"You're upset." He scrolls down. It's a long list.

"I'm not personally a fan, no. Humans from my world have an afterlife by default and Elves and orcs are resurrectable - otherwise not so much."

Nod.

Sigh.

"The Anitami moral values in conflict with just stopping it are - justice to the surviving family of the victims, who presumably wouldn't want their loved ones' murderer hung in a society where that wasn't conventional but who do want it as things stand. And swiftness and surety - you don't leave people in a protracted state of doubt over their fate, you have an interview quickly and then you carry out the sentence the next day, you don't torture people with false hope. Plus deterrence, of course. And a - zero-sum view of resources, every rapist and murderer we're feeding and housing in prison is a family that can't have a child this year and a fairly extraordinary expense for the government. That one we can change, and it makes the others tractable, but it doesn't make them easy. If you put it to a straight unweighted vote it'd come down overwhelmingly against abolishing the death penalty."

Nod.

"The courts are a mess. Was on my eventual to-do list, but access to demons might solve it sooner. - I'm not sure how clear a picture you have of our society..."

"I don't. I've been reading, but some about you and some about the Federation et al. Federation appears to be run on an alternate version of my home planet, that's fun."

"Is there a you?"

"I checked records from when I would have been born, no dice."

Nod. He pulls six case files aside for closer reading. "We don't censor the internet but I might be more informative in some contexts, if there are things you want to know..."

"The reds thing really bothers me."

He winces. "It's going to bother everyone, isn't it."

"Well, the Ferengi seem to have a comparable grade of sexism going on and the Cardassians seem pretty brutal to their occupied territories but having a caste system at all disqualifies you from Federation membership, let alone having a caste that's handled in that way."

"Which is inconvenient, if the rule for membership was 'stop murdering them, let them emigrate, get them decent medical care' everyone would probably grudgingly get in line but since the bar's somewhere we can't reach no matter what they're going to be less inclined to try. Their own planet is probably the way to go."

"Maybe. But you can't just trap them there."

"There are sixty-five million reds. If they do a growth rate of four-per and they're well supplied it'll be a century before they start needing more space and by then we'll have forgotten to find them gross and it won't be a problem."

"I don't just mean living space, I mean if you leave them on a planet somewhere they may be menaced by Cardassians or found by the Federation and considered based on the rest of the species to be post-warp and invited to join and traipse all over the galaxy."

"Does the Elf universe want them. Or your home universe."

"Transit would be challenging."

"Getting them on the ships is going to be a nightmare. Ugh. I - before this happened my long term plan was to convince everyone they can be cleaned with, I don't know, chemotherapy or gene therapy or something."

"Seriously?"

"Yes. You can't just make people get over it, they don't."

"Angels," says Cam.

" - can do the exhaustive paranoia-satisfying medical procedures?"