Fuck."
"If he's frozen solid presumably wrapping him up in insulation won't help at all?"
"Yeah..."
She is wondering if she could beat warp three and probably but not for a lot of years she thinks.
"If... if we do the orignal plan, with the disguising the warp signature, maybe we could sneak them onto a hidden spot on our planet, without the rest of Amenta finding out?"
"People will notice them going missing and amalien action will be an obvious guess."
"I meant we say there's a planet like you said, and say we're disguising our warp signature so they can't be followed or found, and so on. And then instead of going to a new planet, we bring them here."
"...they would probably notice that sooner or later, they do have, like, satellites around this planet now. And even if you have a way to build them an underwater megametropolis or something Amentans need sunlight to season."
"Hrm, do you think it's infeasible to manage the other Amentans knowing the reds are here?"
"I don't know if it's impossible but it would be assigning ourselves a difficult task with no end date, whereas if we find them their own planet they will probably eventually be self-sustaining. Seasoning is a thing Amentans do, starting when we're four or five, in Amentan years - some people are doing it here too, some people aren't, the ones who aren't are mostly going back home because we don't like being without it. When our bodies are convinced it's spring or don't know what's going on because we've recently changed hemispheres or planets or something, we're fertile; we want babies all the time but it's especially intense around then."
"We're not sure we've pinned down all the factors but suspect sun angle. Anyway I don't know if it's literally impossible to keep Amentans from noticing reds here on this planet we are busily colonizing and surrounding with satellites and so on but I'm not sure you could even be confident of no reds leaking it, let alone cleans noticing."
"Don't need to tell em till they're here?... guess that means we'd have to keep em from leaving..."
"Yeah. You'd wind up keeping them prisoner with no Internet. I'm sure some of them would prefer this to having hypovernal grandkids and dying at home of old age but I'm not sure what percentage."
"If they're on another planet and the Amentans know that they are on a planet somewhere, they can have the run of the place - admittedly they can't have their own warp ships any time soon - and subspace internet."
"We might be able to set up subspace internet here, maybe with a relay to somewhere else so it looks like it's coming from far away. Also there's a lot of room in the caverns."
"It's not as good as a whole planet though."
"And, again, they won't season in caverns. Plus they will, unless you stop them somehow, reproduce, and ultimately need more space - a planet will take them a while, caverns while they're all permaspringing won't."
"I'm pretty sure I could do things with light to fix that? There's a monster that can sorta infuse light into things that might work. And it would give us a lot of time to solve the other problems."
"All this still sounds really risky to me. One nice thing about a planet is that it's really easy to verify that all the pollution is staying in the one place. Hiding them in caverns - if it does leak, and I think it would be very likely to, it would be way harder to be sure that Chaspanti hadn't gotten polluted somehow in the process. Nobody's going to trust you on it, you don't appear to natively have the concept and hosting reds would all by itself call into question whether you respect anyone else having it."
"If we can possibly patch the planet scouting option it has a lot, a lot, of advantages. It lets reds be relocated as a one-time cost and then it's easy for everyone else to ignore them, which is basically what most people want. It directs lots of energy at colonizing the planets, and accordingly away from paving over this one or making red-related trouble. It makes billions of people dramatically happier because they can have more babies. Is Meow the only plausible candidate monster? Mind that we don't necessarily have to physically travel to planets to narrow them down - an atmosphere sample would go a long way."
"There's a monster that could prolly multiply the speed of a single ship by a bunch. Maybe we could have Neh look at the most promising places within a hundred lightyears, which is maybe easier to find a good place in, and then use the monster to get people there in less than a year?"