After recovering, she goes to find Lucien and Pelape.

Pelape is helping herself to a post-shower breakfast in Keetim.

Vira plops down the star chart next to Pelape. She's bouncing a little.

"Oh, marvelous. To retain the leverage probably we want to check these ourselves, I've gotten started on the piloting course..."

"Ooh, what'd you learn?"

Vira takes some potato pancakes for herself. Nom.

"Starting out it's mostly just about how the controls are labeled."

Vira would like to know how the controls are labeled!

She can look over Pelape's shoulder while she completes the unit test.

Vira guesses you'd have to make a ship like that if you wanted different people to be able to use it. Still, she feels like if she designed the layout it would be way better than that.

It is certainly possible to improve on this, it was invented like last year! But it's the current state of the art.

Vira usually doesn't change things after she invented them too much, though she supposes she might within a year.

Well, probably her production cycle is... very different... in lots of ways. Anyway, this is what they'll be able to source from Tapai shipbuilders, though once more countries have their own programs off the ground more thoroughly they'll probably have competing standards.

Mhm, she's okay learning someone else's. It's fun to see how other people think sometimes.

At her current pace she'll be ready to go take the test on a live ship in a month. Inconveniently, it looks like they're not selling any ships to private interests - the amaliens may be able to buy one, or they can try to make a deal with Voa or Anitam or whoever without being able to deliver right away.

Lucien goes to check with the marine biologist Green that's been working with Vira on their progress.

The marine biologist and several of her colleagues have been able to get a fair number of grants and prizes for various amalien researches past and future.

Enough to pay for a ship?

The thing is there aren't listed ship prices because they aren't selling to private interests. They're going to have to talk to some blues.

Pelape points out it doesn't have to be Tapai blues if they don't want it to be - Anitam is closely allied with Tapa and has its own fleet now, and Voa's working on one, and Cene too.

Does Pelape have opinions on which of those would be best? Lucien isn't very knowledgeable about the different Amentan countries.

"Voa's big and I have the impression they have slightly less awful relations with their reds than everybody else. Like, not enough to be impressive, but relatively speaking. Anitam I natively speak the language and they're more likely to trust me. Cene I mentioned mostly just for completeness."

"Let's try Voa, if the translation issue won't be severe. If it would be Anitam sounds good."

"I don't speak Voan but the machine translation's all right."

"Okay, let's try that then. I think transl-ation difficulties will be less problematic than cultural ones anyways."

"Plausible. I think you should send the email - I'm likely to get filtered out before it hits anyone important. But I can help you write it."

Lucien appreciates the help, and is quite eager to learn how to write this sort of email.

It should indicate that he is speaking for amaliens as a group - maybe have the signatures of a few dozen, enough that it's obviously not just one guy and his friends - and that they are interested in purchasing, outright, a warp capable ship, for an Amentan grey in their employ to pilot until such time as amaliens have fully learned how to operate the controls ("you don't have to tell them that Vira's probably competent to pass the test already"), with the understanding that if, through amalien-specific expertise and monster access, they are able to make particularly valuable discoveries, they will make Voa their first port of call in attempting to responsibly disburse these discoveries.

Lucien checks with Deet, Keeta, and a few other respected amaliens (he tactfully leaves out Meelia) before adding their signatures to the email. 

And now they wait. She'd be surprised if the turnaround was worse than a week but doesn't have a very fine grained prediction.

Lucien asks if she's available to do the practice chicken debates they had planned in the meantime.

"Sure. You want me to pretend I'm a purple or a blue first?"

"Blue? I have more experience with them I think."

Pelape clears her throat. "So the agenda notes for this meeting say 'chickens', can you say more about that?"

"I'm representing concerned amaliens, who would like to find an app-roach that makes amaliens happier about how chickens are treated and doesn't hurt Amentans either."

"So, the chicken industry takes inputs such as grain and land and labor, and produces outputs such as meat and eggs. If you want an industry to produce a new output, even an irregular one like 'amalien happiness', that's going to take new inputs or reduce existing outputs. Since you don't want to hurt Amentans I take it you mean to add a new input rather than turn eggs and meat into unaffordable luxury goods?"

"Yes - we'd like to provide more land."

"Our understanding had been that you had already volunteered much, if not all, of the land you were willing to turn over to Amentan projects. If there's more available the first thing we'd spend it on wouldn't really be chickens, left to our own devices; my constituency is clamoring for more places they can start families."

"I actually suggested a small portion of land partially as a means of helping us learn to live together - we could provide more land I think. Though we might have to work on def-ending it, but some amaliens would do that if it helped chickens. I'd be nerv-ous about giving more land right away if we can't solve our prob-lems. And in the long-er term we are hoping to find more planets for you too."

