They are very, very far away.

That wasn't the stage where they thought something might go wrong. Well, it could have, but then they'd be dead and waking up in Lórien. 

The question is whether they'll be able to head back. And the navigation computers are at least under the impression that they're working just fine, and could take them home this minute if they so pleased.

They do not so please; they were born before their people had harnessed electricity and now they are looking out on the stars of a different galaxy and they are the Noldor and they will go home when they're good and ready. They let robots maneuver all their best external cameras into place. They sing. They map the stars. 

The computer patiently launches in on a battery of forty thousand tests; three need to be rerun, anomalies being present. 

" - that might be radio," Ertuon says, when the anomalies are still present the second time.

"Ilúvatar above."

"Yeah - what do you say we jump sixty lightyears that way - it might not be but I don't want to go home wondering -"

The navigational computers are instructed to do that.

It's radio.

They're engineers, not alien-contact diplomats. But they know some of those. 

They head home.

Twelve days later all of the lightleapers in existence (there are four) arrive on the spot, half the Noldorin royal family accompanying them. They have to jump twice more to find the actual planet.  

Here it is! It has oceans, and continents, and cities!

And aliens!!!!!!

They've been doing some space exploration, they're familiar with oceans and continents. The cities are more exciting. They look for the prettiest.

The least ugly one is over there on the coast. Of its buildings, six and three-quarters of them, if they were cleaner and had nicer grounds, could maybe be the ugliest buildings in Elf cities but not slated for demolition and replacement outright.

Well, that's a little disappointing. A lot disappointing, really. They scout for pretty uninhabited areas where they can maybe settle in so they don't have to live in the city.

Most of the planet has seen some kind of interference - mining, logging, habitation ongoing or abandoned, farming. There are some wilderness areas, not very close to the least ugly city but some closer to it than any other city.

Aaaaaaaargh. 

"Maybe the interiors are nice," someone says hopefully. 

They find a wilderness area to land.

They are shot at!

The ships are shielded against running into space debris. They are not shielded specifically against people shooting at them because why the fuck would anybody do that, but the shooting turns out to do less damage than a rock run into at acceleration-to-a-lightleap speeds. They are mostly confused.

"Maybe the Enemy did things here too?" 

      "Or there's another one -"

"Prince Curufinwë, how are you on the language from the radio samples -"

      "We didn't get high enough fidelity messages to tell if it was spoken words or music. We could listen now, pick up the language this afternoon -"

"Let's just land, they're not going to hurt us -"

Yes they are!

"There's probably a war on," someone says charitably, "and they're scared. They're handling it badly but I suppose if you landed on Endorë -"

       "They wouldn't shoot at you! We're obviously not hostiles in their war."

"Maybe they think shooting is friendly."

       "I know everyone's eager to get out of the ships, but perhaps we should just stay in orbit and pick up the language and communicate that we regard shooting as unfriendly."

"Yes," Fëanáro says, "let's do that," and that settles it.

There are many languages spoken on this planet. They are not pretty, but they are serviceable and there's a lot of some of the popular ones on the radio. Several dialects - seems like a social class marker - of a popular one are spoken in Least Ugly City. Hypotheses among the locals about the ships include that they are enemy action, that they are aliens who don't know enough to send a message first, that they are aliens who are here to collaborate with the enemy, that they are an elaborate prank, and that they are a collective delusion.

Those are interesting hypotheses. Elves sit contentedly in orbit while Fëanáro picks up four of the languages and all of the dialects of the one spoken in Least Ugly City and teach everyone else a few and by then being contained to the ship is really stressing them out so they broadcast something back.

Hello, it says, we are the Quendi of Valinor, very far from here, and we found you on a scouting mission four of your weeks ago. We are going to land. Shooting us would be unfriendly. 

There is a delay and then they get lots of replies. Are they going to try to land in the same place as before? Are they with the enemy? Are they clean? How did they get here? Were they damaged in the shooting? How many of them are there?

We'd prefer to land somewhere uninhabited but can choose a different location if convenient. We are not with the enemy; when an enemy troubled us back at home he was destroyed, and now we have peace. What do you mean by 'clean'? We have faster-than-light travel. A few cameras were damaged in the shooting, but they're ones we'd use for taking pictures of the stars, not of your world. There are eighty people on this expedition.

What do they plan to do after landing? How does faster than light travel work? Have they touched anything or anyone who was unclean and then failed to sufficiently purify themselves (presumably as aliens they are not of inherently unclean bloodlines, but if they are that is also a thing they'd like to know)?

We know our bloodlines back to the first of the Eldar and don't think our world has unclean things. Once we land we'll try to learn more about your world. Faster than light travel requires very, very complicated math, we will teach you but it might take some time. 

How are they defining the first? Why do they need to land they can talk just fine like this. If they're going to land it has to be closer to the city, how about that farming area there, otherwise the enemy might get them.

We have larger spaceships for when we're going to spend a lot of time in space. If we can't land, we'll have to go home in a day or two. The first Elves are the Elves that awakened beside Cuivienen 625 Years - 1473 local years - ago, how else would it be defined? We can land there but it's not very pretty, is there somewhere pretty?

Their species is much older than that and evolved from another species. They are not sure why prettiness is a criterion or what aliens think is pretty.

Once we have more information about your computer systems we can send examples. It seems likely we have different understandings of what is pretty. 

They land in the fields. They open the doors - atmosphere's breathable, Elves can tolerate a wide range there - and are immediately much relaxed. They sketch prettified pictures of the landscape and sing.

There are people waiting for them! None are more than five and a half feet tall and most of them have blue hair, some green or yellow. They don't seem to have a braiding custom.

