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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Have a nanny on hand to remove them if they're disrupting proceedings.

alicornucopia

Okay! Has the seat on the uni board materialized by sorcery -

Two members got a promotion and resigned and a friend of Isel's mother was tapped for one seat and invited Isel's mother to the other, and she regretfully declined but suggested Isel who suggested Shasali. Aitim wasn't even in the country for any of this.

alicornucopia

How sorcerous. Shasali graciously accepts.

Tamai is a green university notable for its history and theatre departments. Its board seems to mostly meet with prospective professors to assure them funding and status will persist, meeting with rich greens who want to be sure their children get in or graduate, meeting with various groups of idealistic students who want to change a rule or hold a protest or demand a new field of study be created, and occasionally trying to coax the holders of the nearby student apartment complexes to keep their rates low.

Idealistic green students want: mandatory third language! six art history classes in the core curriculum! gendered restrooms! pension plans for the landscapers! greens on the board of directors! insulation of the tunnels because some reds totally froze to death there during the last big blizzard!

alicornucopia

Gosh. Shasali doesn't have strong opinions on most of those things and can just be friendly and accumulate owed favors. She is in favor of tunnel insulation but quietly.

Tunnel insulation is expensive and they're building a new theatre with expensive mahogany flooring, which will affect far more people. Reds should probably read the weather forecast.

(The green students in favor of that one aren't sure why reds don't read the weather forecast, really - "but if the fact of the matter is that they don't, then it's up to us to help them!")

alicornucopia

Well, if any of them ask her she can tell them.

Isel's mother's friend does, actually. "Shasali used to be red she did the cleaning thing -"

Green students look fascinated!

alicornucopia

Shasali smiles politely. "I didn't have an outside job, but my understanding is that reds who do have such careers experience serious penalties, usually but not always financial, if they do anything that could be interpreted as a strike. A client who disagreed with them about how serious the weather forecast looked, especially if competing providers were also staying home, could impose unaffordable fines."

...huh. So, tunnels?

Someone offers that they could insulate like a 10-foot-cube section of tunnel and install doors there and then the reds could hang out there if they needed to, much cheaper than insulating the whole thing.

Someone else points out that you have to pay construction workers way extra to work in contaminated areas like that.

alicornucopia

"It's possible you could hire reds to do it themselves. It wouldn't be as tidy a job, but there are some who know how to alter structures, they wouldn't need extra, and no one else will be using the space anyway."

"Is that even allowed? Construction's not red..."

alicornucopia

"It would be subject to the normal income cap for out of caste work but that's not prohibitive for a one-time operation as long as the reds in question also have other employment of some kind. And it would only even be capped in that way because it's outside of a red neighborhood; reds pay each other to do things that would otherwise be other castes' jobs routinely and it's a written-in exception since no oranges want to mind red children or look after sick reds, say."

Isel's mother's friend says, "you can ask Isel to get them to give us an estimate. If they don't cheat us outrageously maybe it'd be affordable with the discretionary student funds - if you're sure that's what you want to spend student funds on -"

Greens nod earnestly. One of them explains that under the philosophy of moral uncertainty even if you think it's very likely that the suffering of reds doesn't matter, you might as a consequence of assigning some credence to theories under which the suffering of reds does matter be willing to help reds when it's much much cheaper than helping other people. One of the other ones has vague opinions about 'colorism'. The other one was just really freaked out to hear there were dead people in the tunnels.

alicornucopia