"Probably not the exact thing Aitim does, but the thing Aitim does is not the only way to be a very powerful blue, and I do think you can do that."

"Well what would my thing be like then?"

"I don't know! What do you think you are best at?"

"I don't know yet! There are so many things to try. And then it matters how good other people are at them too. Because of percentiles."

"It is often worthwhile to do things that you are uniquely good at, but there's also a lot to be said for doing things that you are just reasonably good at but have unusual resources for."

"Is being a plant useful for anything?"

" - I don't know. Negotiating with the plant people if they get in touch with us someday, I suppose."

"Hmmm. I wonder what else I need to do that."

"When you are a bit bigger school will start covering lots of diplomacy and negotiation stuff."

"But they won't know anything about plants."

"This is true. We don't know anything about plants except I guess a list of the technologies they do and don't have. And their castes are apparently different, and it's unclear how they do population controls."

Nod. "I guess we know plants are not so different that you notice right away. Unless I am a strange plant."

"It seems possible that since they were determined to sneak the plant baby into Anitam they might have changed how you look if they can do that. But yes, probably plants look and act a bit like us - aside from a pollution instinct you have most of the same senses and preferences and so on that non-plant people have -"

"And I already knew two languages of not-plants. Which is more than I needed to be in Anitam."

"Anitami and Tapai. Maybe they had not decided where to put you."

"Hm. I wonder why they decided Anitam."

"It seems like it'd be valuable to know that but I don't know how we'd find out. I wonder why they caused you not to remember anything, assuming they caused that."

"I don't like it. I wouldn't have wanted them to do that."

"Yeah. And you'd think that 'prevent a tiny child from knowing any state secrets' wouldn't be that hard without memory tricks, and they can't have expected we wouldn't notice you were a plant, so I am not sure what they were trying to hide."

Nod.

"Did you ask your grandma everything you wanted to know about theology?"

"Yes. It was interesting."

"Usually if you get a green to tell you what they're interested in it's very interesting."

"They're never interested in boring things?"

"Some of them are interested in things I cannot imagine spending more than an hour thinking about but usually there is something which draws them to it which is interesting to hear for the first time even if you would never ever devote your life to it."