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.
Giggle. "Okay. There are twelve kinds! Um, zero, one two, three -" She counts on her fingers, goes as far as twelve. "- twelve kinds. Glass, lightning, water, shine, wood, adamant, earth, fire, stone, air, ice, shadow. Elementals can do one or two kinds, very well. Penumbra is two kinds - shadow and shine -" Penumbra dims and brightens her halo when Maurabel says that. "- and humans can do more kinds, always weaker than elementals but different amounts of weaker per element."
"I don't like it either. And this is -" he presses a button and the screen flickers to life - "called a television, people with things to say - stories to tell or true things - can use a special thing to send from their -" he waves his pocket everything - "out to the whole world and then we can all scroll through the ones that are available - this is how you scroll - and learn about them. The ones you can watch from here are ones that lots of people like, if someone just starts one and talks about their cat and no one watches it then you need a pocket everything to find it and watch it."
All of the news channels have variously sharp footage of the aliens and yellow-haired newscasters excitedly speculating! This channel has dancing. This one has singing. This one is about the aliens too. This one has some sport played with rackets. This one has a very pretty purple-haired woman sobbing heartbroken on the floor of her apartment while snowflakes drift in through the window. "That's one of the ones that is telling a story, not real," he says.
"It wouldn't be impossible to do it with a regular Shine and a Shadow -"
"You told me it shouldn't be impossible for me to steer a regular shadow-walk."
"...it wasn't."
"Yeah, but still. You're probably it until a few more generations of magic study have gone by."
"Mm."
"Sorry. If you'd rather find somewhere that doesn't want it this desperately I guess we can but they're being very nice about it."
"We are not trying to forcibly stop them we have no idea what else they can do."
"If they're leaving anyway -"
"They might come back. We are not trying to stop them."
"No one's voted for you, Neli -"
"And that's not the capacity in which I'm here. We are not trying to forcibly stop them from leaving if they decide to leave."
"We could at least have greys on standby, make the call based on the circumstances instead of making it in advance by not even being prepared -."
"No."
"I'm going over your head on this one, I'm going to ask if we can have a team."
Sigh.
"And if you neglect to translate plans to leave that's treason, Kisantami."
There's a notepad in the desk next to her bed! It has the name of the hotel on it. He names things. They zip around the city on the screen - that's a rail line, that's a sports stadium, that's a courthouse, that's some billionaire's private skyscraper, that's the headquarters of a large Anitami business, that's a public art installation, that's a city park, that's an airport.
He goes across the hall. "She wants your father back."
"He went back to Lina."
"Well, she thinks that's fishy as hell and she wants him back."
"You're doing great."
"I'm doing adequately but I don't think it's even about that, it's about how when your translator vanishes overnight you wonder if this is a place where one gets shot for stepping on someone's toe -"
"And we couldn't have her thinking that."
"So get someone to drag him back," someone else says.
"I guarantee you that will backfire."
"Because he'd rather die than follow orders for three fucking days."
"Because he would rather be the kind of person who everyone knows will be dead inside three days if made to follow orders. I can't say it's a strategy that would serve most people in most contexts but he's very committed to it."
"Then bribe him."
Aitim calls his father.
"I will consent to translate for the alien in a private capacity for as long as I see fit and I'll stop whenever I please, including declining to translate any conversation I don't want translated, and I will face no criminal or civil penalties for so doing. And I want that pompous idiot fired."
"I would like to learn more Anitami! Penumbra's been watching the television a lot but mostly things we don't have to understand the language to enjoy. I'm going to be a lot slower than you, of course. Though I have memorized the alphabet and can mostly spell things if they are said slowly."
"Penumbra was trying to figure out the structure of the - we think it's a contest, the dancing contest. Because whatever it is booted her favorite. But we're not even sure if they explain that or if they just expect you to know when you watch it."
Penumbra giggles and looks away.
"They explain it, but probably in the first episode, by mid-season they probably don't keep explaining - I don't watch that one but I can look it up." He does. "- oh, the viewers vote! If you get a pocket everything," he says to Penumbra, "then install that show's app, then you can say who you want to keep, and they count everyone up and whoever gets the most wins. That's how we do government, too."
He nods. "Grey is also city watch officers - grey is most things that need you strong and untiring. Blue is government, green is learning and discovering and art, yellow is attention to detail, orange is caring and teaching and healing, purple is making things. Not - perfect, but very strong, because it has been that way so long. If you don't fit you can color your hair - I was supposed to be blue but I hate government and like learning."
"It would be so a problem if I had to be government! Some colors it's easier to do the thing that interests you than others. Some people think we should stop the colors, but most people like the colors - like having a country or a religion, people like having something that is theirs and they are good at and respected for and that comes with a community."
"Guess that makes sense. We don't have that. Uh, we have nobility, which is like - your ancestors were in charge and they want you to be in charge after they die - but it's not a color and if you didn't want to be nobility you could probably go do something else easily. My country doesn't technically have this any more since the war."
"There was an Emperor who ruled - a lot of - not the whole world but all the parts of it we knew about before we talked to elementals more. But then when more people had magic there were a lot of rebellions and he died and his empire split up into a lot of countries like mine."
"They are! They have been calling our government to say how did the aliens get here can they meet you can they take you home if there are worlds they should get a world first because their children are hungry, that kind of thing. The government has been saying wait and give the aliens time to learn things."
"A good government figures out how many children there will be food for and allows not quite that many children, so if there is a disaster or famine there is still enough food for all the children. But some governments guess not quite well enough, or people break the rule and have not-allowed children."
"That is very kind of you but Anitam does not have hungry children and has rules about how to help other countries in need because we don't want - countries to be irresponsible on purpose knowing the responsible ones will fix it. That sounds very unkind but - it is worse next year if we are thoughtless this year."
"The government is not sure how to - let you meet everyone you want but not let you be manipulated by a country that will lie or think you haven't thought of the responsible-next-year problem. That's why they are saying wait until you have learned more. You can say no, I want to meet everyone now, if you think they are deciding wrong."
Anitam was a poor country all privately owned by dukes and duchesses with big estates where other people worked as farmers! There were cities for trade on the coast but no way to get to them if you didn't live on a river and they were mostly not governed at all. Anitam got trains and power plants and started growing up, but then the mean evil Oahk Empire invaded. Their soldiers hurt people and they had cruel rules about children. This half of Anitam didn't let the soldiers come and there was war for a long time. Finally the Empire collapsed of being mean and evil and Anitam was free! They worked very hard and became a rich happy modern country with enough for everybody, and now they are safe and strong so no one can attack them again.
