"I'd make a terrible grey. - Do you think of me as low-key having a caste?"

"Green, of course, inventing new things with servantmaking. Not that you are, just that if for some reason you landed on us you clearly would be."

Giggle.

Aitim can in fact sort everybody else they know! Purple and purple and orange and purple and green and grey and yellow "and I think maybe King Efatze would be a very happy painter or something, he's definitely not blue..."

"But he went and became a king."

"A very poor decision! ...probably in this society it's hard to make money as a painter."

"It's not impossible but it's pretty hard. Do you have more of a market for paintings?"

"Yeah - people can commission you, you can get an online following - but it's still not very lucrative - anyway Efatze is well-meaning and he's not dumb but he doesn't have the problem-solving skills to run a city well."

"I wonder how he wound up running one, I don't know the history of the place."

"I don't know either, I wasn't there very long."

"The usual thing if you don't found the place is to apprentice to the prior ruler."

"Maybe he was sleeping with them. He's not a dreadful king, just not a very blue one."

"Painting's - green?"

"Yeah."

"It's weird that scholars and artists are the same thing."

"Creativity is supposed to be the underlying thing. It'd seem strange to me but Makel is very much the artist kind of green and the rest of my family very much the intellectual kind and so it's good they're all one caste."

"Well, you aren't."

"I am not! I wriggled out. Some people think intermarriage is unwise for this reason, gets you kids with the wrong aptitudes."

"And not everyone can wiggle as you did."

"I am much advantaged in wiggling. The system should be more flexible, it's just hard to do in a way that doesn't impose lots of costs on other people which they didn't agree to."

"Like what?"

"Distortions in credit costs - I could buy five purple credits a year if I wanted to, and I wouldn't do that but some purples might go blue to provide for all their grandkids that way and then purples who are just purple would never afford children. Worse education if schools started trying to help people change castes instead of teach them something they'll be able to make a comfortable living at. Destroying cultures and community safety nets - caste mobility is like physical mobility, 'zero' is bad, 'shuffle everyone at complete random' would be monstrous, the amount you get by 'default' has some advantages for individual liberty and some invisible community costs...

- or, here's an example, we have organized labor. Purples who recruit and organize all the people in their factory to demand better working conditions. Reds have Shasali. Most purples don't have that skillset, most reds don't have Shasali's skillset, but if we plucked purple union leaders and Shasalis out of their communities in early childhood and blue'd 'em then those communities wouldn't have anyone who was one of them and also had the skillset to advocate for them."

"You think she should've been blue? By aptitude."

"I think if we were tracking by aptitude we would have had her blue, yes. I think she might be happier orange but maybe that's just all the horrible springs."

"I'm kind of surprised childcare even has a caste to it the way you take to it, but maybe oranges can't sleep unless five babies are snoring in the bed with them, how would I know."