She arranges to be free then and shows up.

"Peka!!"

"Peka!"

"He doesn't usually show for family dinners, you're very special," he informs Peka. 

"Nice to meet you, dear," he says in perfect Tapap.

"Hello! It's nice to meet you too."

He hesitates for half a second and then hugs her. "I'm glad you're settling in okay."

Hug. She doesn't prolong it. "It's really nice here."

"We do okay."

The younger kids are chattery but harder to parse for someone still not totally fluent in Anitami; Kantil, who must be three, is easier to understand and as promised seems to talk about nothing but inefficiencies of the caste system, though he's happy to tie it in with whatever everyone else is discussing. Aitim is apparently in the middle of securing funding for overdue repair of the Great Dam (Kantil pipes up that it sure would help with securing funding if tax revenue was up eighty percent, wouldn't it).

Telkam is making another movie, this one about invading aliens. ("Don't you think," says Kantil, and Telkam sticks out his tongue at him.)

"Well, I'm curious, how would abolishing the caste system affect an alien invasion."

"We could fight the aliens better because military weapons development is seriously impeded by what I call the color filter - whenever an idea requires development input from people of two different castes it's far less likely to happen. Military development requires input from four or five - you've got sophisticated computer systems, you've got the engineers - and it's utterly stupid to separate theoretical engineers and practical engineers, most good inventions come from seeing the need for them in the field - and you need grey input into what you actually need and you need people to fund it and you often need manufacture to very precise standards and it's useful to have engineers on the manufacturing floor and it's useful to have software developers who know the conditions they're designing for and the users who'll need their interface and I bet a society at our technological level without castes would kick our asses in a fight -"

("Language, dear," says his mother -)

Peka giggles.

"The aliens would probably still win, FTL implies technological capabilities well beyond ours. We'd handle even the most efficient society in the world if they hadn't invented gunpowder, and the differential could easily be that big."

"Yeah, well, you know what else the caste systems slows is technological development wholesale -"

Headtilt.

Kantil beams at Peka. "Because of compounding returns to - I don't know if they teach this in grey school - which is another source of inefficiency, their concept of 'what you need to know to be in this line of work' is really limiting and gets you an uninformed electorate which then gets used to justify the continued marginalization of the uneducated parts of the electorate - anyway, GDP growth is measured as a percentage of current GDP, it grows exponentially, and that means that the difference between a 2% and a 3% annual growth rate - which is significantly less than the productivity losses to having a caste system - I can draw a graph -"

"I do not actually know that I'd understand a graph, unfortunately."

"Which is an injustice you were done by our educational system. Or by Tapa's, I guess, in your case. Uh, I can do a computer model that's really visually straightforward but it'll take me longer -"

He elbows Aitim. "Aren't you supposed to be defending the status quo, brother mine -"

"They have yet to give me my magic button of convince-the-whole-populace-to-go-along-with-what-the-economists-think-is-a-good-idea. I think the standard rebuttal is that specialization would be a good idea even if you presumed everyone to be equally capable, and you could perhaps accomplish it with an exhausting regime of constant testing between the ages of 2 and 4 but then you'd get, well, miserable children for one thing and probably a stronger sense of being a failure than exists under the present system - a grey who goes to school for two years and becomes a security guard doesn't feel like a failure for not being a professor of astrophysics because they weren't supposed to be -"

"Bullshit," he pipes up without looking up from his oversized pocket everything. "Everyone sure knows exactly how the system would fail for no one ever having tried it."

"Language, dear," says his mother.

"And if you got red jobs if you did poorly enough in school that'd be a nightmare -"

"As opposed to now when the lottery that makes some people red is before birth, that's so much better."

"I mean that you could never again touch your family - being red might not be horrible if everyone you knew and cared about was red too but if it ripped you away from them -"

"I thought the idea was generational uncleanliness, if you just suddenly started being a plumber you'd have to take long showers I guess but then you could go home -"