in color | Glowfic Constellation

His hair is green.

His mother was green, and in lots of places he would follow her, but Anitam is not one of those places; castes are patrilineal. He is a blue with hair inconveniently reminiscent of his dead mother, that's all. He will grow up and be a politician or a diplomat or an ambassador, like his father, like his father's second wife. His mother did embroidery, stunningly beautiful tapestries and fabric concepts and artwork that hangs in the state buildings and museums. But he's not green, and he can't follow her.

He runs away from home, of course. He would probably have done that anyway; looking back on it it feels a bit overdetermined. The hair would have been enough. Entis, his father's second wife, would have been enough. His siblings - two of them, blue in hair and ambitions and manner and talents - would have been enough. His hair is green. He runs away from home and shows up at a university in Anitam's third-largest city and sits in on classes, front row, asking questions and taking notes and turning in effortlessly brilliant problem sets.

In the third week he tells a professor, biting his lip, that he's not technically enrolled - family couldn't come up with tuition this year, and said maybe next, but he didn't want to wait - and the professor ruffles his hair (green!) and says that it's a delight to grade his work, he can keep sitting in and if he does well he'll talk with the administration at semester's end.

He excels in all five classes he sat in on. They find a scholarship. He vaguely mentions his mother's family.

He graduates with honors and co-authorship of four papers and offers from eight higher degree programs. He accepts one and publishes machine learning papers at a pace that has his advisors gently asking if he's going to burn out and he's green green green and he lives off microwave dinners and praise and envy and he marries the co-author of one of his papers about fluid dynamics and eventually someone pieces together his parentage and asks -

"Are you," he says, "suggesting that someone wrote my papers for me?"

" - I - what - no - I was at your thesis defense, no one else could possibly have -"

"Right. So then are you suggesting that the person who achieved those things wasn't even green?"

"There's no need to be confrontational. I was just - it's matrilineal lots of other places."

"Yes, it is."

And he's green green green.

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"I think credits are mostly set with consideration for the right questions and not decided by the most profitable price point - notice how they're doing a tier for poor purples now - but if the economists come out with a paper arguing we're setting them badly I can't say I'd be shocked."

Isama glances expectantly at Kantil.

"There probably shouldn't be red credits anymore -"

"That one's an investment in public safety."

"And there're the eugenicist arguments but you've said what you think of doing irreversible things because the academics say so."

"So I have. We're eugenicist relative to Voa, I do mean to look at who seems better off in ten years as a result."

"I talked to a Voan expat who says there's less crime when everybody has a couple kids at home to worry about, but I dunno if he had statistics."

"People with kids definitely commit less crime but most criminals are young - four to six- and it's pretty rare to start that early these days, people want a bit more of a financial cushion."

"Farm purples blow their savings on a kid as soon as they have it or their grandparents front them the cash," says Isama.

"Prefer to have them young?"

"Yep. More help around the farm, see more generations of great-grandkids."

"Someone could probably win an election with a 'first kid free' platform, even if you raised taxes to make up the revenue deficit. Split the difference between the Voan way and ours."

"So why hasn't anybody?" asks Isama.

"I mean, you could probably win even more promising two kids free, and maybe even more than that promising three kids free. At some point it's irresponsible, and at any point it's very hard to reverse. And you can't do a small pilot somewhere, everyone'd move there."

"The effects on the dating market are really something. Women just barely in my tax bracket want to date anywhere else."

"You could do first kid cheaper. Tax credit or something that covers around half the cost of your first child credit, that's more reversible than a full switch - and definitely by all means fix the thing with the brackets where people have incentive to be poorer -"

" - that might go somewhere, I could suggest it. Instead of brackets you could maybe scale the credit."

"Like how?" Isama asks.

"If two people are married and neither of them have a prior child, they get a tax credit towards their first one which comes to half the cost of a credit plus an extra thousand ni for every two thousand by which their income is below thirty thousand a year -"

"That's a fifty percent marginal tax rate and it's not the only social program that phases out around thirty thousand a year - you get healthcare help below that line, too -"

"I can give someone rough desiderata and get a formula out of that."

"Yet another secret tax on people who cry when they look at forms," says Isama.

"There can be a calculator online - how much do you earn? This is how much a credit will cost you - but yeah, 'free' plays better. It's just also irreversible and impossible to check empirically before you do it everywhere and exacerbates income inequality and so on."

"'How much do you earn' is a messy question all by itself," insists Isama.