"Lots of pre-modern countries had a government arrangement with - a monarch, but a relatively weak one, who ruled mostly by appeasing local rulers and could be overthrown if the local rulers managed to coalesce around a different one. Anitam was like that. The local rulers had more-or-less arbitrary control in their lands as long as they paid taxes and raised soldiers on request. That gets you a - patchwork government, a good ruler could be very good and their people thrive, but a bad ruler would not be held to account unless it got so bad their people started flooding into their neighbors' lands. Few places do that today - the downside is too bad - though some do a weaker version where regions can set their own laws as long as they meet basic standards of rights for their populace."
"Anitam was - less developed technologically than most of our neighbors, we industrialized late. That and the weak central government meant weaker population enforcement - it was set differently by region and you could subvert it by moving, and regional dukes and duchesses could have as many as they wanted. We had wealthy trade cities and good farming, our children weren't starving, but the Oahk Empire was invading anyone who didn't have strict enough rules and we didn't. They conquered -" map - "this part. The mountains and this coast were resource-poor and had poor infrastructure and they weren't really worth conquering; occasionally a general would have a go and the locals would shoot back and they would slaughter a few towns in retaliation but it was never properly under Imperial control."
"The Oahk Empire really was evil - war generally is, but unusually so even for that. And their child credits system was very coercive - you got them for service to the Empire, so people who objected to what it was doing or wanted a quiet role doing something less harmful could do that but they'd never have children."
"Maybe. It's - a really big deal. People save up their entire lives to afford a credit, in civilized countries where credits are available for purchase. In the Oahk Empire, they - started wars, committed horrible crimes, planted evidence of horrible crimes by others so they could get credit for stopping them, betrayed their loved ones, followed all kinds of evil orders - and some didn't, and those died quietly alone with no children."
Nod. "So the Oahk Empire - the book says they died of being mean and evil? It's not too far off - blues needed the personal approval of the Empire to have children, and so they were constantly starting or suppressing internal rebellions, plunging all their money into long-shot military weapon projects, framing people for sedition or for assassination plots, created an atmosphere where the Emperor was constantly hearing about enemies internal and external - it had started out well-run, if evil, but it got worse. Eventually there was a coup. After the coup they granted secession to everyone with a claim and Anitam reunified. It was - not in good shape, post-occupation, although some very nice well-funded universities were established in that time period. Tapa - our neighbor - invested lots and lots of money in getting us modernized, because it was inconvenient for them to share so much border with a country with instability. It worked very well, we modernized, we became a democracy, we wrote good laws. There are international agreements - about when to go to war and how to conduct yourself in wartime, about how to be transparent with your population controls, about how to manage pollution and hazardous materials and trade standards - and we are a signatory to all the important ones and good at compliance, which is important, wars are avoided best when countries are known for keeping their word."
This book is about how bills become law - "It's correct as far as the formal steps go, there are probably informal ones, you'd really have to ask a blue -" and this one about animals - "I haven't much to add, we don't oversimplify animals that much -" and this one about ways they have tried to get around being out of space. They have built places to live on the moon and underwater and tried ones in the sky but it didn't work well.
More books! This one is about a little purple girl who gets lost in a big shopping mall and responsibly finds the police so they can get her home. This one is about a little girl from the equator who is smaller than all the girls in her cohort because of being born out of season; they tease her until they learn not to tease. This one is about electricity.
It used to be that the rulers of countries made the law, and it was silly to think that they could break the law. Some of them ignored it all the time, and some of them could not afford to anger their subjects, and some liked to follow the law because it was better for their subjects if they were predictable. (Queen Ghastly: What pretty land. Give it to me. Queen Grand: I want to own that land! But if I take it, then my people will not work as hard on their land, knowing it might be taken from them. I suppose I will leave it.)
But then a few small countries with weak kings made their rulers subject to their courts. If the ruler took something, their subjects could demand restitution. The courts would order the ruler to make it right. Some rulers ignored their courts, or bullied them. But some didn't. And their countries flourished, because people knew nothing could be taken from them. And the good rulers said to themselves 'well, I am predictable; my people know I won't steal from them. But I have some irresponsible grandchildren and rivals and advisors. I want to bind them to be predictable like I am, for the good of the land'. And they built courts, and empowered the courts to make their laws. (Queen Ghastly: ewwwwww. Queen Grand: Hmmm.)
With this change came a change in how we think about the law. The law is not 'the set of rules the ruler uses to decide disputes' - the law is the set of rules the country uses to decide disputes. And everybody can get in trouble if they break it. Anitam has a council. The council is very powerful. But if a councilperson does not pay for lunch, they will get in as much trouble as the rest of us - because that's a stabler system than even the most virtuous queen.
What do you do if you don't like your work? You leave! That company will have to find someone else to do the work. Every caste can do this - blues can leave the courts and greens can leave their universities and yellows can leave their computer jobs and greys can leave their dance team and oranges can leave their school and purples can leave their restaurant. This is very important, because it means companies cannot treat their employees too badly.
Says Elis the Evil, "what if I want to treat my employees badly?"
A long time ago, it was legal to take prisoners from a war, or people who were in lots of debt, and make them work for you without pay and with no right to leave. This was called slavery, and many countries practiced it in different forms. Some allowed enslaving foreigners but not natives; some allowed purple slaves but not anyone else; some allowed twenty-year terms of indenture but not longer than that. In some places slaves could be traded or sold at auction; in some this was disallowed. But all of them allowed forcing a person to work for you with threats.
There were always people who said that this was wrong and had to stop. Some of these people bought slaves and let them go free; some helped slaves escape to places that did not allow slavery. And some of them tried to convince governments to make it end. In 3380 Anitam abolished slavery by edict of the king. When Anitam was independent, they wrote the laws against slavery into their new government. And eventually, in 3397, an international convention of 122 countries signed an agreement never to allow slavery and to punish anyone who still did. Soon after that, almost all the countries that still had slavery stopped so their neighbors would trade with them.
Discussion questions: Anitam and most other countries do not allow soldiers who signed up for the army to run away in the middle of a war. Is this slavery? Why or why not? Would you allow this?
Anitam and many other countries do not allow strikes which shut down essential public services like hospitals and ambulances. You may quit, but you may not arrange for all your colleagues to quit at once. Is this slavery? Why or why not? Would you allow this?
A person wants to sign a contract that says their employer will pay for a child credit for them every year, and in exchange they will work without pay. They may not leave the arrangement. Should this contract be allowed? Why or why not?
"I did and one of my sons did and another one informally does but it's not, like, anyone can go in any time and register as a different color, it's more like if it's obvious from very young and you move and live as your new caste and don't get into trouble then no one will bother objecting. "
"There's a site to petition the government for things you want them to do. There are petitions to build new sports stadiums and petitions to subsidize all kinds of things and petitions to have the whole council quit and petitions to require the whole council to be purple and there is a petition on there to make a easier process to change castes but it has many thousands of times less signatures than the other ones."
