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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" - okay." Hug.

touchme

"I was in a riot once. My boyfriend then was too, he died."

"What over?"

touchme

"Just your garden variety 'hey we could budget for robots that handle bodies and plumbing and trash' proposal. I drew short straw for being in the riot but I got the safe job, I just chalked messages on the road."

"But he got caught?"

touchme

"Firefighters got the blue's cat out and penned him and a couple other people in and they burned. - Blue wasn't home, the idea is scare 'em don't kill 'em or you waste a scare -"

Nod. "I'm sorry."

touchme

Nod. Sigh.

Snuggle.

It's an election summer. Aitim and Kan aren't senior enough to run. Their grandfather retired after twenty years of service. There are television spots, targeted by caste though if you try too hard to sell different messages someone'll post the videos side-by-side and make fun of you. People put up yard signs.

There's a candidate who says during one of the debates that he visited Olvala and found it the most civilized place in the world, but he's not especially popular.

touchme

"...damn, I still can't vote. Although I have to say in most other respects I have found Anitam remarkably hospitable to an illegal immigrant."

"If you got arrested there'd be problems. But yeah, the income and tax agency's separate from enforcement, and if they get their cut they're happy. No point in making your illegal immigrants poor. Who would you vote for?"

touchme

"I dunno. Not the asshole who likes Olvala, for sure, though."

"So civilized, mass murder. There are as many blues as reds, I wonder if they'd think it was civilized if someone did it to them."

touchme

"Of course not, the cornerstone of civilization is well pedigreed legislators. - Probably every caste has a way to tell themselves that they're the ones who are really important and really keeping things running."

" - probably. Blues really do do important work, I've seen Aitim at work and do not envy him, but also I can't help but feel that a good ruling class would have built, well. A good world."

touchme

"You know what's great for everybody? The internet. Nobody worries about pollution on the internet - my great grandpa had to splice cables to steal bandwidth for the neighborhood, but now it comes standard - we might have to get all our electronics secondhand or out of the garbage but once we have them we can talk to people and say things and nobody's worrying about it - I think if I grew up before the Internet and somebody told me about it I'd've thought it'd solve everything, by itself."

"I'm a bit surprised it hasn't done more for, like - people meeting red friends, realizing they're just people, the social justice people could get all over it -"

touchme