"We're not teaching you how to make lightleapers because we don't want you visiting, but if you'd exterminated your reds that'd still be true. You don't get enough of a biology boost to develop effective narrowly targeted bioweapons for the same reason, and that we'd be even less inclined to share if you'd exterminated your reds. Everything else is on the table, and we'd just dump the data on you if it were not apparently useful for your political processes that we phrase our humanitarian requests as exchanges for technology and so on."

"Requests."

"We could hand you all the technology and then demand all the reforms. My present understanding is that this would be less helpful for stability than letting you negotiate for it and come away with deals that satisfy your fellows."

"Yes, but don't be disingenuous about it with me."

"All right. There's no request about it and we're prepared to just remove governments that are insufficiently cooperative."

"How, since you don't like executing or imprisoning people?"

"We'd lose very little sleep over putting people in comas for a few years, that's a candidate. We'd prefer not to forcibly relocate them, but that's one too."

"Mm-hm." Sigh.

"I know you didn't have much to work with."

"You read a book before coming, did you?"

"Several. I don't think I could have done any better. But now you've got more to work with."

"Which would be lovely if I could work with it towards my own goals."

"If you were slightly less convinced that only some of your subjects merit equal rights I'd be inclined to leave you to it and go bother somewhere even worse."

"If more-powerful aliens descended on you and wanted you to do a combination of the bizarre and the impractical and was happy to inflict fates upon you for noncompliance based on their own scruples and not yours perhaps you'd simply adopt their ethics for yourself at once but that wouldn't make me think more highly of your principles."

"Oh, we'd quietly comply and make a thousand-year-plan to get powerful enough to utterly destroy them."

"I would be lucky to be alive two years from now, Prince Nelyafinwë, and I would rather die at home."

"I promise that if I see fit to remove you from power I'll ask you how you'd like it done."

"You persist in missing the point."

"Then enlighten me."

"I am very old. Biologically; I imagine you see us all as children. I have invested my whole adult life in this country and soon I will be out of life to give it. You might like to pretend that you will destroy nothing that matters if you destroy it while trying to squeeze it into shape, but you would be wrong, and I want to recognize the view from my window when I leave the world."

"Is treating your reds as subhuman a necessary part of - of recognizing the view -"

"No! I have told you repeatedly you may take them all and replace them with robots! This afternoon if you like, if you have the robots!"

"I don't have the robots yet! I didn't know I'd need the robots a month ago, or I assure you we would have been working on nothing else! Until I get the robots this is their nation too and you are hurting them, all of you, constantly, for no fucking reason! I hope you die happy, if that's what you want. I can make you live forever, if that's what you want. But there are people being beaten to death in your streets because they were loading boxes of food and someone couldn't cope with that, and I care what world they see while they die, too."

"You have by your own account met one red, from another country - you have no idea what you're talking about -"

"My brother talked with Davar about it while he was here, and I watched. My people have been talking with as many locals from different walks of life as they can, and I watch, or read transcripts if I'm out of attention. A different brother spent the whole day in Tapa's red district, and I watched that too. I don't know enough, until I know every single person on this world like my closest friend it won't be enough, but we did not come here and decide to meddle where you were different, we came here and decided to meddle where you were hurting. In my society it is illegal and considered appalling to have a romantic relationship between two men, or two women; I haven't mentioned that with our demands because what you're doing may disgust and horrify us but it doesn't seem to be hurting you. You allow people to terminate pregnancies, we'd prosecute that as murder; I haven't mentioned that with our demands because there's clearly more going on there, too. But that child did not want to die. He wanted to meet aliens, if you'd waited one fucking week he could have fucking met aliens - Davar didn't tell my brother about those reds because he was making polite conversation - I went and looked them up, I needed to know their names, I needed to know if the families they left behind were starving because you sure wouldn't know or care -"