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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She makes a face.

"Kantil thinks the justice system should be caste-blind and he's probably right."

"I think it's useful to be able to specialize in the cultural and circumstantial features of a population."

"Maybe sometimes. But it also makes it a formal feature of the law that important people get away with things and unimportant people don't."

Nod.

Kan Neli

"Civil could maybe be caste-blind. Circumstances don't matter as much there and some housekeepers winning wage suits would - push things in the desired direction with less disruption."

Isel

"What is it that usually happens, just someone asking the judge to be lenient in a case they care about or -"

"Or there's no investigation in the first place or the victims don't think it's worth complaining - I've got a file somewhere of cases where a serial rapist or scammer or extortionist or so on got arrested when they finally bothered someone with blue family -"

"Maybe everybody should have those anonymous complaint forms."

"Only you couldn't get them to plead guilty to tax fraud then, could you."

"Everyone does have access to the anonymous complaint forms and there are anonymous tiplines, but they do work less well when you can't just say 'why don't we not make this a pollution violation'."

Amlas

"Kantil thinks you'd get better reporting if fewer things got people executed."

"Voa uses the death penalty much more sparingly than us and they have all the same problems."

"All of them?"

"I mean, no, they are their own country, but their murder rate's about the same and they copied the tax fraud thing off us with similar results and I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for abusing their household staff there either. And prisons are expensive - if you're going to have someone serving twelve years in prison at a hundred thousand ni a year-"

Isel

"What would someone get twelve years in prison for -"

"That's a murder sentence, if there aren't aggravating factors."

"I wonder if you could do prisons cheaper," says a real estate guy.

"There are probably places you could cut corners but you also want them releasable into society at the end - 'lock up all the violent people together and skimp on therapists' is a recipe for some trouble when you put them back in the outside world - with blues and greens prison's free, I suppose you could let sufficiently rich people in other castes have the same."

"I hope therapists are better than social workers," another one says.

Kan Neli

"I think social workers are mostly great for the populations they're actually serving rather than supervising. Cuts to funding for them do tend to predict a bump in substance abuse and suicide, so they're not doing nothing -"

"Confounded, districts usually cut them when their budgets are tight which is during a downturn."

Kan Neli

"They did an analysis controlling for that by looking at neighborhoods that were differently districted but same employment situation, the effect size is smaller but it's still there."

"Are prison therapists serving or supervising?"