"The Mioleen are doing a pretty good job of picking everything up but they needed purple products to get past day one," Isama says.

"It's a very interesting way to structure a society."

"I'm not surprised it's not universal but I'm surprised it's so rare. Is the Andalite - male/female thing - common?"

"Not our specific division but gender serving that social function is pretty common among species that bear live young and nearly universal among ones with substantial physiological and psychological differences among the sexes. And not everyone has sexes at all, let alone two of them, but if one does they probably have at least a mild form."

"I wonder why we don't! We do bear live young. I remember, I was there." She pats Ana.

"Andalites have to walk within an hour or so of being born, I wonder if that makes our pregnancies more physically demanding."

"Humans have a vaguely Amentan body plan and I think they have gender roles, though."

        "Yes," Ajoran says. "They have shorter lives than Amentans and have kids spaced much closer, though, such that a female was pregnant or nursing for most of her adulthood until they invented birth control, that'd make a difference."

"I bet it would - no reason to educate someone who's never really going to enter the workforce - how unpleasant, though -"

       "Well, I think they got over it when they invented birth control."

"What's likely to happen to the humans since you didn't get there -"

"We'll send a followup fleet - when depends on when we have the resources - it's less likely they'll be able to prevent Yeerks from claiming the planet and likelier they'll resort to destroying it."

"Do we change that?"

"I'd like to, but realistically unless we have ships rolling off factory lines inside a year it's likely to be too late to protect the humans. Can free some and give them their planet back but - I'd much rather it never have happened - we're just stretched too thin -"

"But we'll change that?"

"You'll be a tremendous asset. Just perhaps not in time for Earth specifically. Though who knows, the Yeerks could encounter complications."

"Like what?"

"Ecosystem and contamination things come up - maybe there's an Earth mold that's really aggressive and that Yeerks have the Yeerk equivalent of an autoimmune response to. Maybe Earth has a solar flare - Yeerks're vulnerable to that - maybe their leadership goes with a stealth approach and accordingly a slow one, to avoid losing all five billion hosts by triggering a nuclear war. Earth governments can't order their militaries to drag their populations in for infestation, I think if I were a Yeerk Visser I could have Amenta inside a season but Earth's trickier."

"How would you get Amenta?" asks Isama.

"Pick a country where the leaders live in private homes - Anitam works. Get a couple random grey hosts and have them drop in on your ruling council's housekeepers and gardeners and cooks, investigating a noise complaint. Have the housekeepers arrange to have a bathroom or private pool or storage room in the council's houses be a Yeerk pool. Take the council. Keep a thousand Yeerks in the pool and have them invite essential people over for house parties. Those people can take Yeerks home, get their own staff, set up a pool themselves. Once you have enough blues, which sounds like it'd be a matter of a month or two of dinner parties, order construction of a bunch of proper Yeerk pools with good security. Yeerks breed outrageously fast when they want to, you could start with a couple hundred and have a couple million shortly. Rotate the greys through. Have them round everyone else up."

"...ah-huh. Wow. I'm not even sure how you fix any of that, getting blues to stop having dinner parties is probably like... getting purples to stop having park fests or whatever."

"Yes. I did try to describe to them some appropriate precautions but there are unavoidably a lot of tradeoffs involved in making your society resilient against Yeerk infestation."

"Isn't there some way of checking? Are Yeerks, I don't know, heavy, could you distinguish between 'has a Yeerk' and 'large breakfast', or for that matter 'lacks a Yeerk' and 'skipped breakfast'."

"They show up on brain scans but weighing people wouldn't do it."

"Why's Earth more resilient -"

"In most Earth societies it'd be much less feasible to conduct mass arrests - it'd attract dramatically more media and international scrutiny, there are far fewer explanations that'd be considered sufficient - we are largely discussing societies where you cannot enter someone's home without an order from a judge and where police constitute an order of magnitude smaller a share of the population than greys do here -" says Ajoran.

"Most greys aren't cops, it would be a little weird to be giving strippers guns and sending them to arrest people," Peka points out.

"The kind of weird where you'd refuse to go along with them, though?"