"Well, intercaste marriages are very rare, less than 5 percent, and that's where you usually get people who badly fit. And also I have seven children, that's vanishingly rare - one in a thousand - which makes it likelier I'd have two who weren't green and ran off to do something else."
"Oh, okay. Then we can go for a walk and meet you back here later. ...it might be a good idea to not make it clear which hotel room you're leaving from, actually, just in case someone wanted to bother you, would you mind going down in the elevator with us and then going flying?"
They're glad she enjoys it! They ask all kinds of questions about her world, which Afen translates: what work does she do there, why did she decide to travel worlds, why did she come here in particular, what is the thing she likes most about here, does she miss anything about home, how long is she staying...
She's a student in a mage school and does simple magic to earn her keep, mostly stuff with glass because she's good at glass. The school's principal purpose is discovering new magic, and she discovered that they could travel that way, so they did. They wanted to go somewhere inhabited and weren't sure what else to specify. She is really impressed with running water and television. She will want to go home eventually but mostly just because her parents live there, not because it was nice or anything. She doesn't have a specific itinerary.
"Wow, ice cream, huh," says Penumbra.
"Ice cream!" agree Maurabel. "There were also these hot things - maybe they wouldn't have kept well - dipped in something bready and then cooked in a whole bath of hot oil -"
"Oooh."
"Maybe you should come with next time."
"There's so many people, here, it's even worse than the cities back there."
"It was a bit much. I think they'd back off if you asked."
"Still."
Alik wants to work. Anat wants to hire her. Why should the government have anything to say about it? In some countries, they say that the government shouldn't. Everyone can decide if they want to work, and no one should get in trouble for it. In practice, though, sometimes a government might want rules. What if Anat lies to Alik, and says the work is safe, but it's dangerous? What if he locks the exits to the room where she's working so she doesn't sneak out, and then when a fire starts she has no way to escape?
In Anitam a long time ago, workers got angry about things like that and demanded that the law protect them. They had strikes and protests and petitions. Sometimes, factories hired private security to fight the strikers; people died fighting to get better work conditions. This brought public attention to the unacceptable conditions they were working under.
Today, the law is that work environments have to meet safety standards. Workers cannot be forced to work for more than ten hours at a time, and they have to have access to breaks and water and restrooms. You are not allowed to misrepresent how much you will pay someone, deduct mistakes they make at work or costs of work from their pay, or assess them penalties that decrease their pay below a minimum. Workers cannot be fired for reporting workplace safety violations, reporting harassment, or reporting anyone at their job breaking the law. Salary and pension plans must be reviewed by a board that makes sure they are explained clearly and not misleadingly so people know what they'll get. Contracts are not enforceable if they are misleading or unconscionable.
Discussion questions: adding new workplace protections is expensive: companies have to spend money on compliance, and will hire fewer people. Some worker protections might sound nice but would be far too expensive, like requiring that no jobs have any risk at all or requiring that all jobs pay enough for everyone to afford a baby every year. How should we decide which protections are a good trade?
Should it be legal to hire private security to break up a strike, if they don't use violence?
Should it be legal to nullify contracts for being unconscionable if everybody understood them and agreed?
Maurabel asks questions about the worker's rights book the next day. Her world has not invented striking. It being illegal to fire you sounds like it would make things mighty awkward. Not forcing people to work more than ten hours at a time seems to just overlap with the slavery thing? What is an unconscionable contract?
"Oh, the book's not describing overtime law very well at all - if someone works more than ten hours you have to pay them extra past that point, it's not disallowed. The rule against retaliatory firing allows for monetary damages - uh, they have to pay you if they fire you unfairly, they don't have to let you come back to work."
"Yeah, I have a hard time seeing this implemented at home. Like - people were waiting to learn to read till they were adults and then someone said they didn't think children could and my mother said 'that's not true, my daughter can already read' and now she teaches people's kids, but 'kids can learn to read' was new information."
"WIth a small enough population you can just have very simple laws - no hurting people, no stealing from people - and then let the community vote in new ones, which means they only happen after community debate. There's a problem with that, though, which is that if you have a majority in favor of unjust laws then they can pass - that's why Anitam isn't a direct democracy -"
"People are not great about sticking with treaties and trade agreements, even though they understand there are lots of advantages to being the kind of country that does - people tend to vote to be tougher on crime, even when there's evidence it wouldn't have much of a deterrent effect - confiscating rich peoples' money is always popular even though it's hard to do in a way that doesn't discourage people from starting businesses..."
"Ni don't represent anything, they're just - an agreement. Everyone knows that everyone else will take them as payment, so they work. It used to be you could trade ni for metals, but eventually we wanted more control over the ni supply than we could reasonably have over the metal supply."
"Sure." And a minute later he translates - "Imagine if we handed everybody an extra ten thousand ni. Would they all be ten thousand ni richer? Not really, because there's still only so much food and so many apartments and so many child credits. Those things would just get more expensive. The only way to make people richer is to produce more value, printing more money doesn't do it. Now, usually when a government prints money they don't send everybody their share, they use it to pay government debts. But the principle is the same. If you print more money, there's still the same amount of real wealth, and so prices go up."
Foreigners want to know if she'd like to visit their countries and various historical and cultural monuments within, and if they can get her anything or get her world anything, and what her world is like, and what the interdimensional travel is like, and whether her country would like to ally with theirs, and whether she would like to try their food, and whether she would like citizenship and arbitrarily many children for her and her family.
She might travel more at some point. She is comfortable and not yet entertaining trade agreements on behalf of her world. Her world is low tech and undergoing a magical revolution and does not have castes. The colors between worlds are pretty crazy. She is not a representative of her country per se. She would probably like to try their food. She does not especially want kids right now and neither of her parents has even remarried since the divorce.
When a country goes to war, lots of people die. "Well," says Salie, "when I run the country we will never ever go to war."
Unfortunately, this is not as safe a rule as it seems. If everyone knows that Salie's country will never ever go to war, they might kill her citizens and intercept shipping and demand lots of money for no reason. The safest rule, if you want the country you run to never go to war, is to be very clear about which things you would go to war over, so no one is confused about what will happen if they do those things, and invest in defending yourself so no one wants to go to war with you. Another thing to do is to have lots of trade with everyone, so no one wants to risk their economy by starting a fight.
Another thing to do is to have agreements with your neighbors. If they are responsible and someone attacks them anyway, you will help them protect themselves. And if you are responsible and you are attacked anyway, they will help defend you.