"I'm delighted to hear that. It occurs to me that if new land is granted earmarked solely for chickens, the chicken farmers might not actually move to make use of it right away. Of course I'd need to check with my yellows to be sure but my understanding is that we're no longer importing fresh eggs or meat into Chaspanti; if there's further construction to be done on the farms as they were originally planned it's certainly less than what would be necessary to relocate them entire. So the farmers will need compensation, part of which could maybe be in the form of letting them live on-site of their workplaces, and presumably they'd recoup some the value of the parcels the original farms are on; I do wonder if you have anything in mind to cover the transition cost, though."

"Could w grant additional land as an added bonus and provide amaliens who can help them move?"

"Additional land would certainly go a long way, especially if it's adjacent to Chaspanti or sufficient to found a second city. I'm not sure what the value-add of amalien assistance in moving would be, can you expand on that?"

"Help with building new places for chickens - so you could save on costs of paying Amentan workers."

"While I'm sure you can build a chicken enclosure you're satisfied with qua chicken enclosure I'm less confident that the farmers will find it equally straightforward to collect eggs and look after chickens in a context built to an unfamiliar standard."

"We'd be happy to work with you to design and build them, if you'd like."

"Do you have reason to believe that Amentan chickens can in fact be successfully farmed under conditions you find agreeable? Has it been done?"

"It's not a singe defin-ite thing. There's better or worse and we want to get it better."

"So, do you anticipate that this will be the last time you want to adjust the chicken farms?"

"Quite likely, until clean meat is perfected."

"Well, I think with enough of a land grant we can make it work. If there are other things we're currently doing in a way you object to for reasons of limited space it might be wise to have those all assembled in a single proposal I can take to my people, optimally allocate the land to the new uses - I'm not a farmer, of course," she touches her hair, "but presumably not all land is created equal for all agricultural purposes."

"Oh! I know about how to install irriga-tion to make lots of land pretty good. Would prolly be best to give you nearby land to Chaspanti, even if we have to give you a bit more cause it's not quite as good."

"I think irrigation is less the trouble than soil composition and suchlike but, again, not an expert," hairtouch. "Near Chaspanti is wonderful, of course."

"Mhm, we can find a good place I think."

Pelape breaks character. "So, land is really valuable and you can get a lot of stuff in exchange for it, but if there are a lot of things you might want, you might want to ration how much of it you offer for each one."

"Hm. I don't know how to tell how valuable things are is I think an issue."

"Could you put a bunch of things you might want in a list and then rearrange it by which ones you'd want if you could only get some of them?"

"Oh, yes!"

Lucien enjoys making this list. It discusses various animal rights things, things about reds, amalien-Amentan inte-gration, and Amentans having lots of space. He organizes it very thoroughly and then re-organizes it a few times and comes up with a detailed flowchart that has lots of space to add information to. It's also color coded, like his schedule!

"And some of these could come in amounts, like amounts of space for Amentans and number of chickens in good rather than bad conditions and stuff, so you could also figure out how much you'd trade those for partial improvements in others, and then you could figure out the actual monetary cost of a few things, and propagate that."

Lucien does not have enough room in his chart for this but he can fix that! He gets Keetim to make a really big white wall he can write on with his colored pencils, and also has keetim add some stairs round the edges so he can get to all the bits. Then he starts making the bestest most thorough flowchart ever, with annotations and abbreviations and a few variab-les per node and some nodes are them-selves pie charts. It's very very fun!

And 'ventually he has some final numbers. 

He's so cute but she is going to try not to make everything about that. Practice for when she starts reseasoning, any day now. "Awesome. You can pull out that kind of thing when you're talking to blues, estimate that you'd value thus and such at so many tap, especially when you have that many in hand, and then they can tot up their costs and see what those look like in comparison."

Lucien takes a picture of it on his pocket everything just in case. And also adds some abbr-eviated charts to his schedule book on the extra blank page for notes.

"That seems really handy and good! Money is really cool and I'm happy Amentans invented it."

"It's useful stuff."

"Yeah! It lets you think about lots of different things in such a neat way and you can write all the things down and comp-are things that are really diff-rent!"

"I'm glad it helped. Uh, one effect to have in mind in the background is that if you turn over more land, the price of land here might go down, because there's more of it, but it can also go up, because more land means all the other land is now near more stuff people might want to be near. Even if it's not adjacent to Chaspanti it's cheaper to get halfway around the world, in fuel and in time, than to get back to Amenta - though it's currently happening much less often because we don't have airfields and stuff set up so it'd be trading against more trips to Amenta where most of our stuff is."

"Huh! Cept for our 'bility to get things from it being more 'spensive, should we want it to become differently priced in one direction or another?"

"I think it's possible what you most want is for it to be steady? If it gets much more valuable then they'll be more aggressive about trying to get ahold of it, if it gets less so that might be fine but it'd be hard to do sustainably."

"Oh...kay"

"Actually I'm con-fused. Is them being aggressive not good cause we can get more things for it? Isn't that how money's s'pposed to work?"