Oh gosh that's distracting and awkward.

"Hello," he says in their language to the tiny naked people. "It is exciting to encounter other life among the stars."

"Hello," says a blue haired person. "We are overjoyed to make your acquaintance and apologize for our earlier misunderstanding."

"It's all right! We hadn't learned the language yet or we would have known that there was an enemy and cause to fear the arrival of strangers. We have had peace for so long we have forgotten war."

"We are so pleased that you have chosen to land among us instead of them. If there is anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable please let us know."

" - uh, actually, it is a custom among our people not to wear your hair loose, that is reserved for privacy and marriage -"

There is some polite blinking, and then people start awkwardly braiding their or each other's hair. One of the yellow haired people had his in a ponytail and has spare hair ties, almost enough to go around.

They're braiding each others' hair oh wow. He averts his eyes. "If there's anything similar we can do for you we of course will."

"We will be sure to let you know," says the blue haired person. She is really bad at hair braiding. There are bits sticking out and it's lopsided.

Well, it's - the thought that counts? Maybe they can work up a chip blessing that just blocks out everyone's hair, the bright colors should help with that. "What is the nature of your conflict with the enemy?"

"We used to trade with them. They poisoned some of the food they sent and denied it when we found out."

" - and so you're shooting at them?"

"We don't have independent food security and need more farmland if we can't import from them any more."

"- you're hungry? Because they poisoned the food they sent? Oh no - we might have or be able to design plants which you can eat and which grow well under these conditions -"

"We're on tight rations and we've had to up the population controls, but it's not famine yet."

"We can send a ship and ask Yavanna if she'll come personally, she well might."

"Who is Yavanna?"

"Yavanna is our god of plants, the harvest, and genetic engineering for crop yields."

"...and you can fetch her?"

"I don't know if she'll consent to come but if so, yes, it's five days' travel each way and the gods lightleap just fine."

"I am sure it would be very interesting to meet a god."

"They are very useful. If you don't have gods who resurrects you if you die in an accident or a shooting war?"

Polite blinking. "No one does."

"No one does? What, you just - stop existing?"

"...yes."

" - you need to stop having shooting wars!! That's horrible!"

"If we don't have enough food people will also die."

"Yes, I understand that, but we'll fix it, I'll send one of the ships back up to go get Yavanna right away -" and one of the ships does, in fact, take off - "and maybe we can take people to Valinor if there isn't sufficient food and it's going to take too long to set up your ecology better -"

"Stepping down from a war is delicate, but we will consider it if your solutions are sufficient."

"Thank you. Are there other pressing problems?"

"I'm not sure what to expect you to find a pressing problem."

"Are there other things that cause people to die?"

"...yes, of course."

"Well, those would be pressing problems."

"People die of diseases or civil violence or old age."

"...old...age?"

"Our people live to be about forty of our years...?"

"....oh. I would not even know where to start on helping with that but the Valar might and even if they can't we will get there eventually. The Eldar do not die, save by accidents or violence, and then we can be resurrected from our backups."

"I see. We do not have backups."

"We don't know yet how to safely install backups in other species but we'll get to work on it immediately."

"That is very generous of you."

"It is very exciting to make contact with other worlds, even if they have problems unknown to us. How should we begin to learn about yours?"

"We would be happy to bring some or all of you to our capital city."

"I imagine everybody would love to come." Pause. "No, some tests are still running. Forty of us will come."

"Our convoy is this way."

The convoy is protected by armed people with white or grey hair.

The Elves are not sure what to make of the weapons but get in agreeably and close their eyes and start singing.

The locals find this very interesting! A couple of the green haired people look like they want to interrupt but they don't.

"Are the differences in hair innate or chosen?" someone asks one of their guides after a few songs.

"The color?" asks a different blue haired person. "Most people have the right hair color for them at birth, and those who don't dye it so no one is confused. No one has black hair like that here so there shouldn't be any problems with people making assumptions."

"Some Elves have -" their color divisions seem a little different - "orange or golden or silver hair."

"Then I suppose people might think they were doctors or bureaucrats or athletes. But you would be a little difficult to mistake for our species, so it wouldn't be a strong assumption."

"Oh, they indicate talents? That's fascinating! And most people are born with the right one? I suppose it would often run in families."

"It does. But sometimes if there's an intercaste marriage - those are rare but they happen now and then, especially blue and green - then the caste doesn't match the hair."

"Intercaste?"

"The hair colors are loosely indicative of caste," explains the blue haired person. "The castes have a lot of names but everyone will know what you mean if you use color - blue, green, yellow, grey, orange, purple."

"I don't think we have those. We have different tribes of peoples - the Noldor, the Vanyar, the Teleri, and Endorë has more, and they look different, but they all have all kinds of people."

"Here it would be unheard of for someone of the blue caste to be a farmer, say. - It's a purple career."

"That's fascinating. It's very rare for a Teler to be a farmer but there aren't many things like that, most occupations have all kinds of people. Pure mathematics is almost entirely women?"

"Most of our jobs aren't sex-skewed like that - math is green -"

"Is there a list of occupations and associated colors?"

"Not written down; people here just know it by heart. I could sort things if you name them."

"Literature? Poetry? Ice skating? Teaching? Governance?"

"Literature and poetry would also be green. Ice skating would be grey, teaching orange or maybe green at the high levels, governance is blue with some yellow in the more functionary roles."

"Fëanáro is the crown prince of the Noldor; his father's our King. But day-to-day he mostly invents lightleapers and the Silmarils and so on - how would you sort that -"

"I guess you do caste differently than we do, or perhaps your people don't come in castes at all. Inventing things is green."

