"Is that about the right amount of context?"

"I think so. Is there some reason he decided to promote us to your attention?"

"...he was really upset about the infanticide but I am not sure if that was the reason. You might have been unfairly deprioritized, truth be told. The analysis thought the sanitation workers thing would be entirely disqualifying and we'd see no Amentan nations interested in membership and no cheap or scalable things you wanted - and it doesn't help that you're in such a crowded galaxy - but there are a lot of you and you need the planets, I bet somebody somewhere comes up with an adequate sanitation worker solution."

"It seems like you have the resources to be pretty creative."

"I suspect if we fully understood the concern we would already have resolved it, honestly. We're just not clear on what features a solution needs."

"At minimum it must not cause a hysteria like the one we are already dealing with. People will go to very considerable lengths to avoid being polluted."

"Is there a way to check whether something or someone is polluted."

"Only by investigating the history of the object."

"Magic almost certainly fixes it but I have no idea how to prove that if it can't be tested in the first place."

"Perhaps you can convince the theologians that some application of magic constitutes a decontamination procedure."

"We'll follow up on that. And if you could follow up on polling the reds on what perks they'd want we could get an estimate of the feasibility of doing it privately. Anything you offer them that everyone else gets already - if other people get more funding for schools and healthcare, for example, or more social service programs - you could give them without any problems with a vote elsewhere, are there any things like that?"

"They have free birth control and vaccinations. Mostly they can allocate their income however they like."

"Is that the same as a comparably poor non-red?"

"There are many public services available for clean castes, as there are people willing to be employed in providing them."

"...you couldn't employ reds to provide them to reds?"

"The reds may employ each other in this way, but you're overestimating the amount of interface we have. It's often difficult to find one social worker per neighborhood, I'm informed. It would be possible since the advent of electronic money to dump some of it in to their neighborhoods earmarked but we'd have no oversight to speak of in how they used it."

"...how does oversight work if you hire, say, a teacher to teach a purple school? Direct in-person inspections of the school? Couldn't you, uh, have them submit enrollment numbers and possibly test scores and satisfaction surveys, maybe do video calls with the administration..."

"You're overestimating the amount of interface we have."

"...the requirement for universal adequate schools and medical care is, actually, universal, 'the poorest people in the country don't get that but they can spend their own money on it if they want' does not qualify."

"I don't anticipate the political resistance to earmarking money for those things to be intractable in light of planets unless it is spun terribly. It's simply not something we have already."

"Well. That makes it easier, in a way, because spending on reds the money you're already spending on everyone else would not force a vote among everyone else and yet might be enough of a bribe to entice them to support membership."

"I believe reds are as likely as anyone else to want the opportunity to expand onto other planets."

"Oh good." Someone pulls out a notepad. "I'm going to request the crystal ball setup and regular food deliveries, if that's all right with you-"

"Yes, thank you."

She writes something on the notepad.

"We should walk through the rest of the terms, though I don't expect them to be a problem - equal enforcement of the law is another thing that could be, I guess - if it's harder to prosecute crimes against reds at the moment because of the lack of interface, that'd need to change -"