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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touchme

"What if Senel guesses."

"I suppose she might try to blackmail me?"

touchme

"...that would be bad. - how much access to your stuff does she have."

" - lots -"

touchme

"I hate the world."

Squeeze. "When Telkam talked to her about the child credit did he say -"

touchme

"No."

"Worth it to have a documentary or no?"

touchme

"...probably not. I bet idealistic graduates are kinda like social workers."

"- what are social workers like -"

touchme

"Chipper. They - they come in and expect everybody to be chipper. Like we went into quarantine voluntarily because we're all such nice people and we're keeping a positive attitude about it. When there've been things diverted, somebody's crop got blighted or their factory closed, they're chipper about how we're going to help out with making up the supply shortfall meaning our corn or our fruit or our shampoo is getting sold to somebody else before it ever gets near us and make a joke about how we probably won't even miss the shampoo, why do we even order shampoo, ha ha - there was a skyscraper going up that was going to mean a huge section of our neighborhood would be in shadow all day every day, afterwards, it was already pretty shady but there was enough sun to grow a few little gardens and not have to pay as much for heating, but weren't we happy about how all the purples living in the skyscraper would have new homes, did we want to see pictures of the apartments - and - and the social workers are also the ones who tell the cops if they think we look too rich or like we have too many children or just shifty. The cops'll look into that, see if we're charging more money than we're allowed to and whether every kid has a matched credit and if anybody's vaguely complained about us lately. So we have to be chipper right back because that's what they expect to see."

Squeeze. "My whole family would be such dead reds."

touchme

Nod.

"You could put that in the anonymous complaint box and see if Isel does anything with it."

touchme

"I don't know the social workers here in particular. Just the one assigned to us and the stereotype."

Nod. Squeeze.

touchme

"If they're the same they might not know if there's any way to replace them or if Isel has the clout."

"I don't actually know whether Isel has the clout, I get the sense she spent all her political capital on refugee passes and so on - and it's an election season coming up - but it seems like the kind of thing that maybe wouldn't require much clout, sneak into a seasonal budget a clause about retraining them to better detect signs of discontent that might lead to riots and then have Aitim assign the people retraining them - he does practically all of the hiring because everyone else finds it tedious and has failed to notice how powerful it makes him -"

touchme

"I'm not sure having social workers paranoid about riots would be better."

"The justification for hiring new ones and changing up the training doesn't have to bear much resemblance to the content of the training."

touchme

"I guess."

"Though it doesn't sound like having good social workers would help much - you'd presumably also hate them if they said 'we're putting a skyscraper there, we know this hurts you and we don't really care' -"

touchme