"I don't think we come in castes, it sounds like practically everybody would be green. Singing and performing? Owning and running a store? Street cleaning?"

"Singing is green - but dancing is grey - purple for stores - cleaning is red, I didn't mention those -"

"Oh, what else is red?"

"Plumbing, handling the dead."

"Huh. The royal family personally did a lot of plumbing back when we invented it, that was how they convinced everybody it was a good idea to have indoor running water."

"...well." Several people look uncomfortable. A green person asks if it was just the water part or if they also did toilets. Some other people look scandalized. A blue person ventures that he is sure that even if they did the toilets they have certainly bathed since then.

" - well, yes, of course, that was hundreds and hundreds of your years ago. I really don't think we have castes, Aulë, the Vala of engineering, helped with developing indoor plumbing and if it made us unclean he'd have noticed."

"That settles that," says the blue person who first greeted them, and nobody complains further.

Elves continue singing. One explains the Valar - "there are fourteen. Sort of fifteen, one of them used to be evil and now he's been paroled so he can prove he's not still evil. Aulë is metalworking and mining and engineering and Yavanna is plants and crops and genetic research and Mandos does resurrections and justice, and Ulmo is waters and climate and Oromë is hunting - which we don't do anymore, but when he was first the Vala of it we didn't have better ways to get food - and exploration, and Estë does healing and Varda does space and interstellar travel, and Irmo does dreams and psychological healing, and Nienna is Mercy and Tulkas Strength and Vairë Fate and Nessa Dance and Vána eternal youthfulness..."

"How often does Mandos do resurrections?" asks a green person.

"Whenever people die - which isn't very often, we don't have old age and accidents are rare - when we started lightleaping we asked if he'd do resurrections for people who got lost lightleaping really far, just in case he felt that was irresponsible conduct and didn't want to enable it, but he said he would, so off we went... he won't resurrect someone who has a lot of misbehavior to their record and refuses correction, but that hasn't come up with Elves."

"Correction?" asks a yellow.

"You know, like, if someone has an impulse to steal things, they should go to Lórien and Irmo will make it so they don't have an impulse to steal things. And if they have an impulse to steal things and kept stealing things and didn't agree to go to Lórien - we don't force people to go to Lórien, you have to choose it willingly, but we might exile that person or make them have a minder or something - anyhow, if they then died, Mandos wouldn't resurrect them until they agreed to getting corrected. Or if someone sexually desired children instead of adults, things like that."

"That sounds useful."

Nod. "Endorë doesn't have that and they have more crimes and unhappy people and so on."

"Endorë?" (They have an accent; it comes out like 'Entorë'.)

"The world where the Elves awoke. We lived there during the war with the Enemy and then the Valar stopped him and invited us to come live in Valinor and we accepted because they were very great and we desired to learn from them."

"So you've had lightleapers for some time?"

"Oh, no, the Valar made huge beautiful ships and ferried it all the way - it's six of your years at lightspeed. We haven't been able to go back and forth until very recently."

"Oh. And people still live on Entorë?"

"Not everyone wanted to come live in Valinor. If we invite your people to Valinor will all of them want to come?"

"I doubt it."

"So like that. And there are orcs and Dwarves on Endorë, and they're not allowed in Valinor."

"What are those?"

"Other species." Pictures are pulled up on a computer. "Orcs and Elves don't live together well because they're really not pretty enough."

"You seem to... care a lot about... whether things are pretty. Do we need to filter people who may come into contact with you -?"

"If they looked like orcs that would be a bit of a problem. In Endorë's Elf kingdoms they have the orcs wear facial veils, I think. We'll probably build our own little place here and it'll be utterly stunning so it doesn't matter too much what the visitors look like."

"I don't think any of us look quite like orcs but people are more and less - symmetrical, smooth-skinned -"

"- it would be dishonest to claim it didn't matter, but it sounds like this world has lots of problems and it would grieve us to be delayed in aiding you by finding someone important or capable too ugly to look at, and there are technological solutions on our end, so we'll probably just work on getting those deployed."

"Technological solutions -?"

"It seems like it shouldn't take too long to design a VR blessing for it."

"What is a blessing?"

"Our thoughts are written to a chip in our heads, which is then backed up in Mandos, that's how we're resurrectable. You can load all kinds of things onto the chip that increase memory, attention, senses, reflexes, anything affected by the brain. We also have a related industry for things not affected by the brain. A blessing could be written that would, for example, blur out the faces of people in front of you -"

"Oh, I see. In the meantime we can ask people to try to look their best or bring scarves - and there's no reason you'll need to talk to a red caste person about anything, I think, and most of us are uncomfortable enough around them ourselves -"

"Are they unusually ugly?"

"We don't usually think about it in those terms."

"Do all the societies in the world have the same castes?"

"Loosely. Some of them sort things differently - there's a province where medicine is historically green instead of orange, that sort of thing - some people are more or less strict about mixing -"

Nod. Elves sing some more.

And here is the city! The city is called Tap. The building where the blue caste does most of the work of governance is one of the tolerably pretty ones. They've sent messages ahead to pretty things up and shoo the red caste and braid hair and so on.

So thoughtful of them! Elves are privately murmuring in telepathy about the caste thing but Fëanáro has so far been dissuaded from asking his approximately three thousand probably-impolitic questions.

Here are various tolerably pretty offices! Here are more green-haired people who want to talk about the math of lightleapers and learn Quenya and see pictures of pretty Elf art! Here are blue-haired people who want to talk about the structure of Elf government and the possibilities of trade! Here are some yellow-haired people who want to know if the Elves will require hotels or food or anything else!