"Ehh... ish. They're currently construing you as having the right to grant or not grant them land. If it got much more valuable, they might... stop. I think they're reluctant to be as aggressive with you guys as they might with a species of giant bugs or something, because the PR will be absolutely awful if they hurt you when you look similar to Amentan children, but they will take more risks in that direction if they want the land enough. They are not realistically going to stop wanting land to the point where it's no longer possible to trade it for stuff, though, so the price going down is not, I think, an issue - even if we found twelve more habitable empty planets tomorrow this one is already developed on and has cool monsters and stuff, people want to live here."

"hm... Um. Why do they want land so much they'd do means things if we looked?"

"Room to have babies in."

"Ah."

"Hm. Do I have to worry that, even if we provide enough habitable planets, Amentans will still end up wanting to expand more on this planet and will e-ventually become aggressive here?"

"I think there is probably some number of habitable planets, plausibly even a number under a hundred, where our expansion rate will not overwhelm them before we figure out how to mitigate springs. But I can't be certain of any of the inputs into that expectation."

"Oh I was mostly thinking about an issue from Amentans specific-ly wanting to live on our planet even if there are others, like you said would happen."

"Right now the things that are appealing about this planet are that it has cute aliens on it, that it has interesting monsters on it, and that it is the only one on offer. The last one is by far the most important. If Chaspanti becomes a specific hub of some kind of industry, which it could, people will want to live there for jobs in and supporting that industry, but that'd be localized pretty much to the city."

"Okay, that's good to hear."

"I guess it might be important if all the other planets are farther away from Amenta, especially if this one is on the way to some of them. But I think for a lot of purposes relating to that an orbital station would work about as well."

"That's good, I guess. We can find a lot of planets prob-ably if that helps."

"Will do that anyways just to help Amentans, including reds, though - helping us isn't the most important of that."

"I guess you guys live long enough that maybe you can roll with an - unfair decade or two no problem for the best chance of stabilizing Amentan civilization?"

"I think we'd accept it if we didn't live this long, or if it was going to be forever. If it was needed to help people and we knew that."

"I think you might be very different people if you didn't live this long, but - maybe, yeah."

"I don't think we would be but I suppose there's no way to know."

"Yeah. There's this concept in gambling - playing games or making predictions versus other players, with paradigmatically monetary stakes - 'risk of ruin'. Where you can do all kinds of fancy math to figure out what bet has the highest expected utility, but while upside can go up without a cap, downside can't. When you've bet your whole pool of money available for gambling, you can't make any more bets. So you can wind up with situations where you could maximize expected utility by putting all your money on something with objectively favorable odds, over and over again, and this makes you fabulously rich but only if you have perfect luck every single time...

- I bring this up because we can die, and you can't, so you don't have to worry about being ruined; you can take losses, but you can't be out of the game forever and you can bet whatever you need to bet to get the best expected utility."

"I don't think Amaliens decide what's important in a way that makes that argument work, but also I think the fact that it's really hard to kill us isn't as relevant as it might seem. We can lose resources which decreas-es our chances of future success - in extreme cases we could be left in lava for centuries, unable to have any real impact on problems we encounter."

"Yeah, that's fair enough. I do think the - historical evolutionary context is relevant to how Amentans approach things though."

"That sounds like it would be true!"

"I re-sear-ched evol-ution for a bit before and figured out that Amaliens have something like it - our habits and ideas and stuff are more likely to stick around if they are useful for people, which leads to a sort of nat-ural selection for Amaliens."

"Huh. I guess if you don't have especially stable personalities or eidetic memories or a lot of biologically-varying limitations that would work."

"It can vary how much we change. My epi-sodic memory is a bit worse than normal and pretty much only goes back fifty amalien years or something. Amn't sure how I acted before that. Neh doesn't seem to rem-ember anything from before she fell in lava, and I think her per-sonality changed from that. There's an amalien named Fika who's memory is really good and based on Mon-ument I don't think she's changed much over tens of thousands of years at least, maybe way longer. Deet has a really bad memory and has trouble rem-embering anything before an Amentan year ago and changes a lot over-time - lots of why he is very big on prin-ciples now is cause he feels like things 'bout him aren't stab-le otherwise I think."

"Huh. I think if I were in that position I would put a lot of effort into writing down events of my life and what plans I wanted to make and why."

"Wouldn't sur-prise me if he did. I 'spect that wouldn't help over too long a time if he didn't also stick to prin-ciples he really beli-eved in too.

"Also um. Wri-ting doesn't last too long by our stand-ards. Would have to spend a bun-ch of time cop-ying things if he wanted to rem-ember over a long time."

"Yeah, or you'd need to etch stuff into gold or something. Either that or invent computers so copying was less of a time-sink, which I guess would not be a predictable consequence of going along the tech tree in that direction."

"I sort of exp-ect Vira has at least come up with the ideas for computers - and she sometimes builds up a bunch of tech that are used for building other things so she can end up with a final comp-licated thing she wanted. Just, making them long lasting and main-tainable and mass producable wouldn't have seemed super rel-evant for whatever she was doing prolly. She usually has a spe-cific goal she is trying to accomp-lish when she builds things - like learning what will happen or doing a single thing once to fix a problem.

