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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He can sit down with Isel and Aitim and figure it out.

Isel

"The food labelling laws are probably excessive but I don't want to set a precedent of treating ex-reds differently than anyone else."

"And they can amend their own laws if they want them, later. What needs to happen to deregulate shipping and get rid of the rules on employing Anitami workers -"

Aitim Neli

"For some reason the government is pretty enthusiastic about employing Anitami workers."

"Well, make them get over it."

Aitim Neli

"Not only is my political capital not unrestricted lately it is very scarce indeed."

Isel

"I think places usually handle the on-site requirements by just opening up a foreign office of yellows who can work fine remotely and still hiring local labor, and no one's gonna want to relocate to the equator. We can say, like, we want to discourage the outsourcing of Anitami jobs to undesirable locations -"

"Gets you hella incentives - everyone'll be competing to argue the places where they want to do business are undesirable - but maybe it's an angle on collapsing the whole thing, I don't know. What about the shipping lanes."

Telkam Tis

yeah-fuck-you

Telkam has enough money saved to get Ladah's grandfather out next time there are decontamination buildings not in complete chaos with Evalee reds. He uploads a note to this effect to the picture site.

Kan Neli

And what is Evalee doing for their garbage and sewage and bodies at the moment, exactly -

They had emergency protocols; they have doctors (nurses, hospital janitors, etc.) transporting bodies for cremation and truck drivers in hazmat suits hauling garbage and clean-water plumbers more or less improvising with the other half of the pipes.

Kan Neli

Well, better than drowning in it.

They get to work on regulatory exceptions that will make it straightforward to trade with the ex-red country. Everyone can eventually be coaxed to let Anitami businesses hire overseas as long as they are taxed to hell and back for it; Kantil splutters exasperatedly at his brother until Aitim reminds him that with the present massive thank-you-for-your-patience tax cut they're not really so bad.

When the reds are in the less excruciating stage of decontamination he takes them a legal code to look at. It is ten pages and short words.

The reds designate someone to inform him that they are nervous about indicating how they are organized amongst themselves lest someone decide to shoot the ringleaders.

"I can put it online and people can leave anonymous forum comments? Ideally we'd give some people some training in evaluating international trade agreements and navigating diplomatic stuff and working out border agreements and so on but there's probably a way to do that compatible with anonymity."

"Anonymous comments are fine."

"Great." He puts it online.

They were not planning to have castes except for swap purposes. They consider castes the source of all their problems.

Then it's a good thing that the legal system doesn't use castes for anything except swap purposes. But since people might not want to swap immediately and might not want to foreclose the possibility of ever doing it, there should probably be a provision for them.

They find the template useful but apparently consider it necessary to posture a lot about how some random Anitam green is not their real dad by changing random things.

If the changes are stupid he points out the drawbacks and describes problems that might arise. If they're just random sure, okay, he could care less how often they have elections.

They're less free-market than he'd probably like, but reasonably pragmatic about how they want their rules against feasting while your neighbors starve and suchlike.

Sure. He asks Aitim to record some very basic talks on what international trade negotiations are like and how to navigate them and what sort of challenges to their sovereignty they should anticipate and how to manage that and immigration and people wanting to use them as a tax haven and so on.

Aitim Neli

Aitim can think of some things he'd say in an in-person introduction to the topic that he won't say on the Internet but he's happy to do that.