Sigh is right. He also starts changing.

"Would you in fact try to swap into Miolee if there were more grey swaps?"

"Probably, yeah."

"Seems like a great injustice that there aren't, then."

"It might pick up once Miolee's gotten more batches from other countries, who knows."

"Am I guessing correctly that you'd go either yellow or green if given the choice?"

"Orange'd be fine and I can do the accent and have the relatives and everything, but yeah I'd strongly consider any of the three."

"I think all things considered I'd like to be blue—politician, maybe judge—but that's an outside perspective, maybe there are hidden horrors I haven't thought of."

"I'd like to be blue too but it'd be an extra handicap I don't need to try it on no assets, which is what I'd get if I tried going through Miolee even if someone from Miolee wanted to be grey in Anitam and also someone blue in Anitam wanted to be casteless in Miolee."

"Yeah, just pipe dreams. And I'm not sure I'd have preferred to have been born blue, I don't know what the effective isolation from other castes would've done to my worldview."

"I think I would've been all right, although I suppose I might have estranged my blue extended family and wound up handicapped that way."

"Might you?"

"I am not naturally tactful."

"Ah, I see how that might be a problem. Maybe they have lessons on this?"

"I assume they do. I'm not sure how much that masks actual political disagreement and have no idea how blue families handle it when they have those."

"Maybe they're so used to it they have cultural norms for decoupling work from social?" he suggests.

"That would be smart but I'm not sure they're that smart."

"Maybe not," he concedes. "But given the way the Anitami government works, I don't think they'd get much done if they let too much political rivalry leak into their personal relationships."

"How do you figure?"

"Our government is not a model of moral purity, to put it mildly. And when the way to get things done is asking the right person for the right favor, it seems like it wouldn't do to be disliked by too many right people."

"That just means that the ones who get anywhere are the ones who are good at navigating that, it doesn't suggest that no one gets pushed to the margins." She's all dressed at this point, and jerks her head toward the exit.

He is also dressed. He follows her. "Yeah, I suppose you're right. It does sound like the kind of knowledge and skill that's at least amenable to training and maybe even passed down generations, though."

"Maybe I would've been fine."

"You're probably smart enough to have picked it up if you needed to, to the extent that's a general intelligence thing."

"I think there's an extent to which social skills are separate, but it couldn't hurt."

"Yeah, probably."