People are apparently on rations so they'd feel terrible about accepting any food. They brought some with them and will do fine until the ships come back with more supplies. They are so so enthusiastic about green-haired people and will delightedly teach Quenya and show art and show city skylines and start in on the precursor math to the precursor math to lightleapers! Elf governments are like such and very interested in trade!

Fëanáro finds a particularly intelligent-seeming green-haired person to ask what happens if someone with an obvious talent for mathematics wasn't born with green hair.

"Oh, that actually happened to one of my children! Her grandfather on her father's side was yellow and she was bright sunshiney yellow. But she's green caste so when she was old enough to hold still for it we started dyeing it."

"Does mathematical talent just not occur in people who aren't of appropriate green lineage, then?"

"They'd channel it differently. A math person who was grey caste would do maybe logistics or ballistics or something like that, orange ones might wind up in research medicine - I once met a purple who could do excellent mental arithmetic, barely wrote any of his shop's accounting down -"

"It seems like you'd get better matching of people to jobs if they were all allowed to dye their hair, then -"

"Oh, no, that would never work. People wouldn't really be happy if they were pretending to be the wrong caste."

"How intensively has all of this been studied? Can children be adopted between castes, are there countries that assign things differently enough you could learn something by comparison -"

"There's pretty serious limits to how much we can study this without wrecking the social order, everybody's family ties and aspirations for their children - every now and then if we don't know who an adoptable child's parents are they just go by hair color even though that might be wrong, but that's when you don't know and have to guess. Otherwise it's all in-caste. Our enemies do things differently - they used to be more like us and now they're poisoning the food, I think that might be a bad sign, don't you?"

" - yes, if changing customs led to poisoning food that's a really good reason to leave them the same, I'm just trying to think the best nondisruptive prosocial way to check whether there are innate differences being captured or whether the differences are fundamentally arbitrary - which wouldn't mean they shouldn't exist, gender's probably arbitrary and I still think people are happier having it, but I'm terribly curious which it is - what customs did they change before they started poisoning food?"

"It was some change in how they dealt with the red caste - red caste are really different, I don't understand them at all, honestly, they heard about the food and threw a party, they live mostly separately from everyone else -"

"Can we meet some?"

"We've told them to stay well out of the way, I really don't think that's a good idea."

"But no one's asked them why they were happy about food being poisoned? Back home that'd be considered terribly concerning -"

"I'd be concerned if it were anyone else! It's just the red caste being gross and it's best to let them be gross on their own as long as they keep doing their jobs."

"What do you expect would go wrong if we talked to them?"

"I don't know specifically. Sometimes it seems like they go out of their way to be disgusting, maybe they wouldn't braid their hair for you or they'd try to grab you -"

"Huh. How is it decided what caste the child of a mixed-caste marriage is-"

"Almost always it's whatever the mother is, but if either parent is red it's always red - not that anybody else marries reds - and sometimes if people expect their children are going to take after their father they can get things shuffled around."

"Are there rules against pretending to be in a different caste or is it simply not done -"

"There's rules against reds pretending, for sure. But it's less of a problem with anyone else, if we hadn't dyed my daughter's hair she'd still be green on all her paperwork but people would think she was yellow and that wouldn't be a disaster."

"And everyone else is pretty happy with what they're doing so it wouldn't really come up?"

"You get silly stories about people pretending to be blue or purple children wishing they'd been born grey, that sort of thing, but not in real life."

And he goes back to questions about the language.

Which she is delighted to answer!

That night he goes back to the ships and picks up another language and contacts the enemy. Hello, he says. We are from a distant star. We are curious about you. 

Are you the people who were speaking Tapap on the radio the other day?

Yes! We've landed and met them. They mentioned they are at war with you but said they'd stop if they had enough food so we're bringing the goddess of harvest and then hopefully the war can stop. We disapprove of people dying.

Everything about that sounds very strange.

If you are more specific I can maybe explain.

It seems very unlikely that they'll stop trying to take our land, and also that you're bringing a literal harvest goddess.

Well, if they don't stop, then I guess we could stop them. I don't know for sure if she'll agree to come but I think it's likely.

Why did you go to them instead of us or another country?

Their city was prettiest. 

That doesn't seem like a very responsible way of handling first contact.

Um, I should probably mention that I am not in charge of anything I'm just a kid with a way around their radio jamming.

Most possible ways of picking which country to land on seem pretty arbitrary. Their radio jamming? 

They've got a thing so radio's not reliable in our country because that makes it harder for us to get war news moved around but I have this thing.

They said the war started because you poisoned their food, is that true?

Basically, yeah. We have to eat the same stuff.

Why did someone poison the food?

The reds got really uncontrollable so they're letting them handle some of it now.

And they poisoned it?

Yeah.

I am confused about why this was not handled internally instead of uninvolved parties now shooting each other.

They won't keep the reds away from the food. It's disgusting. There's a few things they're still not allowed to touch but hardly anybody can afford to only eat those things.

I agree that it makes sense to punish the poisoners. I am confused about why, presumably, not-poisoners are murdering other not-poisoners.

They keep saying it's safe. I think nobody's actually died, maybe that's all they mean by that.

There's confusion about whether the food is in fact poisoned?

Of course it is, it just won't outright kill you.

What does it do, then?

It's unclean. Some people are refusing to eat rather than eat the poisoned food and other people are eating it but getting sick. Some people seem okay but even they don't like it.

Do you know what makes some people get sick while others don't?

No.

Do you know what specifically was done to the food?

I told you, the reds are touching it.

And are they putting foreign substances in it? Failing to take some steps that are ordinarily taken in food preservation?