Countries that do these things see more peace than countries which try to be threatening or countries that promise never to go to war. But no one has figured out yet how to be perfectly sure of never having a war (maybe you will be the one to figure it out!). For that reason, there are rules about how countries should conduct themselves in war, to make sure the wars are less awful and that they can quickly be ended and peace restored.
It is absolutely forbidden to attack people sent to negotiate things about the war. ("That sounds silly," says Salie. "People don't think it's inexcusable to kill a thousand people, but it's really evil to kill one if they are negotiating?") But this is because no one can negotiate if they have to fear for the safety of their negotiators, and that means wars will never end.
It is absolutely forbidden to press into service on your side of the war people who you have conquered during the fighting. This is because it makes wars unstable - whoever makes initial gains can put those gains to work for them and get even stronger and gain more and use that also. This makes people more likely to jump into wars in the first place, since if they don't move first they will probably lose.
It is absolutely forbidden to break explicit agreements made with the other side of a war.
It is forbidden to deliberately spread pollution or use pollution as a weapon in the course of war.
It is forbidden to target medics on the battlefield.
Discussion questions: what are the reasons for the last three rules presented? If you were to add a rule, what rule would you add?
"I don't know how to translate the concept, it doesn't seem like you have it - when lots of people live close together, like in a city, there can be horrible plagues that spread from person to person and kill nearly everyone. So after a long time living in close quarters people develop a very very strong sense of horror at certain things that are - reservoirs of contagion. All Amentans have this very strongly. If people know a place is polluted they'll be - disgusted - a while back someone polluted all the food, because they thought people would get over it if they had no choice. Instead, there was mass starvation - it was just that intolerable to try to force yourself to eat something you knew to be polluted."
No country in the world takes immigrants anymore, unless you can find someone who wants to swap with you and live in your old country. If we did take immigrants, then we couldn't have as many children. This is a sad situation, if a necessary one, because immigration used to be the greatest check on abuses by governments. If they treated their people badly, their people would leave for somewhere better! If their city was destroyed in a war, they could flee somewhere that was at peace.
Even though immigration is not allowed anymore, some people do come to Anitam without permission. Sometimes they cross as a tourist and then never leave, living with friends or under a fake name; sometimes they hike in across the mountains; sometimes they buy false papers. When we find these people, we send them home. (If we did not do that, what would happen?)
Children born to people who came here illegally are in a hard position. Under the law until recently, they were not Anitami, but they can't return to their parents' country either. This happened rarely, but in a country as big as ours, even rare things can be a problem; if one person in every ten thousand is here illegally and has children, then there are sixty thousand non-citizen children born every year. (Usually their parents purchase a credit. If they do not purchase a credit, the children are adopted out and are Anitami citizens like their adoptive parents.)
People became worried that these children would form a permanent class of shadow people, not allowed to take most jobs or have children, poor because the rules on foreign workers are not designed for people in this situation or illegal because they are ignoring the rules on foreign workers. They proposed a rule: everyone born in Anitam is Anitami, regardless of whether their parents were here legally.
This was controversial. People worried that immigrants might illegally cross in order to have Anitami babies. But eventually, a form of the rule was agreed on that resolved everyone's worries. There are no shadow people in Anitam today.
He reads over shoulder to figure out what she means. Then he looks it up. "If children born here are eligible for citizenship elsewhere then they're citizens there - since the idea was helping people who've nowhere to go. And you can only buy a credit if you've been living here for a year unless you get a waiver, so the kids the rules apply to are all children of parents who have been living here for a year."
"What exactly happened?"
"I was just flying around and I found a place with much shorter buildings, and then I saw they had red hair, I landed - I couldn't understand much of what they were saying, I haven't learned much Anitami. They looked really - busy and tired - I don't think more busy and tired than human farmers or something but for here -"
"Uh-huh."
"I didn't go visible. I might go again tomorrow."
"One common complaint was that the social workers didn't want to hear 'this is unfair' or 'we need help' or 'you're mistreating us', and would get upset with people who implied that, so everyone felt pressured to put on a convincing presentation of happiness when they were around. Another common complaint was the social workers not treating them as equals."
" - we have to replace the carpet and anything else she's stepped on. They're poor, they're tired, they'd be terrified if she showed herself because they expect that, should she want to kill them, we wouldn't intervene to protect them, and that she might want to kill them because they're reds, lots of people do."
"The police aren't great at investigating crimes against reds. I know someone who bought all the reds cameras and we made a law that no one could tamper with those and that made it easier to identify troublemakers even without police cooperation, but some crimes are legitimately hard to solve if all the witnesses saw nothing."
"We won't. I haven't told anyone I don't completely trust not to be stupid and there's absolutely nothing stopping you from leaving and we won't. - we might have. If the first visitor had been someone from your government who said 'oh, they're more like forces than people -' not even because we'd have believed them, just because it would have been enough to make it not something we had to think about. Two planets and then a moral revelation, that's how lots of people work."
"I think I'd have noticed. But I don't run this country yet, couldn't've done anything - is there any chance they'll do planetary transit for ice cream? This is not even remotely a dangerous secret if we can sell it as 'elementals will give us planets for reasonable payment, except the humans are enslaving them, let's bribe the humans to stop and then bribe the elementals for planets'. It is a dangerous secret if they won't want to help on their own."
"Elementals can be enslaved magically. It's - it's easy. It had to be invented but it's easy, I know how and I wasn't even trying to learn. You have to be a mage to use one like that, and it's probable that no matter how much seaweed you eat you just can't ever be mages, even before we knew seaweed helped there were some."
"Yeah-huh." Sigh. "Penumbra belongs to my school. It has rentals. So students can borrow them and play with more powerful magic. I could've just refused to go to school at all but that wasn't going to help - I didn't have any luck with any other humans though. So I just tried to - I'd trade the elementals for their time, I couldn't give them stuff, they couldn't keep it, but I could arrange for them to have privacy or teach them to read if they were too old to know how or arrange to rent them when somebody particularly awful was otherwise going to."
"I can't let her free outright because literally no one has ever survived doing that and no one knows why. Like, we have a pretty good idea why the Emperor's elementals killed him as soon as he was persuaded to let some go - they convinced him they'd handle his hundreds of simultaneous rebellions, let him act in more places at once, but - sometimes people have just said 'well, around here it's customary to manumit slaves after twenty years' and - magical explosion, dead."
"If Penumbra went around personally vouching - uh, we can shut them up, we can't make them talk, although if you are ever not sure of that I don't speak any of the other languages she knows - maybe they'd settle for me nominally holding them all till I was really old and then having an explosion party."
