"I would be downright astonished if whatever they came up with was unsatisfactory by local standards. They haven't released their preliminary report yet, but it should be coming in the next couple of weeks."

"Lovely."

"I respect the Commission. They're good at what they do."

"Are the Ceirene likely to be moved by the argument that no one is likely to begrduge them all the reds they can handle if and only if they wait for the automation?"

"I'll do my best. Some of the latest generation of councilors aren't bad."

"How many reds can they handle?"

"How many reds are there?"

"Certainly more than fifty million worldwide."

"They'd make a splash landing on Ceir, but not an unmanageable one."

"I don't know how much use Ceir has for unskilled labor in that quantity - they are heavily skewed towards the traditional occupations and a few other things to make their neighborhoods function internally. It sounds like a nightmare to me but perhaps they could handle it."

"About half of Ceir right now is excellent farmland going to waste because the people who used to work it are dead. If they're remotely sane about handling the transition, they can easily set up fifty million reds in a collection of self-sustaining communities."

"I am routinely assured that farming is skilled labor, but I suppose any yield exceeds 'none'."

"Yes, the ideal way to set it up would involve some integration with the surviving locals so they can learn what they need to know."

Nod. "What's the time horizon on automation?"

"The Commission has to finalize their decisions on relevant hygiene and safety procedures, which will take at least a few more weeks from here, but I can spend all that time organizing supply with Sikyal - Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati, the single most useful ruix to know - and have robots ready to be certified almost as soon as there are procedures to certify them. It would speed things up considerably to have a precise idea of the work that needs doing and the way it needs to be done."

"I can put you in touch with some of the orange social work types who interface with red neighborhoods."

"That'll help."

"Do you have locally compatible email -?"

"As of very recently, yes."

She gets him a list.

"Thanks. And I'll forward you all the xenosociology reports. Anything else you want explained?"

"I would like more information on the war and how stable I may expect postwar relations to be."

"You can expect postwar relations to be extremely stable," he says. "Ruikni social structures are built to last. When they originally found us, about five thousand years ago by your calendar, they believed that it was morally wrong to condone the continued existence of non-ruikni sapient life. The humans of the time fled their home planet into the biggest Sphere available and closed all the portals they could find after them, which wasn't quite all the portals there were, and the ruikni patiently explored the maze of abandoned Spheres until they found the one that still had humans in it. Then they resumed trying to kill us all. We held them off for a few decades - a century and a half in our years - and then one day a strange girl with unprecedented magical powers appeared out of nowhere in my kingdom, and I convinced her to help me end the war, and several inhabited planets self-destructed from sheer terror but at the end of the week all the surviving ruikni agreed that genocide is wrong. If there hadn't been an exquisitely well-engineered doomsday cult waiting to overthrow the social order once it started to collapse, there might not be any surviving ruikni."

"Thank you, that's reassuring."

"Riya's an idealist but she's aware enough to realize how destructive that can be. She got her wings along the way and now she spends all her time in her Sphere with all the portals closed; I could coax her out for another interstellar war, but short of that she's not going to bother anyone."