She makes a face. "Water healing probably fixes uncleanliness, the question is whether it fixes hereditary uncleanliness - I suppose we could do a study of sorts, Water-heal some reds and have some consenting volunteers hang out around them and see how they feel about it..."

"People'd be ill at ease around perfectly clean people if they had red hair."

"If you want to quibble over experiment design wait until we have approval for the experiment in the first place. Is there documentation on what sort of things Water healing does work on -"

"Mix in local Shines and Shadows with red hair, have their halos turned down," suggests Maurabel. "It'll do snake bites, heavy metal, ate the wrong mushroom, poison ivy, week-old fish, the works, I can get you a more complete list."

"Please do."

Maurabel writes that down.

"And then what's the plan, magic 'em and let them integrate and do robots once it's not a mass death sentence?"

"Yes. Before magic entered into the equation that was what I wanted - everyone, including them, will be so much better off with them gone if only there were a safe way to achieve it..."

"What'll they do?"

"There'll be a shortage of non-mages, they'll be able to find unskilled work."

"You don't mean to just turn them all purple, do you?" asks Isama.

" - if they're going to do unskilled work I think it's probably better to have them purple than some limbo caste -"

"Bullshit," says Isama, "there's got to be some who mind red babies or write insipid poems or something, purple doesn't mean 'random idiot' -"

"Could have an aptitude test. Pass the university entrance exams or an audition or something and you're green, make the team and you're grey -"

"And if you fail everything you're purple? That misses the point."

"They'd be safer green, honestly, greens won't murder them, but I don't expect many of them would ever find jobs."

"Because you can't sell the cleaning thing even if somebody credible says oh yeah just Water them, or whatever, or because that won't be enough, or because you think they're morons? I know I have a sample size of two but Juin's really bright and Tiya's not stupid."

"My estimate is that about one in two hundred purples would get into a green university given a green upbringing. There are incredibly smart purples but there are lots and lots and lots of purples. It'd be surprising if it were higher for reds. And they haven't gotten a green upbringing. Making the red doctors orange is obvious, though - and the red landlords blue -"

"I could maybe make that happen."

"Then there you go."

"Where'd the estimate come from?"

"Ran a pilot program! I asked a bunch of purple schools to recommend their most promising one-year-olds and got a hundred twenty recommendees and put them through a special gifted purple school that just followed a green curriculum, until they were three. Four of them obviously would have been great greens, another dozen could have gotten along.The schools I funnelled them from served about four thousand purples that cohort."

"What happened when they were three?"

"Picked the vocational program of choice, like all three-year-old purples. I published a paper. It's not like we don't need brilliance in purples, too."

"Did the purple kids by any chance know they were not going to be allowed to keep the lifestyle you loaned them? I feel like that would affect motivation."