...maybe? I don't know. They're touching it.

I am trying to figure out the mechanism by which their touching it leads to people getting sick.

I'm surprised more people aren't, I keep expecting to.

Can you put me in touch with someone with relevant medical expertise, maybe?

I'm not supposed to have this thing.

People are dying. 

So will I, I'm really not supposed to have it.

...I am confused about how that would cause you to die. 

The enemy's jamming the radio and if they notice I unjammed it to talk to aliens they'll hit us harder than they have been, official word is let them jam, so it's sorta kinda treason.

Okay. What percentage of people who eat the poisoned food have gotten sick? How sick have they gotten, what kinds of things are they experiencing?

I don't know a percentage. Maybe ten percent. They're throwing up or shaky or weepy or itchy.

And it's not known what's causing this?

I told you they're letting reds touch the food! They're picking it and milling it and packing it and putting it on trucks!

- wait, is the claim that even if they don't put any substances in the food, or change food preparation procedures in some way, people will get sick as a consequence of their having touched it at all?

Yes!

Does this world have magic?

No?

Are there persistent, measurable phenomena that cannot be explained within the framework of physics?

I don't think so but I'm purple, they don't teach me physics.

I cannot think of any mechanism by which red people touching food poisons it. 

They're filthy.

Food grows in the ground. It's covered in dirt. Worms and bugs live in the ground. Washing it fixes that. Why doesn't washing it fix having been handled by red people?

They touch corpses and sewage and garbage and each other. Food doesn't stay in the ground that long but they've been unclean forever, it's in their blood now.

Your concept of cleanliness does not seem to capture any actual material property of the world, so I kind of wouldn't expect it to be able to do things with material consequences, like get people sick.

They're sick anyway. They shouldn't let the reds handle food.

Given that letting reds handle food wouldn't cause sickness, I think maybe the cause of the sickness is something else.

It's definitely that, the fancy stuff they still aren't allowed to touch isn't making anybody sick.

Were other food handling procedures changed when red people were first allowed to handle the food? 

I don't know, I'm purple but retail purple not farm purple.

I think they must have been, and that that, not the handling by red people, is what is causing the illnesses, because handling by red people causing illnesses doesn't make any sense.

Yes it does, you're an alien so maybe you don't have an unclean caste on your planet but they're inherently disgusting and of course people will throw up if they try to eat things they've touched.

Has anyone checked what happens if people are told that perfectly good food was touched by a red person, or fed food that was touched by a red person while not being told that it was?

Um, no, nobody has tried sneaking unclean food to someone or purposefully trying to put them off their appetite while they're on rations.

If they did, what do you expect would happen? Would they get sick if they thought they were eating red-touched food, even if the food was fine?

They wouldn't eat it if they had any other choice.

The thing I'm interested in is whether people are making themselves sick by expecting to be sick.

I don't think that makes sense.

A lot of things about this don't make sense. If I assume that people who eat red-touched things would get sick whether they knew about it or not, then the red-touched things have to be somehow physically different than non-red-touched things, but I have a hard time believing no one checked whether new substances were being introduced into the foods, or wondered if a change in food handling procedures was causing trouble. If I assume that the food is not physically different, except for the fact a red person touched it, then either your people can notice things that are not physically measurable except in the effects they have on you or you're making yourselves sick with anticipation. 

They don't teach me physics, I told you.

This doesn't require a grasp of anything especially complicated. Maybe I'll ask for some contaminated food to run tests on.

Maybe you're immune to uncleanliness because you're aliens, that'd be something.

I'm pretty sure we are. No one has gotten sick who didn't eat contaminated food? Not the doctors who treated them, not their spouses who kissed them or cared for them while they were sick?

I don't think anybody's eating the food who's married to someone who doesn't also have to - doctors have special procedures so they can treat people who have gross diseases without carrying the gross -

And it happens even if the food is subsequently washed and cooked and prepared?

Yeah. I don't know, maybe doctors have a way to do special food procedures too, but I think they'd tell people.

Probably. Do reds ever get this particular sickness?

Of course they don't, they're already always unclean.

Being unclean protects you from getting sick from contaminated food? Does being unclean have any bad effects?

It is a bad eff-

The kid is cut off suddenly.

He frowns.

The next day he asks their hosts if he can have some samples of the poisoned food to do tests on, and also whether they expect the poisoned food to have any effect on people who are already unclean.

"Oh, of course it wouldn't do anything to reds, we let them have it when we found out since it wouldn't make any difference to them - there's not many of them but what unpoisoned food we diverted from their usual supplies helped a little - how are you planning to handle it?"

"The highest standard of caution we have is for the cores we use for our power plants, and that's worked for centuries without incident; we'll use that until we figure out what's going on."

"And this doesn't involve you coming into direct contact with the tainted food, or with any unwashed instruments that touch it -?"

"There will be six inches of solid metal between the experimenters and the food."

"All right. I can have you brought some samples out of the red district - do you care what kind of food -"

"A variety would be good. We're trying to figure out if uncleanliness has detectable physical properties that could perhaps be fixed with technological intervention."

"I believe some of our scientists are already trying to come up with a way to purify it, but didn't you say you had a harvest goddess who was going to come fix everything?"

"Yes, I just find it intellectually curious."

"All right."

The samples arrive in several layers of packaging. Most of it looks like it'd be shelf-stable - some grain, some dried fruit - but they also seem to have stolen someone's sandwich; there's a bite out.

Perhaps the person didn't like their sandwich. He takes it back and runs tests. It's not radioactive. It does have bacteria, of course; they get to culturing and cataloguing them. "There are other, subtler things that could be wrong but it's odd that they wouldn't affect any reds -"

     "Maybe they've already been exposed?"