"Ice cream's pretty good, but - I don't think you can just use the history of local slavery here, there's - I can make her blink, I can make her hold perfectly still, I can make her do anything, I used to have a serious problem of doing it by accident, it's easier than moving my own body, if she's nearby and it would be marginally more convenient for her to be doing something else. They don't have to sleep or eat or rest or ever do anything that isn't be convenient magic vessels for their owners and occasional or not so occasional sex toys. Even if their owners have to sleep we can share them. They've been so - so -"
"Ah." Sigh. "So, letting them go is absurdly difficult and even if accomplished they'll likely be recaptured, or else kill lots of humans, which might not be an innate tendency at all but just self-defense under the circumstances, more are getting captured all the time, and the only way to get the thing we want is to participate. ...what would you need in order to successfully steal a bunch more?"
" - tentative plan, we send you back with the resources to steal lots more of them, we announce elementals get asylum in Anitam due to being enslaved on their home planet, we explain to the elementals once they get here that they can't be released until you're elderly unless they know a way but that under local law you're not allowed to order them and if they like we can have a social worker routinely check with them about whether they have been ordered and stop you if you're doing it. We hope that after a couple seasons some of them are feeling recovered enough to consider finding us planets, but we know that might not happen and we make it work regardless."
"I don't think I have enough of a picture - we have weapons that would, just, not leave anything larger than a speck of dust in the area for quite some distance around, the hard thing here isn't doing it at all but doing it without casualties. If there are people who would smuggle you elementals for lots and lots of salt and shells, you could take that back with you - Penumbra can go invisible, will she help with this?"
"I know how my people work, you're entirely right that if they were on your planet and told they had to use slaves to get a new one they'd rationalize it away but they're not going to go from 'Penumbra wants her friends, who are prisoners and who might when freed be inclined to do terraforming' to 'or we could try to take the one alien hostage to get the other alien, who has a lot of magic we know nothing about, to take us to their home world where doubtless everyone will think this was brilliant of us and want to teach us how to use elemental slaves."
"One country recently transitioned away from using reds for red jobs and killed almost all the reds except the ones Anitam took in. Another country is in the middle of doing the same thing. Everything else is less obviously horrible but I'd expect you might genuinely have different sensibilities than us - Anitam executes people for serious crimes? Some places do less of that. ...we let people do sex work before their first spring if they're of age? There's some place down south that's been sanctioning us over that for the last twenty years but no one else cares. Different castes have different penalties for the same crime, by law in some cases and in practice in others. There's a province on the coast that's been experimenting with corporal punishment in place of prison."
"They didn't offer any red credits, this spring. The reds figured that was precursor to a massacre - correctly so - and they snuck out of their district and burned a blue district to the ground and attempted the same with less success elsewhere. Government shot a lot of them and then tried to make the rest train their replacements in how to do their jobs. The reds refused. The government took their children hostage and is now holding the children to make the parents train their replacements in exchange for periodic verification that their children are alive and unmutilated."
"We're working on a plan to get the resources we'd need to terraform. There are lots of countries. I can do some before others. What do you think would happen if I pointed out that Penumbra can teleport and be invisible, and might be conducting secret inspections of random red neighborhoods to make sure they're okay?"
"Some people would try with varying degrees of ineptness to make their reds more okay, some would threaten the reds, some would explain to you at length how it's hard not to mistreat your reds, might be an improvement on net - do you want to talk to Anitam's reds person, she would know who in the red communities to ask about this directly -"
And she clarifies for Penumbra what happened, since Penumbra's Anitami is not very good and some of that conversation was in Anitami.
"But they don't know how to steal me?"
"No."
"Okay."
"Are you okay with running errands, teleporting around -"
"A little - not all the time -"
"Okay."
"That implies there is a way, even though we're not mages."
"We're going to get what we want anyway, Maurabel wants the leverage."
"Mmmhmm."
"Of all the things to get upset about -"
"Biyan's torturing children, of course anyone who wasn't in the habit of thinking 'well, reds' would be upset."
"They're not torturing them."
"But if they were, who cares really, right?"
"What's your point?"
"We'll get some rainforest, we'll ask for the reds anywhere too unstable to hang onto them to be put there, you can prove that you could take them there yourself..."
"That's not going to leave me anything for healing them if they're hurt."
"No. I can do some, but that's probably going to have to be mostly locally managed."
"What'd you say to her, Aitim, the mic didn't reach -"
"I promised confidentiality."
"If this goes wrong and costs us the planets - you've ignored the recommended handling over and over -"
"I am well aware."
"At least he didn't storm out in a huff at the implication he might be accountable," says someone else.
"Do you think Aitim's -' says Penumbra.
"Uh - helps he admitted that they'd totally have been all over you like I thought if we'd just kinda -"
"It does?"
"I mean, it's not better than if they wouldn't be, but given that they would have he's more likely to be in good faith, saying that."
"Most people want them dead. Almost anybody, given the chance to press a button and replace them all with robots, would. They - it makes no sense to them that anyone would care for its own sake. So if someone shows up acting like they care, it's likelier to be a - test, or a self-aggrandizing performance of altruism - until you actually do things for them, they just won't believe you that you care at all."
"Not - exactly? There are things that aren't at all up for debate and then there are things which you wouldn't want to risk guessing wrong on lest there's a pollution hysteria and then there are things where whatever the ruling people'll be fine with it and you may as well rule the overwhelmingly convenient way, and 'alien whose grandparents might have done red work' is the last thing."
" - really complicated to explain. Uh. Poisonous. You have a lot of latitude, you're an alien, but - people don't even like thinking about it, they just get stupid on the topic even if they're generally sensible...I think you could definitely get away with 'one consideration as we decide in what order to terraform planets is who has humane policies towards their reds and plans to humanely transition away from using them. Bids to be the first to get a terraformed planet should include a discussion of how your reds are treated, rates of police violence against reds, red mortality rates, and legal protections reds in your country enjoy and routinely are able to exercise.'"
"Great!"
And she writes the reds:
As I imagine you heard on the news, there are aliens. They're upset about the treatment of reds and want to bribe people with planets to get better about that. Can you think of simple, concrete reforms that are worth demanding and that'll be a good idea in other countries as well as here? We're discussing getting somewhere to put Biyan's reds - a rainforest now, a planet later. Suggestions are welcome there, too.
"It's this thing Anitam tried to manage the police violence, if they go around all the time with their pocket everything video running then if anyone randomly attacks them there's video proof, and people are less likely to attack them with proof it was unprovoked as compared to just everyone-sort-of-knows-it-was-unprovoked."
"If you want to buy something you can order it online and then get it delivered. Unless you live in a red neighborhood, no one delivers there. That means reds can't buy lots of things everyone else can buy, and the things they can buy cost them more. If you set up a chute so the packages can get delivered without the delivery driver getting polluted, then reds can buy more things and pay less for them and be less vulnerable to coercion by the one supplier who serves their neighborhood."
