"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."

"It wasn't a lifestyle change, it was just a school that taught them in more depth than traditional. Giving out cash prizes for performance doesn't affect it much. Look, I'd love to run off to a casteless planet, I think the whole thing is horrible to all the people it catches in the edges. But - expect one in two hundred. That's still fifteen thousand reds who could be green."

Sigh.

"It can work, we just shouldn't be too optimistic they'll integrate without any problems once they're clean."

"If my world weren't just as bad and poorer to boot I'd suggest moving them there."

"If there were a straightforward way to move sixty-five million people to another world we could set one up for them."

"Too many." Sigh.

"Uh huh. Even with an abundance of helpful Shadows."

"Wild elementals are such sweeties when they have not been warned that everyone is out to enslave them though, it's great."