"Did you pretend you were going to do a purple thing when you grew up? Did you ever actually do a purple thing?"

"At first I said I wanted to run a hotel because I thought that way I'd get math and accounting and business classes and those would at least be helpful but actually the way they teach those to purples was slow enough that I was better off learning on my own online so then I said I wanted to work on a farm and was allowed to drop out of school. I did help on the farm but not with anything interesting and I wasn't very good at it. I was never planning to be purple forever so I was probably not properly motivated to get good at it."

"What farm things did you do?"

"Gestured at the tractors if they were not going in a straight line. Fixed broken sprinklers."

"Were you really scared?"

"I felt like if I were scared then other people would probably be more scared, and if I was calm and clever and being a secret right under the occupiers' noses then they would be less scared too and so I shouldn't be scared. But I was terrified."

Nod nod.

"The occupiers were scared too. I felt a little bit sorry for them."

"What were they scared about?"

"Well, the sort of people teaching conquered children in a remote mountain town were never going to get to have children themselves, so they were scared about that, and the orders they got changed a lot and there were signs the empire was not stable, so they were scared about that, and sometimes things were sabotaged though we were careful about that because they would usually retaliate by killing lots of people."

"What things got sabotaged?"

"Communications. Transit. Sometimes people would grab a soldier and jump with them in front of a train."

"Grandfather, she's one."

      "So was I."

"It doesn't seem very useful to do the train thing if they killed lots of people when people did it."

"Shutting down trains for a day makes it harder for them to get soldiers around and if you pick a location well it will not be clear who they are supposed to kill in retaliation."

Nod.

"Fighting an occupation is an interesting thing because it is not usually in the interests of the people doing it but being the sort of people who will do it is very much in your interests if someone is deciding whether to conquer you. In practice people will only really do it if under the occupation they have no hope of ever having children."

"And the empire was especially bad about that."

"They were. If you were an Anitami purple on a farm in the mountains you were not going to have children. The empire realized after a while that they'd dug themselves a bit of a hole, with that, but it's a hard problem to correct once you've made it in the first place."

"Why?"

"Well, if you correct it by letting the people who've been quietly abetting terrorism have children, then that's terrible incentives."

Nod.

"And if you correct it by shooting lots of people, then lots of other people will decide that they have nothing to lose anyway. Really you just shouldn't occupy peoples' countries and make it very hard for them to get children."

Lintalai writes this down.

"Our village did not have any such incidents because people were trying to make sure I did not get killed. If they wanted to do things like that they would go far away. Someone once took one of our trucks and filled it with an explosive kind of fertilizer and drove it very fast into a checkpoint at the border but they were very careful that no one would be able to trace the truck."