"I really recommend against that. If there are other planets, even if a particular country hasn't gotten one yet, everyone'll be patient; if the first planet ever is for reds it'll seem like a colossal insulting waste of resources, like lighting money on fire in front of a homeless person, people'll be mad and they'll be less cooperative with sending their reds there. They'll be safe in the rainforest and can take advantage of the time spent somewhere with internet access to learn the things they'll need to manage on their own planet."
And he takes it to the council - elementals are the ones who can do interplanetary travel, and Penumbra has friends who are currently enslaved and prevented from using their magic, she can't make promises on their behalf but they'd probably look kindly on a country who rescued them, it seems to him that Anitam would be much advantaged by a rescue operation.
The council agrees.
He writes Kalana Shenla.
Council should be forwarding authorization for an operation to rescue some elementals who can terraform for us. What do you need to know to make that happen?
She needs help with some of the words, and then she can draw a school map and start speculating on defenses. "Penumbra can only take people between worlds every now and then and even regular teleportation is expensive but she can go between places that are dark more cheaply and so can regular Shadows if any of those want to help. We could set up over as long as we need to bring in all the soldiers somewhere, and go in at night, and fall back to wherever we set up - in a cave or something. The school elementals know me and I think will cooperate once they can, it'll be harder if we have to try again with more who don't."
"Yeah. There might be some elementals checked out, so we won't be able to get all the ones the university owns in one strike. They have several of all the non-hybrids, though. You want Shadow for going to other planets and Air and Earth and Water and maybe Wood and Fire for making planets nice, but the other kinds can be useful too."
Kalana has a few more questions (if it's important that it be dark, how dark, what's the lighting on campus like? If someone is injured what are prospects for solving that with magic?) and Maurabel has answers (some torches, some magical lighting objects, but it's still dark enough for there to be lots of places suitable for shadow-walking at night, as long as they aren't stuck right under a light stone; magical healing is pretty good, Shine for healed-or-dead-in-the-next-five-minutes emergencies one per elemental in any reasonable amount of time, Lightning for that but you have to wait more than five minutes to get to a Shine and also one per elemental, Ice for that but you think you could fix it without Shine in particular, Earth for smallish patch jobs - Fire's for youth and infection and Water's for disease and not directly relevant.)
"Penumbra can but that's drawing on the same reserves she'd use to do shadow-walking, Shine healing is expensive. I have some Earth and I know how to use it - no humans have enough Shine or Lightning to use those for healing. Uh, same caveats as basically everything else, regarding elemental willingness, but probably at least some of them would."
"You'd still need a mage to hold them but -" She tugs her necklace out of her shirt. "If you have these you can hang on to them till you find someone to do that, if you can, you just won't be able to let them do stuff on your own. Penumbra will still be about as free as she is now unless another mage gets this one, so will any elementals whose amulets I manage to touch, any you steal yourselves will have whatever their last constraints were stuck that way."
Nod.
Penumbra takes soldiers and their gear to a wooded area not too far from the school for them to run it if they find themselves needing to do so, but not easily found by random travelers; the Amentans have scent-masking chemicals so they won't be found with dogs as Penumbra takes them back home one by one afterwards. They send a squad of eight, which takes more than a week, then Maurabel. They study some phrases in the local language so they'll be able to yell at people and attempt to soothe elementals. They wait till Penumbra is full up on magic.
She can shadow-walk them all at once, after it's full dark and the moon has set.
Only a handful of elementals are checked out this late at night, but their barracks is guarded. Soldiers and Penumbra and Maurabel have hearing protection against the sonic thing, and the guards go down except for one who has some sort of applicable ward; that one they hit with a net gun and a cocktail of four knockout drugs in the hope that at least one works on humans and if any of them are poison Maurabel can water-heal him in time to save him. He's out but not before he has time to yell. Some lights come on in the dormitories and the study tower.
The checkout clerk is still keeled over from the noise but grabbed some amulets before being completely overcome with the need to twitch on the floor and dry-heave. Elementals are standing over him, interrupted in his attempt to force them to heal him. They can't help her but she can reach between their legs, pull the necklaces out of his hand and clear them, get the rest out of the safe, murmur quick to some of the Shadows.
Shadows go out to the soldiers who are standing ready to interfere if anyone wakes up enough to come bother them, which is looking likely - there's someone with a Fire, there's someone holding a lantern -
Shadows bring soldiers and Maurabel in a total of three trips back to their camp. They have stolen twenty-two elementals.
They trickle back to Anitam, Maurabel first, elementals after. The Shadows and Shines can share some power with Penumbra so she doesn't take a whole month to bring everyone where they're going.
She's not making that up. I am not going to bother being upset about things that happened before I got here, but now I'm telling you that planets take a while and if you want one before somebody else has seconds you should stop doing awful things to reds. I have some rainforest they can be in if you can't handle them yourselves.(Some of the elementals have also gone to live in the rainforest; it is more like being wild again than living in a hotel is.)
"Garbage no - I mean, you have to learn to operate the trucks, but it's a weeklong course, not this - protracted tragedy - but maintaining the sewage systems has a lot to it and preparing bodies for burial does too and there's a lot of turnover because non-reds are likely to get too grossed out."
"I think the way to do it is to get out the kids and then immediately contact the government and say the aliens dropped in to check on the kids, saw them being tortured, and took them somewhere safe. The aliens recommend, so as to avert further violence, that Biyan immediately escort all the adult reds out of their country. They think the reds are insane and evil; they shouldn't want them to have magic allies. Then maybe have a couple elementals around to observe if they don't mind doing that."
They can book a flight.
Isel lets Anitami reds know that it might be good for Biyan's reds to have a heads-up that if anything has happened to the kids, which she of course wouldn't know anything about personally, Biyan will lose its hostages tomorrow. And there'll be people waiting in the rainforest.
So she does! Some of her elemental friends went to investigate allegations of tortured children and were very alarmed by what they found and now the children are safe. They should probably send the rest of the reds after them so the elementals don't suspect them of doing horrible things to more reds.
The observing scary elementals are parked in red neighborhoods.
"The conventional way is to have some diplomatic privileges for, say, the three places you like most, and some other for only the place you like most, and some other for the top six, but all informally so, such that everyone knows where they stand without saying it and inviting offense. You could invite the Cene and Voa and Anitam ambassadors to a dinner, says 'we're on good terms', and then when someone else impresses you they get invited next dinner..."
"In the long run you will need more humans. Maybe I should empty a mage orphanage. Except Amentans would probably raise them with that stupid red prejudice. Unless I gave them to reds, which I assume you will tell me would be a disaster even if their adoptees washed their artifacts before they were sold."