"For a virus that would explain it, for some sort of protein-folding foodborne disease not so much - but we don't know enough about local biology yet, maybe -"

Elves are dispatched with a few more sample requests. 

He inquires after local musical traditions.

Music is a green thing! Except for drumming, which some greys do too. He has lots of green-haired people happy to talk to him about music.

He is a happy Elf! - they're not especially talented but they're doing interesting things, that's something. 

Ten days after they arrive the courier lightleaper comes back to announce that Yavanna's coming - and Melkor wants to come too - but was in the middle of something and won't be here for another week. The ship is packed with food to tide the locals over in the meantime. It is also packed with really really pretty tapestries for the Elves to promptly drape all over everything; they do that. 

He didn't come the first time because he was feeling unreasonably averse to dying but he comes with this one.

The locals look at him for a bit, then decide in whispers that yes his hair definitely qualifies as orange probably yes it's okay.

He's not going to argue the point. "I think," he says to his father after a few hours, "it's entirely a socially constructed thing. Maybe it had a correspondence to reality back before they invented modern medicine?"

"I certainly can't find any substantive physical basis for it but they have very different biology, there could be something we're not seeing."

"Yes, but that's not how they behave around it."

Shrug. "Well, we can feed them all and end the war whether they're silly or not."

"That we can. Are they still shooting each other? They should stop before Yavanna gets here, I think she'd be upset."

"I can't get a very clear sense of how much shooting is ongoing or how attached they are to it, but by all means get them to stop."

He goes back up to the not-intolerably-ugly building and meets people.

So many people! For some reason they keep mentioning their kids around him but he can get them to talk about other things.

Knowing the names of everybody's kids is lovely but yes, he'd like to talk about the war.

What about it?

Will it stop once there's food security?

They were sort of already in the middle of the war when potential food security arrived. They'll need to back out slowly in a way that discourages retaliation and they're not unsympathetic to the complaints of natives of the other country who don't like the polluted food situation either.

"We can get them adequate food too."

"I'm sure they'll appreciate that but they were sort of deliberately poisoned by their leaders, they might not want to see what the next bright idea out of their capital is."

"Are they prohibited from emigrating if they'd rather live here?"

"While the war's on, certainly. Before they wouldn't have been but who knows how relations will normalize after. And many of them would like us to administer where they happen to live but can't realistically abandon their farms or businesses."

"Is there a mechanism by which they can demand improvements of their government?"

"Depends on who they are."

"Then that sounds like something which needs fixing. I don't think killing people who can't even be resurrected is a good way to fix it, though. And if any of our technology makes it easier for people to kill others, we'd want to share it with a people who we trust not to use it for that."

"I understand you're from a very peaceful place. It sounds lovely. If you have a way to enfranchise poorly educated farmers from our neighboring country who need a way to petition their government on matters as immediately troubling as poisoned food, I'm all for it. But I think those of the enemy's citizens who want us there want it because their own rulers have broken trust, and it will be hard to establish again quickly enough that they can all get supper."

"I think I'd like to talk to their rulers, do you have a way to do that?"

"We have some low-bandwidth channels for things like establishing local truces to avoid damaging infrastructure, that sort of thing..."

"Would that work to negotiate for us to go over and meet them?"

"I can talk to some of our strategists." This means "no".

"Thank you! It'll be so much more disruptive if we have to just land on them."

"I really don't think you should do that even if the truce channels aren't available! They might try to destroy your ships, and they probably know you've been working with us, they won't want to talk."

"I expect they will shoot at us. I'm sure they won't want to talk. But there is absolutely no way we can countenance the killing of people over political disputes without having gone to every length imaginable to resolve them without violence. I come from a very peaceful place because I come from a place where we will risk anything to prevent things from coming to violence. If we want this to be a peaceful place, we will have to try for it."

"I think poisoned food is a bit more than a political dispute - and I think you have miscalibrated expectations, you have to be realistic -"

"The people I have met here are as intelligent and as devoted and as loyal as the people of my kingdom. I do not think my expectations for you are too high."

"I meant about the enemy, and about - how difficult stopping wars is especially if no one has won yet -"

"Once Yavanna gets here we might have more options to prevent retaliation."

"We're obviously accustomed to working without gods as a safety net. Perhaps." Smile. This means 'your gods are probably fictitious but wouldn't that be neat if one showed up'.

"But I'd like to speak with your enemy before that, Yavanna will benefit from having very specific information to act on."

"I'll talk to the strategists." This means 'maybe'.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

The strategists can get him in touch with the military leadership of the opposition.

He really does appreciate it. They're welcome to listen in, since he understands the fact the conversation might raise concerns.

Yup, there will be a grey standing by ready to cut them off if necessary and some supervising blues.

"Someone who speaks your enemy's language, so you can understand us?"

The grey and one of the blues speaks it. A yellow shows up late; she's a translator.

He doesn't require a translator but it's good that there'll be one for the benefit of the audience.

Exactly.

And when everything is set up -

"Hello. I am Prince Nelyafinwë Maitimo of the Noldor. Our home world, Valinor, is located in the inner spiral of the galaxy you call Kadashama; we call it Élmaitë. We are here to learn of your people, and teach you how to travel between the stars. I would like to talk with you about ending the war."

"It's the Tapai that we're at war with; we have no quarrel with you if you don't side with them."

"We will side with peoples who seek peace over peoples who choose war."

"They invaded us, we didn't choose this."

"We'd like everybody to have enough food. We are arranging that. Once everybody has enough food, we expect that, the reasons to fight being absent, they will cease at once. Will our confidence on that front be misplaced?"

