Let me know if you need comments on any more Stupid Blue Ideas.

I'm sure we will.

She sends off replies to the rest of the proposals, couched in appropriate political terms: Social workers aren't able to make useful changes and are at this point irrecoverably unpopular; it seems best to phase them out, and replace the services they do provide to red communities - which are mostly communication anyway - with a website. Municipalization would be difficult to do well, and the reds don't need that sort of oversight; encouraging collection agencies to collect on debt to reds is a much better solution, especially if several of them are involved. Offering red communities the opportunity to move to modernized locations is a good idea; they'll need to be consulted on which amenities they need and paid a reasonable price for the land they currently own. Changing how their credits work is not a bad idea, but seems like it would be too much disruption for the improvement.

The reply says that someone's making appropriate suggestions to collections agencies that operate in a selected pilot city and someone's looking for Doet-influenced greens to hire.

Good.

Deskyl keeps working, turning out something - a paper, a design, a list of experiments - every week or so: nothing directly about hyperspace travel yet, but often things that are recognizable precursors to it. She keeps working with her sparring partner - she's up to twice-weekly sessions, one intensive enough to push the bounds of her endurance, the other more focused on rebuilding specific skills - and, after a while, requests a language tutor.

For Tapai Sign Language?

No, for Tapap; she's fixed the problem with her hearing.

Oh! That's even easier. Would she prefer a green or an orange? Greens teach university level language courses but it will be easier to find an orange who knows how to start with the basics.

An orange, presumably: she shouldn't have trouble picking up advanced vocabulary on her own once she has a handle on the grammar and things.

They send her an orange. This orange likes to start with holding up fingers and pronouncing the names of numbers.

Sure, they can start with that.

She has an excellent memory; does the orange notice, or keep repeating things past the point where she's got them?

He does a spaced repetition thing and the spacing is dependent on her recall at last check.

That's fine.

(DZ sits in anyway; they might need to communicate at some point.)

He's been informed that the robot already speaks Tapap so he concentrates on Deskyl. After numbers and pronouns (Tapap has a proximate-obviative system plus an animacy distinction) and simple verbs to hold those together, he moves on to nouns; he's got a little slideshow of pictures on his pocket everything and constructs progressively more elaborate sentences. Here's how you form questions.

Cool.

She ends the session not long after that, and has DZ work up a schedule with him; she's available any afternoon or evening except during or after her sparring sessions.

He's at her disposal!

An hour or two every day after lunch would be ideal, then.

Then he will be here tomorrow!

Excellent.

(The second everything starts seeing use, almost exclusively for reading children's poetry.)

There is plenty of children's poetry to be had! Some of it is about random silly topics, some is more didactic, some is clearly intended for parents to read to their babies about how very delighted they are to have the babies in question.

Well, such is children's poetry. She'll be able to understand the more advanced stuff soon enough, and it's not all bad. The purple who cleans their room overhears her reciting some, once or twice.

He thinks that is interesting but does not comment.

Probably for the best.

How are things going with the reds? Any progress?

They've got three Doet-style studies ready whenever she is to start in different places and the collections companies are working out some details to do with whether it is OK to hassle people and tell them they owe money for the death of their loved ones, which might normally fall under some kind of harassment law unlike telling people they owe money for a noise complaint fine or something.

There's presumably some precedent, there; what happens if a purple pollution-cleanup crew doesn't get paid in that sort of situation?

What do they want to study?

Purple cleanup crews don't have to mention that someone was dead; you have to call them if you vomit on the carpet too. They can just tell you you owe money for the cleaning. No way to mask an undertaker visit like that.

Proposals include: 1) comparative happiness study on the reds to see which ones are happier and figure out why, it's exactly like a study run on purple, yellow, and mixed groups in various contexts years ago; 2) since some of the issue seems to be reds not having money, maybe reds should be internally communist? They're small enough groups that it might be feasible without the problem larger societies have trying it! 3) put cameras on reds, document their lives in exhaustive detail, anonymize (well, de-caste-ize, with career and similar details elided) the data and give it to evaluators to see what the problems look like from that perspective.