"Hostages?"

"I mentioned earlier they'd kill my family if I made contact with the Federation instead of waiting for that to happen in the agreed-upon way?"

"Yes."

"They meant to keep the secret about daeva a little more closely held than they managed to. Learning won't put you in danger or anything."

"...I might benefit from more context."

" - A country in Amenta found out about summoning. Amenta's not a very nice place, and if the knowledge were widespread someone would probably fuck up and destroy the planet. The country decided to explain that there were aliens but not that anyone who wants to can summon them, use summoning and some political pressure strengthened by having the access to the aliens to solve our society's most glaring social problems before we make contact with our neighbors.  - we have a caste system, see, with untouchable sanitation workers.

But, like, they had a pretty flexible definition of solving the social problems, they'd sort of - sigh heavily - when people decided to get rid of their sanitation workers by just loudly saying they wouldn't enforce the law if anyone saw fit to murder them. So I started interfering. So they arrested my whole family on charges of mishandling of state secrets."

"Oh."

"It wasn't a good idea to intervene but it's - hard to sit around going 'gosh, shame about the murder'. When you can do something."

Nod.

"So I said that I'd prosecute murderers if no one else would and Anitam arrested my family to pressure me and soothe their angry neighbors and the reds mostly took the confusion to scramble and get to some place that wasn't openly encouraging people to kill them - I made a little island country to take some of them in - and at that point panicking everyone clearly was doing more harm than good - they're stupid when they're panicked - and the only good thing I was doing was exerting pressure against having my country being taken over by the aristocratic ruling caste. And then I noticed what you were up to."

"How exactly did you notice it?"

"I was looking at pre-warp societies near us, to try to figure out what productive humanitarian intervention would look like. I noticed one of them got warp, I checked if aliens had visited to say hi yet."

"Ah. Which one?"

"Three genders, they're horrible to one of 'em?"

"Ah. I'm optimistic that there's some technological solution to the problem that's addressing for them."

"I wasn't questioning your judgment. People should - have more options, even if their society sucks right now. Amentans are shaping right up - I realize it doesn't sound it, from what I've mentioned, but we've got people agitating for one-person-one-vote now, we didn't even care a year ago."

"Previously... caste-weighted?"

"Oh yeah. In Anitam vote weight is forty percent blue - they're .5% of the population."

"Grand."

"I tried to have my island not have the aristocracy immediately reassemble itself but it is well underway reassembling itself. It's annoying - there weren't any differences to start, but there are now, because we've had population controls for eight generations and they're set up to reward being good at your caste."

"Is eight generations enough to accomplish very much that way?"

"On the assumptions they used to teach us in school - traits about seventy percent heritable and about such-and-such correlated with how many kids you get, yeah, it is. Kantil'd know more, it's not my field."

"I see."

"They taught us lies in school but not usually on reproducible things, you do need your scientists to know how to do statistics if you want your medicine to work. There are probably differences. They just don't warrant the setup we've got right now."

"It's encouraging that things are improving with contact with other species."