"They're occupying half of Imde province and they can't keep it."

"Can you propose a mechanism other than killing people to resolve that dispute?"

"Why aren't you telling them to get off our land instead of asking what we'll do to placate invaders?"

"Because I'm not here to decide who is right, I'm here to ensure that peoples granted the knowledge to go to the stars will possess the maturity not to murder their own neighbors. In this conversation I am evaluating whether you possess that maturity. In my dealings with them I am learning the same thing of them."

"Look, we were minding our own business and they showed up with guns, I don't know how things are in Kadashama but here that makes it their responsibility to go home. We're defending our people and our homes."

"Their complaint is that you changed food procedures in a way that made the food unacceptable to their whole citizenry and much of yours. Was that a misunderstanding?"

"The food is fine."

"While I am overjoyed to hear that they need not fear retaliation when they cease the war, this does not wholly satisfy me as an explanation of how it came about in the first place."

"The food is fine. Check it yourselves if you like."

"We have been. There is no physically discernable difference between food that has been handled in a manner compatible with local purity taboos and food that has been handled in a manner not so compatible. Is that what you mean by 'the food is fine'?"

"Yeah. You just have to cook it and get over yourself and it's fine."

"A lot of people are going hungry. This is a bad outcome and the decisions that brought it about were bad decisions, you do understand that, right?"

"When they're hungry enough they'll eat it, there's plenty, or there would be if the fucking Tapai weren't turning half of Imde into a battlefield, and the Allocator said this was how we were going to handle reds and we need to trust him."

"Can I speak with him?"

"He doesn't touch this channel, this is for military negotiations, how did you even get on it?"

"Observing that my next resort would be less convenient for everyone. If you'd like to propose a better channel for debating the merits of your current Allocator's economic planning, I would be delighted."

"I can forward the question up but it's not going to help that you're with the Tapai and they're still jamming our radio."

"I would be delighted and impressed with the leadership of both nations if they arranged a ceasefire; until you've managed that, lots of our technology will have to go unused by people who could benefit from it. Perhaps you can get on that right away and then we can talk with your allocator once they're not jamming your radio."

"We're already in ceasefire till the end of the week."

"That doesn't extend to permitting communications?"

"No, it just extends to not killing each other. This is the part where I'd ask what planet you're from if you hadn't already told me."

"By the end of the week Yavanna will be here. I think it'd be a good idea to speak with the people making your allocation decisions before that."

"I'm not responsible for this Yavanna person's schedule. You've got a lot of nerve."

"Have you asked your scientists and engineers how far away they are from FTL? More than three hundred years? More than a thousand? Have you imagined meeting a civilization with the technologies and customs yours had three hundred years ago? A thousand? We are from another galaxy, and visited you just to see how far we could go. We are immortal, and if destroyed will reawaken at home, unharmed. We are not here to conquer, but we're not here to negotiate either. It is in the interests of your Allocator to talk with us before Yavanna gets here."

"Tell General Hako that if he's trying to make me miss him, mission accomplished."

"I assume he's listening. Who can you forward the question up to?"

(General Hako, the grey in the corner, snorts softly.)

"My aide's run off to tell the allocator's office."

"Thanks so much. I'll wait."

"I wish you wouldn't. Hako, you six-faced gormless coward, are you there?"

Hako glances at the blues and when one nods says, "Yep. Skyheads insisted."

"Is he really going to wait?"

"Probably. Put Chora on if you're that rattled, you pathetic old bat."

He waits.

The pathetic old bat is replaced by a functionary with what Maitimo might or might not recognize as a yellow dialect accent. "Hello, I'll stay on the line with you until this channel goes back to its usual purpose!"

"Thank you! I'm curious how the change in food handling was announced and rolled out internally. When did you find out about it? Who has oversight on those decisions?"

"The general has advised that no further substantive information be exchanged at this time!" chirps Chora.

"Oh, all right then! Would you like to learn some Quenya?"

"All right!"

Here's how you say 'hello', and 'my name is...' and 'the ships have to get up to 97% of lightspeed to jump', and 'Yavanna can make crops grow from seedlings to maturity in nine hours, and double the yield', and 'it only takes me a few days to learn languages because I have memory blessings for it' - and he digresses to explain what those are - and 'the last war on Endorë sunk two continents' and 'I'd really like to speak to the Allocator, do you know when to expect him?'

"How do you say 'the general has advised that no further substantive information be exchanged at this time'?"

He translates it. "And 'the Valar really dislike discourtesy and I'm concerned they'll clash with your government when they arrive' would be this -"

Chora firmly avoids substantive information but seems to enjoy her Quenya lesson.

Eventually she reports that the allocator's office would love to talk to Prince Nelyafinwë in person if he can get there. (Hako looks tempted to cut them off.)

"Would it be convenient for them to meet the starship Cemenyë in its orbit around your smaller moon?"

"I'm afraid we can't risk any takeoffs even during the ceasefire."

"I can arrange for someone to come visit you tomorrow."

"The Allocator is in the city of Ched."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. While I have a person from the allocator's office here is there anything else I can do for you?"

"We're going to be distributing a lot of food starting next week. We will distribute it to anyone who is hungry. I'd love to discuss with the Allocator's office how to ensure this is not too disruptive to the stability of your nation."

"He'll be ready to discuss that then."

"Thank you. That's all."

"You're welcome," chirps Chora.

Hako looks like he would like his military negotiation channel back now please.

"Thank you," he says to Hako, and lets him have it.

And they all leave poor General Hako alone.

