"It's not obvious to me why that's blue but I don't have a very good understanding of the color system."

"Civil court is yellow some places. It requires good judgment and big-picture thinking, and that's part of it, but the other part is that it has to be high status, it'd feel wrong to people if it were oranges making high-stakes family court decisions or yellows issuing death sentences."

"Family court?"

"Couple with children is getting divorced, who gets to have the children living with them and how do their assets get split. Neighbor accuses the parents of abuse, you figure out whether it's true and who gets the children if so."

"If you and Shasali have a falling out you are on your own as regards Kalatha."

"You mean we shouldn't bewilder some local divorce court with disputes over who gets the kids on weekends?"

"Yes, they'll be like 'we can figure out how to compensate whichever of you doesn't get the house, but why do you even have a baby'. Apprentices whose coteachers break up get to pick, I suppose they might fall back on that. She is a very very young apprentice. Apprenticing to be a person in general."

"Well, that's a better system than home, which would hospitalize me for insanity and give her to my parents."

"Insanity for - cohabiting with Shasali? It's not like anything on the planet meets the standards..."

"Yes, but the rest of you are merely dirty, Shasali's red. I could probably disavow her quickly enough not to be found insane, but -" He shakes his head. "I don't really want to go back, I want to be able to get the people in danger there here where they'd be safe."

Nod.

"How's your golem coming along?"

"I thought you didn't want status reports." But he can show him where he's at.

"Don't need them but they're interesting!"

"As you like."

Kalatha walks! Her parents are delighted. She has a few vocabulary words by now - all in the common - but tolerates Aitim's insistence that she speak half a dozen languages from another planet.

"Are you thinking she might as well pick - all that - up, just in case there's ever a way back, or...?"

"Or in case she ever wants to have a secret language no one else speaks, or in case there's a local language for which it'll be an advantage to have the phonemes."

"I suppose. There's bilingual creches but they're hard to staff till they've been going a while."

"Makes sense, yeah. Anitam did that for green and blue, sometimes yellow, and most people I know were glad of it as adults, but I don't know of anyone else who resented not getting it. I don't think it's very important - but if I'm going to spend lots of time playing with her anyway -"

"Might as well make sure she knows lots of ways to talk to you exclusively."

"And her little more-than-creche-mates once we adopt them."

"True, I guess that would help."

"My father would teach each of the kids a different language and see if they taught each other. I don't know enough languages for that."

"Are you going to wind up with thirty kids?"