They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
"Fair enough. You could have a couple elementals terraform some moon and I could send my brother there to found a casteless experimental community and they could be raised there."
"It'd probably be good to start with a moon you can travel to without Shadows anyway, make sure terraforming with elementals even works right."
"This won't upset people who are vying for early planets? If I do a moon for an experimental community? - Can reds go there, since it's casteless?"
"Not if anyone else is going to live there. I think if you say it's practice terraforming for the planets it'll go over fine."
"There are probably people progressive-minded enough to cope with red neighbors but not with no one they care about ever visiting and no exports and everyone considering them revolting."
"Oh, the moon colony could have them if they lived separately according to all the usual precautions but that kind of defeats the purpose of 'casteless'."
"I think you are underestimating how much social progress a clean casteless society would represent."
"I even believe you. I just have this rainforest full of people with nowhere to go and I am separately going to make places for people to go and I ought to be able to solve the one with the other."
"The rainforest people will be okay in the rainforest, it's nice rainforest and they probably want a bit of a break from being around clean castes anyway."
"They're not dying but they're not thriving either, they don't know how to go live in the rainforest without help and all their help is from individual elementals and what I can get people to give them in case it will make me like them."
"I expect there are some. Maybe not eighty-six thousand. People who aren't going to get children in their country, people who are unusually adventurous, people who cope unusually poorly with the degree of performative docility reds have to exhibit around clean castes..."
"I guess I can look into it. ...Am I going to be in trouble if I don't police the reds in my rainforest on the children thing?"
"They might come up with a way to do it internally, they know if they don't then eventually children are born with no resources to feed them."