"If you're not letting them be blue you can maybe auction the land and pay for it with that. If you run a competitive auction it'll be a lot of money."

"But will it be enough?"

"Depends how well you plan the auction, at least in part. You get starships out of it, I bet you can find the difference."

"We'd really appreciate a clear, definite relationship between the two things."

Isel does nonviolent red transitions. She can testify to anyone who cares that she thinks pulling off a nonviolent red transition is an impressive show of institutional flexibility and competence. She is not an alien diplomat.

Somebody goes to ask the aliens.

He has in fact heard that pulling off a successful red transition is quite an institutional competence thing! And it makes them less of a PR liability, always appreciated. He feels like if he tried to draft an agreement conditional on peaceful transition with Cene he will end up arbitrating endless disputes about whether this-or-that catastrophe was their fault or just inevitable but broadly if they pull it off, yes, sure, Andalite alliance for you.

How sure is Isel that she can shepherd the reds without them getting violent provided Cene is willing to decontaminate them and let them be clean castes (not blue, green if they pass exams).

"They need to believe that if you were going to kill them I'd know. That was easy at home, I had important family and I achieved some things that were obviously only achievable given significant string-pulling ability so when I said 'you're safe as long as you don't riot' that settled it. Here I don't have string-pulling ability, I can only do things to establish credibility insofar as someone else is willing to put up the political capital. If you want a guarantee then I need to be able to arrange arresting people who murder them and quietly recompensing them losses and selecting who gets decontaminated first. If I have that much, yep, they'll stay in line."

"Why does it matter who gets decontaminated first?"

"First ones need to be exemplary. People with strong suitability for the caste they're going to be sorted as, who'll find employment quickly and be diligent and not commit any crimes and not slip up and remind anyone they're ex-red. Helps with establishing public buy-in: you've done some, and no one has had to think about them, and everyone is really excited about never having to think about any reds."

"So you're saying even if we like the initial results it'll get worse."

"If you were expecting a perfect employment rate and a crime rate of zero then you'll be disappointed eventually, but I still think it makes more sense to have the first cohort be highly employable meticulously law-abiding citizens than to have it be a random sample."

"Can you elaborate on 'arresting people who murder them' -"

"Sure! So Anitam had someone find out his coworker was ex-red and drown her in a hot tub in their workplace. We hung him and that was the end of it. Tapa had someone put an ex-red bakery worker through a plate glass window when he noticed an eyebrow root showing. They went, you know, kind of an understandable reaction even if they are clean, gave the guy a ticket. So then the guy started stalking ex-reds, tracked one down and broke into her apartment and tried to kill her, she fought back and killed him, his family burned down the entire red district, disrupting essential services for an entire city. Once they're clean, if people try to kill them you've got to enforce the law, or your citizens will lose confidence that you actually believe they're clean. There's some room for leniency - it'd have been enough for Tapa's lunatic to spend a year in jail - but if I can't do that then I expect some idiot will go around hunting down ex-reds or actual reds and then your reds will riot. Tapa's didn't, but Tapa got really lucky and also expended tons of resources and money shuffling all their reds and enforcing curfews and jamming their internet and heightening security. Sending the one guy to jail would have saved his life and saved them tens of millions."

Faces are made.

"Were you under the impression that you were going to be able to get credit with the aliens with how you did something tremendously difficult and demanding of clear institutional vision and discipline and competence without actually doing anything difficult and demanding of vision and discipline and competence?"

"It'll play really badly with everyone else."

"Yep. Maybe ask the aliens for some shiny non-starship toys to distract the populace with in the meantime."

"What have they got? We got stun weapon plans, the greys'll like that, enough to make up for having to switch to nonlethals, but everyone else..."

"I don't know. Faster computers, faster internet, everybody likes faster internet. Maybe they can improve the trains despite I think not even having trains where they're from. They're decades ahead of us, I'm sure there're lots of things even if none of them matter the way planets do. - also Anitam suppressed the news stories, about violence against ex-reds, it might be worth doing that."

They mutter and ask the aliens about that.

...morph? Would their populace be excited about morph? It's pretty useful and may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, in local idiom.

...wait, is that not just something they can do because they're aliens?

Nah it's technology. Very advanced technology, way more impressive than the starships. Lots of people have starships but only Andalites have morph.