"The way they perceive you?"

"If I were purple people would assume I did not have good ideas because most purples do not, but I could talk like I was smart and then they'd just have to correct their impression. If you're green, people expect you to sound smart but not matter, and that is a harder impression to correct."

"I think Aitim is exaggerating."

"I think I am describing something real but that there are probably ways of not falling into it I just couldn't find them."

"What do you mean not matter?"

"Greens have lots of eccentric and ill-advised political opinions and we do not discourage this in them, because it takes lots of - exploring the space of weird ideas - to stumble on brilliant ones no one has thought of before. But the - other side of that - is that most greens with strongly-felt political opinions which sound reasonable when you explain them and which they can explain at length just have stupid ideas, and so the people I care about listening to me would - not really parse me as someone to listen to - and it would be intolerable. They would trust me to do studies. They would trust me to testify in legislative hearings about the implications of my research. But they wouldn't trust my judgment, and they wouldn't even be wrong really and it would be terrible."

Lean. "Aitim had an unusual experience and if you ask a lot of greens about being green I think almost none of them would mention this."

"Afen likes it."

"Afen wanted it very badly."

"Why?"

"I think in some ways he is the exact opposite of me. Being treated as influential - as the things you say having weight because of who you are and the capacity you are presumed to have to act on them - does not suit him, being treated as a mostly-eccentric-but-occasionally-incredibly-valuable source of pure truth about the world suits him very well."

Nod.

"He is green and I am blue." 

"What would I be if I had no hair at all?"

"Being raised in a government facility where they treated you however they think aliens might want them to treat alien children, probably."

"I mean if they just thought it all fell out or something."

"I am not sure. They might have waited to see if it grew in."

"You know what I mean!"

"They would have tried to vaccinate you or something at some point, probably before they gave up on figuring out what caste you were."

"I mean what am I actually if you don't have to guess by hair."

"I do not think they'd do it by aptitude testing but I think you'd be blue if they did."

"Good 'cause that is the thing I am being."

"It is."

Lintalai's other relatives come to meet her! Fen Neli is old and mostly just smiles at her or mixes it up by smiling at Kan and Aitim and is not nearly as exciting as her classmates seem to think he would be.

Well that's pretty dull but she observes him carefully in case he will suddenly do something interesting. Eventually she tries asking him about work.