" - I think Andalites might take our honor more seriously than Amentans do. The honorable thing is suicide and then they'll let your family pretend it's an accident and it'll be less of an - appalling stain on your family and your memory - and that's enough incentive that nearly anybody would. You wouldn't be assisted, if that's what you mean."

"There're no Andalites without tails?"

"- morph fixes injuries. Very rarely or before we had it - there'd be something - and they'd stay out of civilized society because ugh."

" - taillessness is ugh?"

" - any kind of physical infirmity - do you not have that - I wonder if it's a herd animal impulse, that someone who walks funny or is visibly injured or is otherwise impaired - psychologically, through less visible brain injury, anything - you can't have them around, they should just stay out of the way or kill themselves honorably -"

"We very much do not have that and I advise against expressing it."

"All right."

"People have disabled relatives and they love them."

"It's not about worthiness of love it's that they shouldn't be. If you could cure them all it'd be much much better - you at least agree on that, right -"

"Sure, of course, but given that you can't you do the best you can - and I think there are some deaf people who don't want a cure, say that it's great how they can get cheap housing near the airport and the parts of the brain that parse audio have been repurposed to give them more acute other senses and that sign language is far more convenient for things like a group dissolving into smaller groups for discussion -"

"Well, people'll make the best of anything. One presumes you wouldn't let them deafen people."

"If someone of sound mind wanted to deafen themself and wasn't going to end up on social programs meant for the needy then I don't think we'd care. Of course you can't deafen other people but you can't go around giving them hearing aid implants either."

" - but it's - then there's something wrong with them."

"I have six hundred million citizens, if I fussed at all the ones making life choices I disapprove of I'd never do anything else. It doesn't hurt anyone else."

"The people who have to take care of them -"

"If they can take care of themself, I mean, which they usually can because we have, like, captions and blinky train warning signs and speech-to-text apps."

"Huh."

"We were discussing -"

"Outrageously misleading implications that you extracted the starship information from us without our cooperation, so I can stay liaison until the war's over and try getting you all pushed in a direction that doesn't set you up for inevitable violent expansionism. And getting it agreed that Yeerks are clean."

"I appreciate anything you can do on that, it's important."

"Of course."

"I can tell you everything I know about the people you'll be talking to -"

"Ooooh!"

And he does.

And he writes Orvara saying that he thinks perhaps there was a misunderstanding that might produce more encouraging avenues of theological speculation. Andalites think Yeerks are horrible and like a plague but they do not come into contact with sewage or garbage or corpses - their pools are silty but not inherently germ-infested in the way that seems to be uncleanliness relevant and lots of other species live in silty water and it'd have very unwanted implications to draw conclusions about that. Maybe they could consult with Anitam and Tapa and Voa's theologians and see if the evidence justifies a consensus that Yeerks suck but do not meet any of the standards of uncleanliness per se. 

And he writes for general consumption some comments to the effect that the Mioleens were delightful and all the Andalites charmed, and Anitam's commitment to and evident pride in their decontamination program speaks so well of them, and Tapa's doing the same and Voa means to if it goes well and this makes Andalites very enthusiastic about working with them, and while Andalites might overlook massacres before they arrive if the countries responsible seem committed to good conduct going forward they are certainly not going to overlook massacres henceforth.