"People might conclude it was fine or there might be pollution hysteria or they might try to rescue the poor children from the reds. Humans also might not have it even if raised with it, it's not clear how much it's cultural and how much we've been selected for much stronger disgust reactions as a result of a long history of high-density living."
"Well, if light can do it Shines can do it. I guess I can ask if the reds mind being experimented on."
Reds don't mind. Shines fiddle with the light in the rainforest.
"I'm gonna need more elementals. I want to send the ones who aren't doing anything right now and are willing to go back to my world to spread rumors and tell us where to go, can you get the microphones -"
And Ices and Glasses and an Adamant and a Stone and Woods and a Lightning and an air/stone hybrid whose halo is not usefully air-producing are one by one dropped all around the fractured empire of Maurabel's home world. Penumbra also delivers Maurabel's parents each letters.
They are angry at humans! Most humans. Maurabel was always very nice even when this was inconvenient for her. They want more elementals rescued, as many as possible before Maurabel is old enough to free them all at once. They will talk about being captured and tapped for magic and the Fire in particular has lurid tales of sexual use that she doesn't mind expounding on for hours.
Reds themselves seem to be very responsible about avoiding pollution violations, for instance! If she gave the human children to reds they would not learn unlawful habits. She's not totally happy with this solution but it would solve the problem of thinking reds are disgusting and the problem her concerned correspondents bring up.
...doing magic for reds would be a catastrophe they could touch anything no one could leave their houses ever again and they'd have to stockpile food and what would they do when it ran out? In Voa didn't they have trouble keeping the trains running on time because people kept jumping in front of them? Something like that, anyway.
Only elementals can do the shadow-walking and outright teleporting things. Human mages would, like, make them magic lamps or something. Anything else would require more education.
She tells Aitim, "The more I think about it the more I like the idea of emptying a mage orphanage, then placing one mage kid with a red family in any country who thinks that will be good for them. Sorts kind of neatly, doesn't it?"
"I like your family and if you and all your siblings will line up and hug an elemental who has just spent all afternoon patching up reds without wincing I will consider giving them some mage orphans to bring up. I say an elemental and not a red only because I don't want to terrify the reds."
And Aitim will call up his relatives. "My mother won't do it, but she has a good reason, she works on pollution theology in her spare time so she can make the case for the adequacy of new cleaning procedures and if she didn't take it seriously enough she'd be less credible there. We understood that, growing up, it didn't interfere with respecting reds as people or managing the disgust thing."
Nod.
She announces to the world on her blog sort of thing that she is considering importing human mage children but considers their careful acculturation of paramount importance and while she does not advocate illegal activity wrt reds she does not hold with accompanying attitudes thereunto and you are only even theoretically eligible if you and everyone else who might be helping raise the little mage can demonstrate (especially with evidence of pre-alien-contact behavior) that they are not going to let prevailing culture fuck up the mages on that too much. She will try to find a huggable red volunteer; failing that an elemental who has been in contact with reds.
This is going to be a small number of children by Amenta population standards and she's going to be really stringent. Gotta touch a red. And not make a face. They may shower afterwards because she does not advocate doing anything illegal but if there are a lot of applicants there might be a contest to see how long they can sit around chatting with the huggable red before they run and do that, narrow the field. Mage orphans are funneled into schools when they are eight of her years which seems to be about two Amentan years, so younger than that. She is not sure what caste magic is; it's got a lot of green to it but she worked for her tuition principally by manufacturing windowpanes.
She will be surprised if she can get ten kids on a first pass, although there might be other batches later. If they find it disgusting degrading etc. then competing for this particular offspring scholarship is probably not for them and they should look into some other option.
It's just, objectively, disgusting and degrading.
(Someone writes anonymously that even if someone didn't mind touching a red they could lose their job or get beaten in the street and would certainly lose all the informal social capital poor people need to make ends meet, if word got around they'd got their child by kissing up to reds.)
She writes to this person that the important thing is finding good places to bring up a small handful of mage children and if that is the kind of environment in which someone finds themselves she is honestly very sorry, she is working on the planets angle of children too, but that doesn't sound like a good place to bring up a mage child, around people who want to enforce this rule that way.
Buncha greens who donated to red charities for idealistic reasons and think magic would be cool and can probably stomach the red thing if they take anti-nausea medication first, an orange ex-social-worker who says he's used to it but his wife refuses, would that be a problem, an orange ex-social worker who Isel checks up on and says had three sexual relationships with reds, all of them abusive; two sad yellow couples who could never afford one and will eat raw sewage with a smile on their faces if she'd like.
"We do, they just cannot afford to be publicly labelled as such - I know people who are already engaged in illegal relationships with reds, I know people who snuck endangered reds out of Olvala or out of Biyan or helped them disguise themselves as clean castes, you're not asking for people who can see past it you're asking for people who can see past it, afford for that to be publicly known, and don't expect to ever be in a position of regretting the scrutiny they've invited."
"Well, if they're hiding disguised reds, good for them, but I have the impression it might be a lot of work to contradict every television show and every book and every neighbor and every custom that doesn't have the force of law and if they've already spent the resources they'd need to do that - good for them but that doesn't mean they'd be able to get a little mage brought up how I think they need."
Also makes it harder to see for everyone who isn't a Shadow - and costlier for the Shadows - but Maurabel has enough Glass to manage vision boost without help and it's her who needs to lay hands on the amulets. "They might be stored farther apart than they were at the school, that was honestly pretty dumb of the school."
"If you just need a human for this my parents are okay - I mean, they weren't going to crusade about elementals but they wouldn't go out of their way to be awful to them if I explained what I was doing, which I have - but you need an actual mage who can be like yes observe I have magic and can totally control that elemental you want to sell me for Ridiculous Amounts Of Salt."
"I will."
They find an island with a cave in it on Maurabel's home planet. They set up there for the longish haul. They steal a private collection and another school collection, with an Adamant acting as Maurabel's bodyguard. A couple of soldiers are casualties in the second school raid, dead before any Shines can get to them. They get a lot of elementals free and Penumbra starts taking them to Amenta, one at a time.
That sure is stuff.
Does Maurabel know or do any of the elementals know if this is the same way elementals started existing back in her world.
...also the rate is much higher than it must be in her world if there are only hundreds in her world and they live forever, does anyone have guesses about that.
"Great, okay, so then if we have mages at all, before they grow up and become powerful we have everyone amend the anti-slavery treaty to include enforcement of rules against enslaving elementals. Everyone'll be in favor of that, no one wants magic destabilizing the political landscape.
- if there are red mages we have a problem."
"I can see how that will help with most of the problems you still have in spite of being unfathomably rich but I'm not actually sure it helps very much with that one except in the sense that cutting off a gangrenous limb and cauterizing the wound can. You know, you might have a problem earlier, if elementals keep popping. They will all know all your languages and they are immortal and powerful and can fly and they have not been raised to hate reds."
