"If you want to relocate here it might be a little more familiar, less alien. Anthropologists are fun to be around these days, they're so clearly having the time of their lives..."

"Hala tells us so, yep, everybody's going to write thirty books. We might consider moving but there's no local industry to hook into here. Though the view is really striking."

"Isn't it? I've been trying to coax visitors from home to come out for a week or two, seeing it tends to make them stop grousing about what if Cene gets someplace nicer. I like Earth."

"It's got a lot to recommend it - and the castelessness means that as long as I'm not looking for highly educated specialists the labor market's beautifully liquid."

"Yeah quite aside from not knowing what to caste them as the needs are going to change so rapidly over the next fifty local years that we'd really regret locking down any particular caste ratio, I suspect."

"I don't see why you'd ever caste them. Let them decide what schools to send their kids to, maybe something emerges, maybe it doesn't."

"I mean, we'll see if that works, but it would not astonish me if people make bad decisions about what schools to send their kids to."

"Is that much of a problem at home? I was deferring to Kantil on schools for the girls because it was all green -"

"One worry is that without castes you'd get lots of people thinking, you know, why not have a try at green or yellow with a fallback purple job - and therefore sending kids to green or yellow schools not because they're suited but because they might make it, or end up with a better social circle for the attempt. I don't think there's anything quite comparable within-caste, though people do send their blue kids to specific schools for the social circle of course."

"Do admissions tests solve that?"

"They might, but if it turns out that caste or parents' occupation is a better predictor than admissions test then we should be using caste."

"Well, there's lots of room to experiment. Did we have this many countries at this tech level? I think we didn't have this many hunter-gatherers, that doesn't scale..."

"Depends how you administer various small tribes but no, we didn't have anything like this much to experiment with. It might turn out that tests predict better than caste, or that people mostly choose well if you let them choose, or that someone comes up with something even better, or for that matter that humans don't actually learn well in schools at all."

"That would be funny, what ever would we do with them then."

"Well, hopefully someone would discover a way they do learn things. They seem sharp enough, accounting for the malnutrition and disease and all."

"I had to make it so clear that I was willing to hire women - and some people were surprised about me, the things they said were like - you know how when you have a dream there are conversations in it and emotional content but it's held together by dream logic and makes so little sense when you wake up that you start forgetting pieces trying to make it form coherent thoughts? They sounded like that."

Giggle. "There is an underlying logic to it, it's just that there are a dozen things piled on that seem totally unrelated to the logical part."

"Someone told me I shouldn't be operating heavy machinery because my womb would fall out. I think. That is the closest I can come to reconstructing the argument."

" - all right, I've got nothing to defend that with."

"I have no idea whether humans actually have gendered differences in aptitudes or if it's all acculturation."

"I'm taking statistics. The women do have worse grip strength, I have to test that for anyone doing certain design work."

"Oooooh, consider me very interested in those. It could still be a cultural thing - can't you strengthen those muscles with practice -"

"The differences are huge - human women only a little worse than us, human men lots better. I don't think it's all practice. Only a handful of people are actually weak enough that I can't hand them a chisel safely, though."

"Huh. Well, even if there are some inherent differences 'no women working outside the home or owning things in their own name' is a catastrophically fucked-up way to handle it, so the next steps are the same regardless."

"We're going country-by-country and reviewing the laws to figure out which ones make sense, which ones were a good idea under previous conditions and can change now, which ones we don't understand and need to before we just get rid of them for being stupid -"