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'll send some money. - or do you want to look at our budget, help me figure it out -"

alicornucopia

"Let's look it over - I want to be sure we can still have another baby spring after next -"

Fervent nod.

Family finances! Practically all passive income from investments and rentals; they both earn civil servant salaries but those won't pay a blue child credit or a decontamination. They're paying a nanny and a housekeeper and a cook and a gardener and the security guard.

alicornucopia

They can't realistically stop paying any of those people right now, not unless they wanted to work less or eat out more or be surrounded by dust and disrepair and suffer in subtle social ways or not have any barriers between random would-be murderers and Shasali. She tots everything up and sections out a donation.

"How cheap would we have to get it before reds could pay their own way -"

alicornucopia

"Depends on the reds. You could convince most of them to do it for the price of a red child credit, they could wait and have clean babies."

"How much do those go for -"

alicornucopia

"There's a lot of collusion to keep it down - I used to orchestrate that - eight to fifteen hundred ni depending on whether one wants a guarantee or is willing to enter a lottery."

"You could maybe get it that cheap - people might donate blood -"

alicornucopia

She sends the site manager an email. The site manager adds a thing for blood donation pledges.

"And once a significant share are out and making money they can fund the rest."

alicornucopia

Shasali nods. "Especially once it's at a point where people who don't have credits to save for are out - older people, who've already had some -"

"And at some point they'll make us stop because everyone left is essential services -"

alicornucopia

"At that point you can start purple rotation. Ex-red, decontaminated purples who already know the work."

"Won't provoke riots?"

alicornucopia

"Not if they all have decontamination waiting after the transition. Riots are about not being massacred, they are not random."

"Yeah, I understand. Biyan, Evalee, you'd have to be rather dense to look and think 'my, their reds are unusually bloodthirsty' instead of 'well, you gave them nothing to lose' - but most people figure you can't credibly promise to treat them well when you do a transition to robots or rotation, because it'll always be cheaper not to follow through..."

alicornucopia

"Right. But if a majority of reds are decontaminated - at that point you'll have to be quick, the neighborhoods will have trouble limping along with only essential services and skeletal internal organization - but if there's most of them out, well-integrated and raising money and touching everybody's things -"

"Then if we promise we'll clean them too it doesn't come across the same as a random politician saying 'don't worry, we won't kill you' -"

alicornucopia

"Right. There is somewhere for them to go. Olvala didn't even outright decide to execute its reds but there was nowhere for them to go except for a couple hundred who we took in. We're making somewhere for them to go."

"The Olvala reds set up in an abandoned mining town. But I do think you have a good point."

alicornucopia

"They weren't technically allowed in the mining town, it was full of porous surfaces and might one day have been of archaeological interest or something, and they couldn't have survived there indefinitely, it's just that no one cared to go in with a military squad and a cleaning crew, and that was a handful of them, most tried to go elsewhere and died trying."

"I guess that explains why Isel was so obsessive about getting them passes - are the ones she didn't get passes still there -"

alicornucopia

"Some of them managed to emigrate elsewhere more or less sneakily. I believe a lot of them wound up in Biyan, actually, it was accessible by boat. Some of them may be hanging on in the wilderness of Olvala without internet access. Most of them are certainly dead."