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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Tapa and Voa can send some people.

They argue.

The principal problem is the extent to which people must be presumed recontaminated if they touch each other, their original possessions, the things of their work, etc. But it seems obvious that the heritable pollution of reds and the incidental contamination that can happen to anyone are different things, and that reexposure is a risk of the second kind. So if they just add a regular decontamination shower that would suffice for a clean person who fell into a dumpster or woke up snuggling a spouse who had died in their sleep or whatever, on a daily basis before beginning the medicalized procedures, the reds should probably be able to live at home and do at least a few hours of work every day.

He doesn't like much about Tapa but they're nice and pragmatic when it's the cost of seven million decontaminations on the line.

Yep.

With the procedure thus amended they won't need the decontamination facilities residential. Tapa can do its own pretty easily.

This is too bad for Anitam's very popular tax cuts but excellent news for the prospects of Tapa transitioning genocide-free. People are upset or pleased accordingly.

Voa is still waiting and seeing.

The Anitami ex-reds, now being selected geographically and not for how presentable they are, begin to stir up more than negligible trouble. For instance, one of them tracks down the cop who murdered her brother, and murders the cop right back.

Honestly it's a sign of social progress that the police arrest her and that she goes to her execution pretty much unbattered.

The grey headlines are less indicative of social progress, but so it goes.

The ex-reds have cobbled together some social safety net for themselves. But it's not perfect. There are ex-red thieves. There are ex-red nuisance drug addicts. There are ex-red sexual predators. The population has been selected for meekness and the ability to accumulate money under the prior social order for generations, so the rates are nothing to write home about, but every instance is treated as an indictment of the whole process.

"Can you suppress the news stories -"

"No."

"If it were sufficiently important -"

"Isel, I owe favors to every single person I know."

"You don't owe me favors. You don't owe Shasali favors. You don't owe Isama favors."

"I do not have the power to influence what the newspapers publish."

"But they're just - we have three million reds, of course some of them are going to be horrible, and the rate it makes the front page you'd think they were worse than - do you know the grey murder rate -"

"Yes, I do."

"You could break some unrelated big story, distract everyone."

"I spent those, too. It might turn out fine, just a bumpy transition period -"

"Might."

"Yes, it also might convince all our neighbors to go the genocide route instead. They don't even read the internal papers, changing the headlines wouldn't help with that."

Tapa builds some domestic facilities and works out a transition arrangement. It is not as red-placating in the schedule or the handling of the rotation work as Anitam's but it has the important characteristic of not involving any reds dying, necessarily. They stop blocking the Internet and Shahn sends Apef word that he's safe.

Makel Alasi