As for your son, though he is rather too old for it, we must dress him as an undifferentiated one. As such, he will be regarded with a good deal of tolerance, more than we manage under most other circumstances. Your young are not unlike ours in being demanding, eager, selfish, gauche. As our sages have said,youth builds a universe with self at the center. Carlos will not be an asset. Our position would be improved had we been able to bring an Earthian athyco with us, if there had been one who would have been accepted by all the religions, political bodies, racial constituencies and social movements on your world. Such a one could have spoken pointedly to our Confederation ambassadors, calling them to account for the depredations of the Fluiquosm, et al. No such person exists on your world, so it is left to us. Vess and I will speak, but we will have to be diplomatic. The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.
However, there is some time before we get to Pistach-home. We have other worlds to visit first. The subjective time lapse from Earth to the first one, Flibotsia, is about two of your days, and you will sleep during all of it. If we could not travel in the null-time dimension, it would take thousands of your years to reach any of our near worlds, but the drive allows us to stand teetering upon a point of time as we plunge onward in several dimensions of space. Indeed, some of the new drives are virtually instantaneous. One begins here, gets in the ship, has a cup of tea, gets out of the ship, and behold, one is there. Poof. Even so, we are far from the intergalactic drive our religion posits as the next necessary step in the evolution of intelligence! Between the galaxies, so our scientists think, the umquah are more evenly spread and less irritable than where matter annoys them constantly.
When we arrive on Pistach-home, I know you will enjoy seeing the House of the Fresco. Oh, I wish it were less obscured by soot, so you could see it as it was when first painted. Though perhaps you would be disappointed. I have seen the Sistine Chapel. I have seen the caves at Lescaux. Your people have an inborn artistry of very high degree. It may be our Fresco would not have impressed you, even when it was new. The Inkleozese agree that this is probable. They, too, deeply admire the artistry of your race.
We must rest now. When we have rested, Vess and I must argue yet again. We have been arguing about Earth for a very long time, now. There is so much to do, and I want to do it all at once while Vess counsels caution, a little at a time. It was I who insisted upon the Ugliness Plague. “An immediate lesson,” I cried. Even Vess agrees it is working, though many of the women are simply leaving the countries that mistreated them. Whether they do or not is up to them, the men cannot harm them. The important issue, the question of purity versus lust, is for the first time being put into its proper context. Some of the men prefer to continue in the old mold, of course, by trying to kidnap women from neighboring countries, but that won’t work. As soon as a man with that attitude touches a woman, she becomes a hag, though only to others. Her mirror continues to show her real self.
We have also scheduled a lengthy time for discussion about your prisons, which preoccupy your people to an abnormal extent. Unfortunately, your penal system is based on religious notions of penitence and reformation, character emendations which can be evoked only where a sense of shame is present. In a society as mobile as your own, many people are totally anonymous to those around them. They do not care what they do before strangers or to strangers. If one feels no shame, punishment only angers. If one feels shame, punishment is almost unnecessary.
Logically, therefore, your prisons should seek to instill shame, but even if it were possible, it would offend your civil libertarians to do so. “Shaming” others is considered an affront to their dignity. Since shame is essential to remorse, which is the natural punishment for misbehavior, just as gut cramps are the natural punishment for eating unripe thrags, if one cannot evoke shame, then forget about penitence or reformation. It won’t happen.