"Yeah. Man, that sounds - lonely? Does she have science friends or is she just doing this all by herself?"

"She has some science friends! Though she doesn't always work with one of them, I think she enjoys telling people about her science but is also more okay being alone than most amaliens are."

"She's very impressive."

"She really is."

Lucien and Pelape proceed to have a second debate, with Pelape posing as a purple. 

Meanwhile, Meelia writes to Tish and Haemi.

Hi.

I'm back home and happy to be here, it's good to see my amalien friends again and to have Cheep back with me. Got hugs from Keeta and also Lucien and those were very good. Gonna try helping people from here, Lucien is good at that I think.

Am still sad 'bout how I made you feel but. Thing that I woulda had to go home quickly anyways since talk-ing to my amalien friends about reds was superduper important. And would have been sad bout being on Amenta without being able to help even if I did know I shouldn't try to help on my own.

Going to collect monster friends to help, am excited bout that! One's sorta like a monkey with eight hands that copies the things other people are doing round it and am gonna be going to get him to help with indus-trializing things - he's even better at gymnastics than I am but it's fun to be comp-et-itive with him.

Love,
Meelia

Dear Meelia,

We're glad you made it home safe. Did the greys we hired work out all right?

It makes us a little nervous now when you say "helping people" and aren't specific! Can you explain? Maybe we could help you refine your ideas.

The monkey monster sounds fun, I bet a video of him on the internet would be very popular.

- Love, Tish and Haemi

"Hey, whats it okay to say that we're working on to my Amentan friends who don't like reds very much?" Meelia asks Lucien, who in turn talks to Pelape about it.

"Uh, maybe that you're hoping alleviating scarcity in general will make it politically easier to pension them off?"

"I don't really get what that means?"

"You are hoping that if Amentans are wealthier it won't be so hard for them to give reds what they need."

They were sorta boring but my friend Lucien made friends with Pelape so that's good!

We're trying to help Amentans by making you all have more stuff so it won't be hard to give stuff to reds that they need. I've done this with lots of monsters ac-tually, but didn't spect to have to do it with Ament-ans since you all al-ready have so much.

[Video of monkey monsters and Meelia doing gymnastics together!]

Thank you for the video!

Most of what we need and don't have is space, and the amalien planet is already helpful with that.

I'm not sure that there's enough of that that the reds can have things they need to, Lucien and Pelape don't think so.

 

Also Amaliens and monsters need this planet too.

 

Also also, here's some video of me practicing flying a pretend con-sole spaceship Vira and Keetim made so we could pract-ice!

[Video]

Of course you need your planet! Nobody's proposing to take you off of it so far as I'm aware.

I don't know nearly enough about piloting to tell how far along you've come but that looks very complicated.

I'm gonna take me off of it, too space!

Um, Lucien says to say that I won't go to your space, since that might make you mad at me and at reds maybe.

I think you're only formally banned from Tapa, but it seems best to give it a wide margin. Have fun in space!

The Prismatic Triceratops and Vira and Neh and Meow found a planet! Neh took this picture when she was there!

[Picture of a planet! It's muddy and rocky and there are occasional plants that look like ferns dotting the landscape.]

It's so beautiful! Where is it? Is it okay to show this picture to other people?

Lucien says I'm not allowed to tell you where, they're gonna talk to some people bout that. He said it's okay to show the picture to other people though!

The picture's all over the Amentan news the next day.

It's a lot better than the last time Meelia made the news!

Voa has replied with tentative positivity to their proposal.

Have the Voans seen the pictures of their fancy new planet?

They have! Where is it? When can they move in?

Once the amaliens find a second planet the Voans can pick one for them-selves and then help reds start leaving for the other one with re-sources and things and then the Voans can have coordinates for theirs. 

(Lucien doesn't mention how he feels like actually reds should get first pick, because that won't help.)

For an informed decision they would like the following data about each planet...

Sure, they can get that, though [list of tools requested by Vira] would be appreciated to make that easier.

Sure thing, they can be shipped to Chaspanti unless the amaliens want to pick them up.

Shipping is fine!

In the meantime, Neh keeps exploring. 

The equipment takes a few days to arrive but is held for Lucien at the shipping depot; a note arrives at his apartment for it, along with an email.

Lucien goes with Pelape to collect it from the shipping depot.

It's a pretty big slew of equipment but maybe Neh can take a few trips?

Sure, she can do that.

Once it's all loaded into the ship they can go take measurements!

(Pelape is fully in false spring now and mostly not looking directly at any amaliens ever, talking instead to their feet or imaginary people over their shoulders. She is going to be so professional.)

Space!!! They are going to space and it's gonna be so fun and even if she can't blow them up into space this time she can help get it into space the Amentan (boring) way and Pelape and Meelia are also here and they are going to SPACE!

