"...I think until recently they didn't really get a choice about it, if their superiors said 'I want a million more Yeerks' then, well, you're dead either way, right? But also I guess some are suicidal? Or really want kids of theirs to exist even if they won't get to see them."

"Huh."

"That's not the sense in which Amentans want kids?"

"I mean, once you have one, you'd die to save them, if you had to, but you wouldn't die to have them."

"Makes sense. Well, luckily for you all most places don't want kids as much as you and if you end up chewing through disproportionately many colony planets that'll be fine. It's too bad you're not near Mîr, by now they'd have wished on some sort of infinite-space solution for you all."

"...uh-huh."

She raises an eyebrow quizzically.

"It just sounds a little - fantastical -"

"I guess. I was born into it, I can't really imagine what it was like for the people who went from a normal life to a - safe and vast and magic one."

Nod.

"Am I keeping you from, like, running your House and stuff?"

"Oh, most of the day to day is delegated and aliens landing is a good excuse to put off anything else."

"Okay, cool. I'm not really the best person for explaining stuff but I'm totally happy to."

"What else even is there?"

Shrug. "People stuff? More magic? The screening for wishes? I'm kind of curious what kind of plot people would suspect this of being, it doesn't seem spectacularly conducive to any plots but I might not have the cultural upbringing to be properly imaginative."

"How did you decide to come here? How long have you known about us? - uh, you've told me a lot of stuff you didn't say on TV, I could be gathering information or could conceivably have been planning to take you hostage."

"Anyone who was sufficient as security against all the other Houses would probably be pretty hard to take hostage. Plus, like, it's Fëanorians running Vanda Nossëo - I guess you wouldn't have known that.

I think we'd added you to a list like ten years ago, you're not high-priority because you wouldn't substantially benefit from any cheap resources and you haven't invented various low-tech ways to destroy yourselves and there'd have been substantial justified resistance to external governance and the reds thing is horrible and hard to fix. You haven't moved up the list much but one of the Elf princes decided to do it anyway, I think because Tapa had a girl he had determined with magic was the girl he wanted to marry. - uh, he can make contact on a whim but that doesn't mean things would get yanked out from under you if he got bored, once it's in motion we always follow through."

"...uh, all right. What is your angle on reds exactly?"

"...on my planet until recently homosexuality was considered disgusting, some places would kill people for it and some just made you - pretend... I've done security on a planet where disabled people were considered disgusting and if you were injured in an accident or in a war then the decent thing to do was to kill yourself and if you didn't do that everyone would just quietly loathe you - I've been to one where they murdered people in all kinds of horrifying ways for being heretics, by which they meant believing a slightly different variant of the local religion - look, everybody hates somebody. It's practically universal that if we land on a planet there'll be people who, to the outside eye, look no better and no worse than all the rest, but who the locals will tell us just need to die. 

So when you say that about reds, we're just kind of like 'okay, listening to those other people would have been a terrible mistake, the correct thing to do was to tell them 'uh, no, you don't have to like them but the law will be enforced for them too' and wait two generations for minds and hearts to change'. 

And maybe that's not true here. But so far you haven't said anything that sounds different than what literally everyone says about the people they hate."

"If you let them go everywhere you'll be - it's - a few planets from scratch is better than what we have now even if everything else is covered in - I'm not sure what you're planning to do about their jobs but you probably have some idea -

- but everybody who looks up at the stars will have to remind themselves that at least the stars themselves are on fire and probably not filthy even if we can't ever go anywhere else because they've been there first or might have been."

"...it probably won't help to point out that the other species do, like, use sewage for manure and have people who have handled the dead for thousands of years and stuff and that we won't force the entire universe into conformity with this thing of yours even if we agree to quarantine the reds in particular -"

"If someone goes hiking and dies and isn't found they'll eventually disappear into nature and that's fine. Reds are - ambulatory, self-renewing - people who have handled the dead for thousands of years are also a problem -"

"So are we supposed to go to literally hundreds of millions of worlds where literally hundreds of billions of people who handle the dead for a living and have for thousands of years are living happy joyous lives married to a - banker or a politician or a personal trainer or a engineer - and say 'look, unless we herd you off into hellish little camps or kill you the Amentans, who you have never met, will feel uneasy when they look at the sky' - those planets would rise up as one against us, they'd react the way Amentans would react if we showed up here and started herding all the gay people off to execute because the Valar think they're gross -"

"The who?"

Handwave. "Different species. They really hate gay people. It's just an example, the Andalites would want us to get rid of everyone who walks with a limp and the Asgardians think there's something stomach-turning about everyone male who does combat or sports or governance and the Ferengi think it's appalling if you let women own property - we might as well sterilize the multiverse, if we're going to hurt everyone who someone else wants gone -"