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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alicornucopia

There she is in her booth with her drink.

"Hi! Immigration is apparently going to require more yelling than I can coordinate on short notice. I am sure you anticipated that."

alicornucopia

"If it was easy it probably would have been done already. You know a lot of blues to yell at them?"

"I am on yelling terms with enough of them to fill up a regulatory committee meeting, but I get the sense that only helps if the regulators don't really care very much either way."

alicornucopia

"Why do they care, when they care?"

"Uh, they like tradition - if you do something new and it goes wrong that's on you, if you just let things be then no one'll blame you particularly. I think they learned all the wrong lessons from that Voan debacle. And they like 'what's best for Anitam', which doesn't include letting people expand their businesses overseas since that has benefits but also drawbacks and they expect to be held more responsible for the drawbacks than they are credited for the benefits, and right now they're all tearing their hair out over how to not be Biyan or Evalee."

alicornucopia

"Seems like Biyan was doing something new."

"Yes, and it went badly, therefore the lesson is to not do new things."

alicornucopia

"Rather different domains."

"You would think. It's useful to be able to generalize but there's such a thing as too much of it."

alicornucopia

"Anyway, some of the problem is the other countries' regulations, too, although anything to make it easier would help some."

"I think it's presently a bad environment for international trade deals but maybe they'll all calm down by summertime."

alicornucopia

"Because of the series of fiascos with reds, or is there something else going on?"

"That's the only thing Aitim talks about - my blue brother - that and the only person in Voa he considered competent died but I don't know how often that kind of thing hinges on one person."

alicornucopia

"...your blue brother?"

"Oh, it's a bit of a long story - my grandfather is Fen Neli, married green, had my father who would have been the worst blue - he's tactless, he cordially dislikes most people and particularly loathes politics and politicians, temperamental, rude, you name it - green hair, refused to dye it - and when he was four he ran off and showed up at university and charmed the professors to pieces - he's brilliant - and claimed his family couldn't scrape tuition together. They found him a scholarship. Eventually figured it out but by then he was the best in his field and so everyone just kind of muttered 'well, it's matrilineal lots of places' -"

alicornucopia

"But your brother - complained -?"

"Yeah. By the time he was one it was fairly obvious that all the blue in the family had skipped a generation. He moved in with our cousins on that side and charmed everybody and my grandfather said we could hardly go switching back and forth at our convenience but as long as we picked one and stuck with it..."

alicornucopia

"Ha. Is it just the two of you?"

"Seven."

alicornucopia

"Oh, lucky. I have an older sister and my parents are having two more now that I can pay for it, little brother is one now."

"That's what my second brother did, yeah, got rich and said 'as many as you want'. I - we really need space colonization, people'd be so much happier..."

alicornucopia