Meelia has already been in space but is pretty sure going as a pi-lot is a lot cooler and this is gonna be so great! She didn't really like her last trip with Pelape but this time Pelape is not paying too much attention to Meelia and Vira is there and so it'll prolly be fun anyways.

Pelape would feel obliged to keep half an eye on Meelia, Commisioner Of Battery, but since she couldn't, like, do anything much about it if battery were to occur, she mostly doesn't bother. They can do the copilot thing, till they can confirm they are all competent to fly solo.

Weeee space! 'Ventually they take the measure-ments and get back and Vira has lots of fun with sciencing things.

And what are the planets like?

The first is a bit cold, especially near the poles, and always damp, but still very habitable! The vegetation seems likely to be edible and the planet has a lot of minable resources.

The second is mostly water, with occasional sandbars. There seem to be giant storms periodically, but the next one doesn't seem due for a century or so according to their instruments.

A third planet is fairly similar to prehistoric Amenta, albeit with giant furry hexapods. 

The fourth, and final one they are set to visit on the voyage, appears have to have structures left behind by a prior civilization, though the stormy weather of the planet prevents them from learning more with the initial scan they do.

Beautiful!

Voa would like the chilly wet one.

"Any obj-ections?"

"Seems fine to me, I didn't have a really strong guess of which they'd go for except not the one with barely any land."

"I'm happy they didn't pick the one with struct-ures since I wanna go expl-ore it."

"Do you have ideas of which we should pre-pare for the reds?"

"Uh, probably it'll be maximally politically palatable to put them on the sandbar planet, if there's enough room for them, which I don't know if there is. If there isn't I'd give them the one with the hexapods, avoid the wailing from all the archaeologists who will also want to explore the structures at some point."

"Sandbar planet would be do-able but hard-er than hexapods one. I think we should do the hexa-pods one."

"Hopefully they will get along with the hexapods."

"The pictures looked friendly!"

"You may have permissive standards for friendliness."

"I dunno, feel sorta like I shoulda been more friendly towards Amen-tans than I was?"

"- okay but I'm not confident that the reds will be able to reliably get along with hexapeds and they can't sleep it off if one steps on them."

"Am pretty sure they're herbi-vores from the lack of attacky bits."

"Stepping on them doesn't require wanting to eat them!"

"We'll help them get 'long!"

"How?"

"It's sorta what we do? Help monsters and animals and amaliens and Amentan's in Chispanti all get along."

"- that doesn't tell me how."

"De-pends! Prolly sorta herding them towards nice places for them that aren't near the reds if they don't get along."

"My concern is that you will discover they don't get along only after a red has been stepped on and killed."

"We could get them to be in diff-er-ent places till we know if it's safe?"

"Would be sorta sad but is prolly the right thing to do anyways."

"Yeah. Fencing or something till we figure out if they're both of friendly and reliably gentle."

"Mhm!"

"I hope they like it."

"I do too!"

Voa receives pictures of the new planet, and wants a recording of an earnest amalien explaining that they found this planet for reds and are going to make it nice for them, to make their relocation of the reds more credible. Then they will round up a pilot batch of fifty volunteer reds from all around the country to go to their planet and come back to tell all the other reds that it is real and they touched it and they are all going to live there. Then they will begin district by district shuttering and start setting up the infrastructure necessary to funnel through other countries' reds too.

"Should Meelia be in the recording? I don't know what reds think of her. I guess the non-reds won't like it."

"Meelia's exiled from Tapa, not Voa, and we don't have a specific objection to her but it's possible an unfamiliar amalien would go over better."

Lucien considers doing it himself but he doesn't want to try speaking to lots of people and has Keeta do it instead.

The batch of scout reds is collected in one place via prolonged road trips this margin is too small to contain. They have a cramped trip up to the spacedock in a lined shuttle - they'll turn over some dedicated craft for the purpose when they're stepping up the rate - and then they can be turned over to the amaliens for transit to their world.

"Welcome, I'm Lucien. This is Vira  - she'll be our pilot."

The reds kind of stare at him, a few venturing to nod.

Lucien gives a brief tour of the scout ship.

Vira hops alongside chattering excitedly about what all the bits do!

The reds kind of don't want to walk all over the ship, seems like it would cause a headache later, but they nod along to the chattering.

Lucien will eventually show them to the bedroom, full of triple bunk beds which they and the amaliens will be sharing as space space is tight on the ship. 

.......the amaliens are going to sleep in the same barracks as the reds? Seriously?

"Yes? Is that okay?"

"I guess probably you'd all have to decontaminate after this trip anyway?"

"We will but that isn't really the reason we are okay doing this - amaliens are hyposensitive and we have no more desire to avoid you then we have to avoid other Amentans or each other."

They will accept this explanation and divvy up the bunks.

Vira wants to be on the top bunk, since you can't bounce as much on the lower ones.

Nobody wants to be directly below a bouncing amalien.

Rats.

Vira settles for a bottom bunk and will only bounce softly she guesses.

