Some of these places look not at all Rivik-like, Isel will recommend her to one of them.

They'll take her. She goes.

And Isel goes to a different one.

It is neither a dumpster fire like Calado nor a seething pit of hatred like Rivik. Its main quirk is that it never had social workers and instead has historically kept in touch with reds through anthropologists who are allowed to use them for social experiments. The reds' opinion of this depends principally on what experiments have been conducted on them lately.

Fascinating. At least once she has their reds out she will have no lingering urge to conquer them.

Some of the social experiments are pretty horrible.

Of fucking course they are but once the reds are out there will not be ongoing victims of horrible. Isel pretty much thinks of the whole population of Calado as ongoing victims of horrible. Poor reds.

Can the anthropologists maybe leave them alone while they're transitioning.

(No! The anthropologists want to watch!)

Anthropologists who have not done anything appalling can observe.

Uh, what counts as appalling.

Would they have been able to recruit clean castes if it were reasonably well remunerated.

They don't know!

...they can describe the experiments to her individually and she will decide.

They told this district they could have all the kids they wanted one spring to see how many did and how it affected marriage patterns and what the kids with so many agemates were like and spent fifteen years throttling credits to compensate. They got all the blind reds to move to one district to see how they'd arrange accommodations with more of them but there weren't very many so they blinded some and the resulting insights have improved accessibility the world around so they repeated it with deaf people! They swapped reds with a neighbor to watch children form a pidgin. They made them paint everything in the neighborhood black and wear all black clothes to see if anything happened. They euthanized sick old folks and studied the grieving process versus controls. They did interesting brain lesions! They made everyone in a neighborhood study Tapap for one week and then cut the internet and enforced full immersion to see how they got along until the city demanded they stop because it was affecting work-related communications. They stopped letting them have refined sugar. They made them be nocturnal.

- yes, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes. "Not that you aren't all terrible people but the ones with scientific merit which didn't involve torture or murder are probably still an improvement on social workers."

"What's wrong with painting things black?" asks Painting Things Black Guy indignantly.

"I'm not green but that's not science! Science requires, like, hypotheses and things! 'paint everything and sees what happens' adds no value to the world and it is dumb."

"But things did happen! I wrote papers!"

"What things happened?"

"Some of them decorated with things that I couldn't reasonably oblige them to turn black, like by putting in windowboxes for flowers, and some of them sprayed that marker chalk on their clothes, and they wore fewer accessories, and dyed their hair multiple shades per head fifty times more often than control populations, and used the fact that I could expense the project to get higher-quality items in black than they'd previously had and kept those even after the project was over, and put on music more often, and did photography very differently!"

"I will ask the reds what they thought of it."

The reds liked that guy, on the whole. He bought them nice black things and nobody died or anything.

Uh huh. Painting Things Black Guy is in.

"Thank you," says Painting Things Black Guy.

"It was probably the most ethical experiment, even if I'm still not convinced it was an important one. And they like you. That counts for a lot."