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There are a lot of Amentan countries. Vanda Nossëo representatives are dispatched to all of them. These Elves (two with black hair, one with silver) take a shuttle down from the lightleaper to a country called Calado, and radio ahead to request permission to land at a elegant modern spaceport.
okay by comparison Voa and Tapa look like thriving modern democracies
"We could quarantine this universe? The other ones aren't spatially contiguous with this one, it'd mean all of the stars you look at are fine and all of the places colonies could reach are fine, maybe someone can wish up decontaminating shuttles for people who want to go back and forth..."
"We don't want you to be miserable. But we - take it really seriously, about everyone having rights and being safe, and if anybody could just veto other people getting rights and being safe then the whole thing crumbles. People'll be so grateful if Amentans can propose a solution that doesn't make you miserable and would generalize acceptably to the next place we go that really hates rape victims or something."
"The place I'm thinking of that hates rape victims doesn't hate them at random either, they can't afford to have doubts about paternity of children and haven't invented paternity testing and handle it with ridiculous-strength taboos on extramarital sex or putting oneself in a position where someone could have extramarital sex with you. It's not random but it's not something that should keep existing in a good world."
"Reds shouldn't exist in a good world. We've wanted to replace them with robots since the concept was invented."
"Now you sound like the people from that planet saying 'yeah, we kill rape victims by burying them up to their neck in the ground and having the whole community gather around to throw rocks at them because they shouldn't exist in a good world'. They shouldn't. But the fix isn't to murder the ones who do."
"Also it sounds like Amentans experience childlessness as something akin to torture. Does it really not wear off? Will their great-grandchildren really be just as - whatever it is you think they are - if they've never been anywhere near anyone unclean?"
"...would it solve anything if I checked what percentage of the not-red Amentan population has red ancestry because people cheat or abandon their babies in a box on a neighbor's doorstep or whatever? Or would it just freak people out if I'm right and it's kind of a lot of them?"
"Usually when people realize the definition they're using doesn't actually mesh with their intuitions they retreat to a more pragmatic one. But I guess the retreating can still really suck." Shrug. "I don't suppose it'd be sufficient if you just had personal decontaminating bubbles?"
"Probably the way to do that would be to have someone wish for it - wishes give you what you want, if they go through at all, though how they do it varies a bit - and then we could check what exactly the wish was doing and maybe find a less expensive way to do it. - the Empress does all wishes personally, too risky to delegate it."
"...so that's not itself a scalable way to do it but it'd be a good way to figure out what exactly we'd be doing, and then find a scalable way."
"It would be easier to start from, like, a specification of what exactly you'd need the bubbles to do, but it sounds like you don't exactly think about pollution in those terms so, given that, something that we know Amentans will consider adequate is probably the best starting point."
"Without magic, sure. With magic - like the bubble could just replace anything that comes in its range with something identical but made of newly-generated atoms, if it did that would that be sufficient?"
"So it'd be something like that. I bet there's a way to do that with a more scalable kind of magic but I'm not an expert."