The reds mostly keep to themselves on the journey.

They can try! Though Vira is pretty insistent about trying to talk to them after the third day! She would like to know Everything.

...she's going to have to be more specific.

What're they gonna do with the new planet?

"Us in particular? This trip is for just - looking at it, seeing that it's real, then we go tell everyone at home."

"What about when you go back?"

"Then I guess we need to... build houses...?"

"You're gonna be house builders?"

"- I think we will all be house builders at first, but after that I don't know."

"What'd you wanna do?"

"I don't know. I have no idea what - life is going to be like, there, what we'll need, what we'll do about it."

Vira can talk about things! She has ideas! They are mostly science ideas.

Lucien has more grounded logistical thoughts if they actually seem interested.

They would like logistical thoughts, yeah. They are kind of expecting that there will be pretty high mortality in the early years of the colony as they figure out local hazards and infrastructure.

...

Could they say more words about the expected causes of the high mortality?

...well, they're going to have to build all their own houses, and before that's done they'll be roughing it. They're going to have to grow their own food, after an initial deposit from Voa, and they have never done that before. They're going to need to manage their own medical care - they did this anyway, but they're going to do it with a different slew of medical conditions than ever before - and they won't be on the main electrical grid, and they won't have internet to look things up with right away...

"Do you have guess-es of how many labor hours it's gonna take to build the houses and grow the food at first? Am trying to figure out how many amaliens would be helpful."

"- I don't know, I wasn't picked for this based on my knowledge of housebuilding. I think in ancient times people would all get together and put up a simple cabin in a day but I don't know if that included cutting down the trees and so on or just putting it all together, or how many people that would be."

Vira has various guesses! Also she has thoughts on accounting for needing to get logs before building the houses.

Lucien does some math.

"Sounds like it'll be some-thing very roughly like a hundred thousand labor years to make basic houses for all the reds?"

"Maybe what could happen is most amaliens come early since we don't need houses or farms - and we help get thing set-up and then as there are more and more houses they can be filled with reds who help s'more?"

"Can you do construction work? You're so small?" asks a red dubiously.

"There's a bit of a difference in terms of how many amaliens are needed, but when I " went down a wiki hole "researched building before I got the impression that avoiding workplace injuries cuts into efficiency enough that amalien healing would offset a lot of the de-creased strength things."

"- does it? I guess I wouldn't know."

"What did you do back on Amenta?"

"Septic tanks."

Vira would like to hear more about how those work please!

...okay, he can explain septic tanks. They're mostly a thing in remote areas where it would be prohibitive to hook up to a municipal sewer system.

Vira would like to know if they can be used for growing food.

...no, that would be a terrible idea, they would spread diseases.

Vira can explain how to avoid that, separating the fertilizing agent from the sep-tic tank from the food.

That sounds cool but also probably way more complicated than they should be bothering with when they're first starting out.

This other simpler way should work for little cost and if they wait enough time in-between production and use of the fertilizer the generation time of diseases spread primarily that way should mean it won't be an issue unless they keep using it for many decades.

Does she... know things... about Amentan fecal-transmitted diseases? Amentans being completely new to the amaliens?

Nope! But she thinks they're pretty similar to amalien animals.

...but if they aren't and her guesses are wrong they're all going to die of intestinal bacteria poisoning.

Oh, that would be bad. She can probably figure it out for sure if she did a few exper-iments...

"Probably this is not what you should be focusing on Vira."

The reds don't have much of an opinion on what Vira should focus on.

Don't worry, Vira has lots of opinions on what she should focus on!

Possibly too many of them, even!

(Definitely.)

Eventually, in-between her asking them about things thye have done and going on long sciencey tangents, she asks one of the reds if they heard about her friend Meelia who visited 'Menta.

They heard, yeah, she visited Tapa and went nuts and attacked a guy and tried to move into a red neighborhood when she'd been told not to?

Vira's pretty sure she just wanted to talk to reds, not live with them.

The amaliens know now that if you want to just talk to reds you can use email, right?

Yeah, Meelia doesn't usually think past the first idea she has and isn't good at figurin' out how to use new things to solve stuff.

Okay. So long as that's clear. The district got closed down well ahead of schedule.

"Oh no, why?"

"- honestly they're just kind of looking for excuses to get rid of us and anything funny going on with a district usually means they close it. Hopefully the planet will help."

"They're gonna leave you 'lone on the planet I'm pretty sure. Specially cause they don't know where it is."

"Do you even have enough ships to keep us supplied - this one isn't very big -"

"Yup! Voa's giving us colonies ships and supplies and things in return for their own planet."

"I hope it all works."

"Me too, even though this plan doesn't have me blowing anything into space."

"- why do you want to blow things into space?"

"Cause it'd be really cool! Like, " Vira mimes an explosion and makes a sound.

