The locals look at him for a bit, then decide in whispers that yes his hair definitely qualifies as orange probably yes it's okay.

He's not going to argue the point. "I think," he says to his father after a few hours, "it's entirely a socially constructed thing. Maybe it had a correspondence to reality back before they invented modern medicine?"

"I certainly can't find any substantive physical basis for it but they have very different biology, there could be something we're not seeing."

"Yes, but that's not how they behave around it."

Shrug. "Well, we can feed them all and end the war whether they're silly or not."

"That we can. Are they still shooting each other? They should stop before Yavanna gets here, I think she'd be upset."

"I can't get a very clear sense of how much shooting is ongoing or how attached they are to it, but by all means get them to stop."

He goes back up to the not-intolerably-ugly building and meets people.

So many people! For some reason they keep mentioning their kids around him but he can get them to talk about other things.

Knowing the names of everybody's kids is lovely but yes, he'd like to talk about the war.

What about it?

Will it stop once there's food security?

They were sort of already in the middle of the war when potential food security arrived. They'll need to back out slowly in a way that discourages retaliation and they're not unsympathetic to the complaints of natives of the other country who don't like the polluted food situation either.

"We can get them adequate food too."

"I'm sure they'll appreciate that but they were sort of deliberately poisoned by their leaders, they might not want to see what the next bright idea out of their capital is."

"Are they prohibited from emigrating if they'd rather live here?"

"While the war's on, certainly. Before they wouldn't have been but who knows how relations will normalize after. And many of them would like us to administer where they happen to live but can't realistically abandon their farms or businesses."

"Is there a mechanism by which they can demand improvements of their government?"

"Depends on who they are."

"Then that sounds like something which needs fixing. I don't think killing people who can't even be resurrected is a good way to fix it, though. And if any of our technology makes it easier for people to kill others, we'd want to share it with a people who we trust not to use it for that."

"I understand you're from a very peaceful place. It sounds lovely. If you have a way to enfranchise poorly educated farmers from our neighboring country who need a way to petition their government on matters as immediately troubling as poisoned food, I'm all for it. But I think those of the enemy's citizens who want us there want it because their own rulers have broken trust, and it will be hard to establish again quickly enough that they can all get supper."

"I think I'd like to talk to their rulers, do you have a way to do that?"

"We have some low-bandwidth channels for things like establishing local truces to avoid damaging infrastructure, that sort of thing..."

"Would that work to negotiate for us to go over and meet them?"

"I can talk to some of our strategists." This means "no".