"Were you aware of the context when you made the offer?"

"We were aware that the Federation prohibits any form of contact with pre-warp civilizations by its citizens. It's one of the reasons we decided to build the infrastructure to maintain our independence as a people."

"I see."

"We're hopeful that we can build a relationship with the Federation on the common ground we do have. Your mission is inspiring."

"I'm sure it'll all settle out well in the end."

"Indeed!" And they can point out local architectural features and explain how Amentans experience seasons.

Ambassador K'riohgann(v)or is flawlessly polite and diplomatic apart from occasional probes on exactly how hard it would be to make them cough up T'Mir.

Amentans are ambiguous about whether they'd go to war over it but aside from that: very hard. Very very hard.

They have a caste system, but it avoids many of the bad things about caste systems! For example, in many places, you can change castes at will, and even places that don't allow that sometimes allow immigration to and from places that do. Shasali here was previously red-caste and Aitim there was born green. People mostly don't want to switch, castes being an important element of personal and cultural identity. Anitam votes occasionally on whether to liberalize - "but people here largely prefer a system that affirms what's important to them, which means protecting caste identity and heritage."

"We find that in addition to being limiting to personal growth, caste systems that limit occupations pass up some opportunities for efficiency by obliging a lot of productive interdisciplinary work to happen interpersonally."

"Perhaps the colony planets with the most experimentation will surpass everyone else economically, and the tides of public opinion will change!"

"I'm curious why you want to conduct the experiments internally when there are other histories to learn from."

"Other species have different caste systems and lived under very different conditions. Their histories are of course of great interest to us, but it's not likely that a policy that works for a different species will straightforwardly work for us without alterations. And we feel very strongly about changing government policy by scaling up small-scale experiments, because people don't like their lives to be changed overnight by idealistic politicians and researchers."

"Very conservative."

"Absolutely. We can hardly afford to be otherwise."

"No?"

"Until we developed space colonization, no country in Amenta took immigrants. If a government made a mistake, their citizens died. There was no one to take them in, there was no one in a position to extend aid - if things got really bad a neighbor would conquer them, maybe - the vast majority of well-intentioned ideas can't be implemented exactly as thought-up, even if they can eventually be implemented with some modifications, and the most important thing we look for in politicians is a willingness to do policy slowly and in an evidence-responsive, reversible, careful way."

"I see. But distributing warp, on the other hand..."

"Will likewise be done very carefully, starting with the lowest-risk populations and very limited intervention, with lots of data collection and public debate."

"How are you assessing population risk?"

"The people T'Mir most recently gave warp were a deliberately pastoral society with one city on which they did all their science,  a low population, and a very low rate of war. They're eligible for Federation membership, and they come to mind as a very low risk."

"I do think you're undercounting the value of unaltered development."

"I would personally hesitate to euthanize even a single baby for the sake of unaltered development, let alone dozens every spring."

"- what's the connection you're drawing?"

"That is what happened here because we did not have warp."

"I don't see how that compels euthanizing babies."