"You can put a huge amount of mass on top of a thick shock absorbing buffer plate thing and if you curve it so the plate sorta en-vel-opes the ex-plosion when it happens you can capture nearly all the energy from the explosion and you can get even more if you put a reflectivey kinetic material 'neath the thing and so you can set off a chain reaction with uranium, even using big rail guns to collide the bits of uranium to get it started and use that to ignite a bunch of hydrogen sorta - and then get it almost all transferred into kinetic energy which creates the BIGGEST push upwards and you can go so so fast and it'd be bad if you were going in the wrong direction if you didn't get to space but you'd get to space so easily and s'long as you're pointing not towards the sun there's so much time to angle and change where you're going with sail things and it's so cool and you can do it with things almost as big as you want and -"

(Vira will keep going on like this for sometime if they let her)

It's less effort than trying to figure out how to navigate more straightforwardly social attempts at interaction!

Eventually Vira notices they aren't talking much and checks to see if they have any questions.

Nope, not at all.

"Oh um. Want to talk about something you find interestin 'stead?"

"...like what?"

"I dunno, septic tanks?"

"We... already talked about those quite a bit."

"We don't actually have to talk about anything. We brought books," another red volunteers.

"Hm, oh do you not want to talk to me?"

"- I mean if there's something you want to know we can answer your questions -"

"Don't want you to answer my questions if you don't want to. Am sometimes bad at not-icing when people aren't 'cited about the things that I like. Sorry."

Vira is clearly sad about this.

"It's okay?"

"Don't want people to have a bad time just cause they're too nerv-ous to interr-upt me."

Reds shrug awkwardly.

Vira is sorta sad but amuses herself and works on figuring out how the ship works.

Eventually they arrive on the planet.

The reds' job is to get out, tromp around, and touch everything. They fan out in groups of two or three to do this.

"Watchya doin?"

"- we're having a look around," says a red, petting a tree.

Vira tries petting the tree to check if that's fun.

Well, it's a novel kind of tree.

One of the other reds in this group is picking flowers and putting them in his hair.

Oh that's neat.

"Um. Would you mind showing me how to do that?"

"- put - flowers in your hair? - I don't actually know anything about it, I've never picked flowers before, I'm just - guessing."

"Ah, okay."

Lucien will not guess how to do it on his own since that might be embarrassing.

"- do you want - me to put a flower in your hair - since you're going to have to decontaminate anyway -"

Nod! "If it's okay with you."

Flower, hair.

Lucien is happy about the hair flower! 

"Thank you!"

"You're welcome."

They tromp around being awed by the scenery and touching things.

"Is the touching so cleans won't try to take the planet away from you?"

"Partly?"

"It's sort of symbolic even though it wouldn't actually stop them from burning a few acres to ash if they had the opportunity."

"Also I've never seen a tree."

"Never... seen a tree?"

"Not in person. I'm not an outworker, I don't get to drive past parks and stuff all the time."

"And ... there aren't trees outside of parks or parks that reds are allowed in?"

"There are trees outside of parks but there weren't any in our district and I'd never left."

"I .. can't imagine that."

There is a tree that looks climbable and this red is going to climb it.

"Want help?"

"- I don't see how you'd help?" Hopefully not by exploding anything into space?

"You don't seem to have climbed a bunch and I have so I could climb ahead and help you up?"

(Vira thinks it is very unfair how people always assume she wants to explode things to space AND will never let her.)

"Are you stronger than you look?"

"Don't think so, but I could lean back so I use my weight to help."

"I... think I'd better not do any climbing I can't do without help."

"Okay!"

Vira is going to go do experiments to a bush in that case.

The reds enjoy their outing and by the end of the day they are all four shades darker and exhausted.

Eventually Lucien talks to Vira about the pollution claiming thing eventually.

Ooooooooh, that's clever.

"Are your guts polluted?"

"- yes, of course?"

"If your gut makes new gut cells are they born polluted like you?"

"Yes."

"Sooo. If we injected a bunch of your gut cells into lo-cal animals would they and all their child-ren will be polluted from then on?"

"...probably, I guess."

"Want me to do that some before we leave?"

"I don't know if it'd actually work... none of us are theologians."

"I tried to figure out that stuff but it didn't make any sense."

"I haven't even tried so I don't know that I can help you."

"Should I do it just in case?"

"I... don't know if you should?"

"Why not?"

"...because I don't know how the cleans will react and that is the important thing."

"Oh."

"They should stop being so important and let you have a turn."

The red blinks at her.

Vira blinks back.

Eventually they decide that this statement doesn't require a response and go back to what they were doing (being flop).

Eventually the reds return to Amenta, where the amaliens deconomatinate and then head onward, back to the amalien planet.

The reds discuss the matter among themselves.

They don't really think they're competent to settle a new planet, or that the resources necessary to let them mostly survive the learning curve will actually be forthcoming without major administrative hiccups of the "no one actually cares about this result, just about looking like they tried" variety. But they are mostly agreed that it sounds - better than soft genocide.

