"The reds we - already have contained. If you whisk them away..."

"It'd be more salient and more upsetting than the fact other planets don't have this concept at all."

"Yes. We didn't really expect everyone would be identical - closer than this, but -"

"There aren't that many reds. They're totally dwarfed by the number of families whose coroner business says 'In the Family Since 1870' in a wood sign out front. Allowing them to immigrate would barely actually change the background - amount the universe has been touched by things you don't like. But it'd make you think about it."

"It'd mean that introducing Amenta to the universe made the universe worse."

"If you were in Mîr we could just have an Amentan wish that everything was not polluted and not pollutable, or something."

"But we aren't."

"Uh huh. You really don't think people will just, like, get over it, if raised in a society that doesn't treat it like the worst thing in the world? That usually happens. On Earth when they tried letting black and white kids go to the same school all the white kids quit so they wouldn't have to be in a room with the black ones and they could have waxed very eloquent about how much they were suffering but, like, twenty Amentan years later they're horribly embarrassed about the whole thing and no one cares."

"There are hyposensitives - we consider it a disorder - but there's also hypersensitives and most people are neither."

"I don't mean thinking that sewage isn't gross, other species think that too. I mean the being miserable that some other planet has been walked on by someone who used to be a garbage worker and isn't even a garbage worker anymore. If you didn't raise kids that way, would they really pick it up?"

"We couldn't go there. No one's upset that we can't go to red districts but we were always hoping once we could colonize planets our population problem would be over."

"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..."

"...the stars thing isn't really the point just an example. But maybe that would work."

"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."

"We don't hate them at random."

"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."

"I'd suggest not giving them any more permissions but you're probably going to make them immortal."

"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?"

"They are, their families are, anything they touch is."

"...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?"

"...that would be worse than Savo's disaster and that was terrible and theoretically containable."

"I will tell my bosses to declare the answer to that question Very Classified."

Soyok nods.