The reds would like to be decontaminated faster if they are supposed to skip kids this spring. All the other credits are more expensive.

That's the whole problem, they're getting blue and green kids at red-credit prices.

The subsidies for decontamination are brought up for a vote. They'd bring the price down to six thousand ni a head. A condition of the subsidy passing is that there won't be more blue ex-reds, supporters of the bill feel that two is quite enough of those. 

How do they feel about blinded interviews of anybody who wants to be blue. Screen out anybody who can't pull it off over the course of a conversation.

They still won't have the means to keep up an estate.

There's a few who own a surprising quantity of the ex-red neighborhood buildings and after it's empty and torn down and cleaned up it will be valuable downtown square footage how about those.

...sure, fine. If they pass a blinded interview.

This narrows it down to like twelve people who want to try it (a lot of property surreptitiously changes hands) but they will all try interviewing in a cohort of provincial governors' nephews and real estate moguls' stay at home spouses and other blues-without-much-experience since that's who they'd be.

Interviewers lean hard on miscellaneous who's who and cultural questions.

The reds may have been studying.

Indignant interviewers acknowledge that these potential blues are qualified. Doesn't mean anyone has to hire them.

That's the point of being the property owning kind.

Several of these dozen people have kids. Are there going to be any rules about families going into the same castes?

Caste is patrilineal in Anitam.

Right, but if you clean and caste-change a whole bunch of generations all at once, does a line have to be the same thing. They're probably already not doing that if you investigate distant cousins and so on.

Grumble grumble - underage kids are whatever their father is. Otherwise the sorting seems to be doing better at placing people into the correct caste.

This actually results in fewer ex-red blues, since the men of the dozen people do not have to bring all of their descendants in tow if they lack aptitude, although most of the new blues want at least one heir along for the ride.

There is some mumbling to the effect that if Anitam had just shot them then they'd get to keep the land themselves, but it remains mumbling.

And at this point a transition entirely away from reds should be planned, do the reds want input in planning that so they will not freak out about it?

Yes. (There are few enough reds left now that it can be hard to get things done with customary speed.) They want a clear schedule of decontamination for every population bought and paid for first and they want some of their own to do the rotation, no training born purples for it.

...that makes it obvious which purples are ex-red.

They will wear masks and there can be secret passages into the places where they get into their hazmat suits and wash afterward, for anybody who doesn't feel safe about that.

Anitam doesn't like it. Too easy for the ex-reds, who've shown in other countries remarkable coordination and resourcefulness with way less resources than Anitam is giving them, to hold the whole country hostage.  Anitam can't hire overseas purples if things get bad, it's much larger than Olvala and Biyan and Evalee combined. The reds should train anyone who cares to show up, which will probably be mostly ex-reds because the work is disgusting. Decontaminations will be paid-for in advance and they'll do trainings and transitions by district.

They will train at most 10% born purples.

Anitam wants to be able to say to other countries 'look, if you are nice to your reds you get a bloodless convenient transition'. This is better for those countries' reds than 'look, if you bend over backwards being really nice to your reds you will get a bloodless but super inconvenient transition that still pretty much leaves reds with a stranglehold on red jobs'.

They will train at most 10% born purples until they are all through decontamination and safely recasted; then they will train anybody else. They just don't wanna get shot.

Anitam not only isn't shooting them they threatened Evalee with a war if Evalee shot their own ones! But fine.

Good.

Reds empty out their neighborhoods one at a time and some take over their old jobs under new conditions. The slums are razed and the foundations dug up and the underground mains of pipes and wiring all replaced and new blues who own the areas are open to bids for development.