He remains fairly reluctant to do things that might get him killed, for no good reason. "Do you want to -"

"I would be delighted."

The city of Ched does not shoot at him.

He's here to meet with the Allocator, where should he go?

These greys will escort him to the office!

Great.

And there is a very stressed out blue haired fellow behind a desk. "Hello," he says wearily. "Are you Prince Nelyafinwë -"

"His brother. Prince Morifinwë Carnistir, nice to meet you."

"Likewise I'm sure." Sigh. "Allocator Savo."

"Do you want a summary of what's going on on our end, or should I have an explanation of the food mess first?"

"Probably the latter." Sigh. "What do you already know -?"

"People on this planet have hair colors that are taken as indicative of the occupations and social position appropriate to them. We don't have that at home. This is inherited but with a little bit of flexibility, enough to suspect it's not tracking some intrinsic natural category, but everyone treats it like an intrinsic natural category. The red-hair class of people are regarded as unclean, and their handling of the food does not appear to have produced food that is in any respect inferior to normal food but people are terrified of it because it's unclean, so they're either going hungry or eating it and then sometimes getting sick - looks like just out of sheer terror. Some of your citizens were unhappy about this, and your neighbors took that as a sign it'd be appreciated if they invaded. They've invaded."

"Oh, they invaded to take some farmland - I think the local discontent is just an excuse - whatever." Sigh. "People hate the reds, and it was never going to get better, and I thought - it had to be almost all the food producers at once, you see, or any of them who sold red-handled food would go out of business instantly same as if they tried to sell moldy food - coordinated that, but people are reacting worse than expected. Especially the Tapai, I - should have expected that, didn't think they'd take it this far -"

"Meddling with markets for social good usually doesn't work."

Allocator Savo looks at him dolefully. "You have lots of company in just wanting to leave the reds where they are, I suppose. Maybe you're even right."

" - no, I think we probably want to let them emigrate. Find them a nice place on Endorë if the Valar make faces at the idea of your people in Valinor. If you treat them appallingly I bet they'll all choose to leave."

"That would be even worse - no one else will do their jobs, we'd have corpses rotting in the streets, sewage everywhere -"

"Your society's totally unsustainable without an underclass who everyone loathes and mistreats?"

"...are you a diplomat?" wonders Allocator Savo dubiously.

"Not in the slightest. I do our economic policy. If you want someone who can phrase things nicely for your superiors I can get Nelyo on the phone, but what I want is to figure out why people are hungry and why people are desperate and how we can fix this stupid planet and its appalling misallocation of its resources without ripping up things we're not set to replace."

"People are hungry because they'd rather indulge their squeamishness about red caste than eat anything they've bagged. I thought - maybe we were ready -"

"Maybe would've worked if you'd gotten some scientists to claim they'd developed a procedure that could purify food red people handled. Or done it with some industry where squeamishness hits less close to home. Or rolled it out with the right PR - you're not wrong that it's stupid, it's just a really bad idea to try to starve people into social progress -"

"Claiming we had a food procedure might have opened food handling jobs to reds but it wouldn't have helped the underlying idiocy. Reds install toilets, and then somebody wipes them down with six kinds of antiseptic and they're fine, it doesn't help."

"I have no reason to expect I'd be unusually helpful with your social problems, but I do think that opening more jobs to people of different castes might help more than expected - giving people more options generally does -"

"The purples find it threatening and they're more than half the population, I wouldn't have courted that just to get reds the chance to pick apples."

"Okay. Well, you tried this and it didn't go well, are you going to try to press ahead with it?"

"If I back off it will never work, ever again, every future attempt to get reds better integrated is going to be compared to Allocator Savo's Complete Disaster, if it can just be salvaged somehow there's chances at more progress someday -"

"Do you have a plan for how to salvage it?"

"Some people - not enough but some - they get hungry enough or they just really want some specific food - it's the purples resisting the most, almost all the greens are eating it -"

"And now we're importing food."

"It's going to collapse, I'm probably going to have to turn up at the Tower of Rainbows in the end -"

"Tower of Rainbows?"

"- it's where we do executions. I was getting enough death threats I had to put my husband and my niece up in the mountains but I can't just run off to the mountains with them if Governor Riado decides the populace needs to see me dead to calm down."

He seems to be on several different levels unable to think of anything to say to that.

"If you'd like to be introduced to some other people here while I'm still around to make introductions I can at least do that."

"I - 

- WHY IS THIS PLANET SO APPALLINGLY RUN?"

Savo winces when he yells. "I'm - sorry?"

"It's not - your fault - look, Elves had failed to communicate that we are sure as fuck not working with anyone who executes their citizens only because it had not occurred to us that anybody might."

Blink. "There's a couple of smaller countries that don't have the death penalty except for reds and greys."

"Then maybe they will cut it out for reds and grays and get all of the next thousand years of technology because no one else can behave themselves or maybe everyone else will figure out how to behave themselves, once Yavanna's here it at least should not be hard to establish we're worth getting along with. What a horrifying - what a wasteful - the kid who explained your side of the war to my father, is he all right -"

"- the - oh - I'm sorry, no, he was caught with a dejammer he wasn't supposed to have, we didn't want to make it more difficult to extend the ceasefire by circumventing their communications jam and there was a very clear instruction - we think they didn't notice but the kid knew he wasn't supposed to have the dejammer and he didn't have an excuse -"

"So you're going to murder him?"

"- I didn't personally -"

"I am going to take a break," he says, "and talk with you in an hour. Are any murders scheduled before then."

"I... can look up the Tower schedule for you..."

"Why don't you."

"- nothing till tomorrow afternoon unless there's some kind of emergency."