Lots of them may die, but. If they have any grandchildren at all they will have fertile free grandchildren who can be anything they want on a beautiful planet all their own surrounded by trees.

They put together volunteers who want to break ground, plant seeds, chop down trees and try turning them into cabins, and so on. They put together a list of tools and supplies they think this group will need, plus guesstimates of further shipments they'll want in the future depending on how the crops do, and ask the amaliens to present it to the Voan government.

Meanwhile, Deet has been getting amaliens organized so they can indust-rialize and things as Lucien and him had planned earlier. A bunch of them know how to build houses and tools and chop down things pretty fast now. They also have metalworking on a much larger scale then they previously managed. 

Lucien is happy to present the red's list to the Amentan government, though he tacks on an additional request for a colony ship from the amalien homeworld for bringing any amaliens who want to go there. 

...the amaliens who go there know they need to maintain a reasonable (Amentan) standard of cleanliness if they ever want to... leave... again... after living with reds for however long... right? Like it shouldn't be a big deal if they're just going ahead of the waves of settlement to put down infrastructure but if they're interacting more directly they need to be paying attention to that.

.... 

Sigh.

Are there some basics they should know about? He can pass them onto amaliens who will make their own individual decisions about it.

Here is how to do a full decontamination shower! Here are the barriers sufficient that you don't need to! Since they are indestructible they could in principle do one of these things that Amentans sometimes do to inanimate objects if that were ever more practical but it sounds really unpleasant!

Could they do those things even after they've been around reds not doing the other things for a while?

Maybe but it's a theological gray area because amaliens are living people and it's not entirely clear how pollution becomes incorporated into the nature of a living person.

What if they do this other much more intense thing?

(Lucien rewrites the description to be 80% less ... vivid)

The theologians can confer on this matter to try to determine if that will work but it is not an area with a well grounded current opinion on the matter and ideally it would simply never come up because they'd take showers now and then.

A bunch of amaliens take showers (or baths), it's the full decontamination showering that sounds difficult.

(Also there is an additional update from Vira attached, though he will note that they don't have to bother to read it if they don't think it's promising - he's pretty sure she is trying to figure out theology by brute force search over cleaning methods. This one is considerably more violent than the previous one and would probably require years of napping before a full recovery.)

Theologians need to spend a while thinking and debating and considering details of questions before they come to a consensus strong enough that it comes with the support of international law. They are not a Theology Calculator that can process questions instantaneously.

Vira is confused about why they haven't figured out more science about this thing that's very important to them! She's read their papers on it and they don't seem to be nearly as good as some of their other papers, have they tried talking to this ep-i-demiologist about it? He wrote some fun papers with pretty graphs about diseases correlations and under-lying hidden var-iables.

Lucien is not going to forward that, he's pretty sure that theology is not a science and that Vira attempting to treat it as such is not actually going to work, and might alienate the theologians.

He explains this to Vira a bunch until she understands what he means.

Actually she doesn't understand but she trusts Lucien and won't email the theologians herself. Though she does com-plain to a green science friend about it.

The marine biologist Vira befriended says that theology is more like political science than like, say, physics. There are still empirical things including disease prevalence to track, like "does democracy work" and "how much effect do various kinds of taxes have on things" in political science are kind of empirical, but the underlying moving parts are not elementary particles but people's intuitions which happen to have evolved for purposes like (in the case of political science) "guarding your material interests over the long term in a small socially interdependent tribe" or (in the case of pollution) "avoiding poisoning and infection when you don't know anything about biology". This doesn't make pollution unscientific, just fuzzier.

"You can still study in-tuitions though? By doing surveys and things. I once went 'round and asked all the amaliens which of a bunch of things was 'soft' so I could fi-gure out what 'soft' meant to amaliens."

Sure, that's also a tool in pollution theology, insofar as the marine biologist understands it, but survey design and implementation and analysis takes time.

But once you do 'nough you can us'lly start pre-dicting the res-ults of the surveys, right? She also does a bunch of that for things she wants to know, cause finding and talking to all the amaliens takes a while since some are in very hard to reach places.

Presumably there are some obvious questions that nobody has to bother actually investigating ("cannibalism: yes or no?") but that doesn't mean that totally novel situations ("indestructible aliens living with reds for many years without showering and then putting themselves through an irradiated autoclave: yes or no?")

Oh what she meant is that if you ask 'nough questions you can start pred-icting the answers using patterns, even when the questions are pretty comp-licated. 

(Also cannibalism does sound pretty ob-vious but it would still be good to do science to make sure people think that if you're trying to be really careful about the science.)

Sometime later Vira encounters discussion on the internet of the red col-onization.

After crying for a bit, she does the math herself to check the expected mortality rates for the migrating reds, accounting for the speed of the the migration, the somewhat minimla supplies, and the lack of expertise.

Then she does the math for what if lots of amal-iens went to help. ... she also checks how many mar-ginal amaliens going there and helping it would take to save a life.

She presents the results to other amaliens.

[Continued in never forget, always forgive]