"If they decide to intervene in things without asking whether this is what anyone involved wants then there'll be problems that have nothing to do with reds. They could - stage prison breaks or rescue murderers from execution or show up invisibly in secure facilities and make it unclear whether they're spying on behalf of a distrusted neighbor -"
"...they're elementals. They will speak every language spoken in the world at the time they appeared. I'm not sure if they will know mine, because there's just me and a few of you and some of the stolen elementals who speak it here and I don't know how many speakers they need, but they're going to all know Anitami."
And attempts (which are not likely to succeed) can be arranged to make the argument that elementals are just too magic to transmit pollution - actual fire wouldn't - and that tracing down elementals zipping across the countryside is as practical as tracing down breezes, and just as unnecessary.
"There are few enough elementals we can maybe hold interventions with each of them explaining that for fragile mortal people who'll be gone forever pretty soon it's terrifying to have people able to do whatever they want with no consequences, and it'd be really nice of them to avoid places where they don't like the rules?"
"Pollution hysteria is hard to predict, it's not guaranteed that it'll be a disaster but it could be. Probably if it gets known elementals do that people will be uncomfortable interacting with elementals. Places will be tempted to get rid of their reds but they don't want to offend you either."
"They fly. They don't know any better - even if you tell one they'd need to be very invested in interacting with Amentans to distinguish this very charged superstition from something that was just made up, it'll be 'gullible' and 'skeptical', not 'cooperative' and 'hostile'. They fly and don't know any better, they're more likely to do the halo thing than a bird for sure..."
"From the sample I have information on they start out really innocent and simple, which isn't necessarily safe but isn't hard to make safe. You could talk to some of them about it - some of the ones from my world I mean, although I guess you could try to chase down one of the new ones if you wanted."
"We're interested in different things than - I don't know what to call you-and-humans. Flesh people? We're interested in different things than flesh people at least until we've spent a lot of time around flesh people. It wouldn't have occurred to me to try to meet other elementals or find out who spoke the languages I knew on my own for a very long time."
"Some elementals like food," he says defensively. "I don't know what Airs like in particular - uh, we're the bandits. Who've been stealing and freeing elementals. We decided to see if we could get any by buying we couldn't get by stealing. Maurabel'll be by to let you go. But she might be a while. Thus food."
Since Maurabel didn't know how long to expect them to take to get more elementals she is not coming by as often as Penumbra could take her. More sellers of elementals come by first. This person has an extra Wood to sell. That one caught this Adamant but she stares at him creepily and won't pull in her halo so he can't punish her very effectively.
"I can't tell what-all her affinities are except that she has some Shine, but it's like learning to walk - she might hurt herself a tiny bit but then she'll learn not to do whatever hurt. If she has any Fire that's the only one that could be really dangerous and even then it'd be fairly unlikely."
Maurabel is deeply annoyed. (In the future they can figure out what the dietary thing is and just make sure reds don't have it. In the meantime... well. This world is very big and they already kill babies for other reasons. ...Is she legally allowed to have some in her rainforest if they manage to get there somehow?)
Maurabel and an Ice who is working as a translator for her these days say that if there were any, it's pretty cheap for Shadows to look at dark places, so they could designate a dark place for Shadows to check for messages sometimes, if there were any messages, which of course there are not.
Elementals have 1-2 elements very strongly and mages have 3-12 at varying strengths, never as strong as an elemental. (12 is almost unheard of but we are pretty sure it has happened to at least one human.) What can be done, especially by human mages using elements in combination, is still being studied. General domains of the elements are known to be:
Adamant: Metal, warding/defense, magnet sense, artifact components.
Air: Air, weather, insubstantiality, scent, very specific respiratory healing.
Earth: Soil, living things (any work on living things with pure Earth requires a lot of detailed knowledge), life sense.
Fire: Fire, prolonged youth, infection-specific healing, warmth sense.
Glass: Glass, vision, breaking things, artifact components.
Ice: Ice, cold, stasis, state sense (solid/liquid/gas).
Lightning: Electricity, fast but not instantaneous travel, hearing, anaesthetic.
Shadow: Darkness, shadow-scrying and shadow-walking.
Shine: Light, invisibility, light-scrying, expensive total instant healing.
Stone: Rocks, weight, tremorsense, longevity, artifact components.
Water: Water, water-sense, poison and dehydration healing, weather.
Wood: Plants (more specifically and less knowledge-dependent than Earth), malnutrition-related healing, plant matter sense, artifact components.
All elements afford at least one special or improved sense. Human mage affinity is graded on a five point scale: none, enough to use the sense at all, enough to incorporate the element into an artifact without elemental help, enough to use other applications without elemental help, and a best affinity which seems to be consistent in strength across human mages (someone could have only three affinities but their best one would be as good as the best of someone with ten).
Seems like magic should be a thing you can do regardless of caste like being a house spouse or reading novels or something. She will have the segregation necessary to make sure that if somehow a red student turned up from somewhere - it's a big world - she would not break any laws by letting them attend lectures with an Adamant bodyguard.
"If you specialize in healing and have a good healing affinity you can get to the point where it's safe to work on people in a - season, more if you work in Earth. The senses don't take long to learn to use at all but they can take longer to use efficiently and accurately, especially shadow scrying."
"With elemental help they wouldn't have to be mages, even, just go with Shadows places. Without - Shine if they were really good, Earth if that turns out to do hair color, maybe Lightning if by 'unnoticed' you mean 'so they couldn't be caught', you'll notice somebody speeding along like that but won't know who it is."
"I would steal more reds if I could but that might not even be the only reason to do it, it wouldn't be that hard to hide one and they seem to kind of get murdered a lot anyway and a mage has some chance of protecting themselves and others. I wouldn't gamble on it if I were red unless I was already very wedged but it would have made sense in Biyan on a long enough time horizon, say, if I'd been red in Orvara after they did their test city I'd do it -"
"People aren't great at following thoughts to their logical conclusion and also they think - and the reds help them think - the reds are cowed and not very smart. And there are a lot of safeguards, a red couldn't do it without outside help, and they can't imagine why anyone would help. It's like - sure, anyone could take a gun and go shoot up an elementary school, but no one ever does, even though there are so many of us, and helping a red disguise themself is - on that scale of horrible - to most people."
"If you asked people 'why hasn't anyone shot up a school, there are after all an awful lot of people and some are terrible', people'd have about the same intuitions about it as 'why hasn't anyone dyed a red's hair and disguised them as a clean caste and helped them escape'. I am not making claims about which action actually causes more harm."
Well by then she will have some kind of scheme where the earlier students can teach the later ones. Hundred sixteen is not too awful. She announces that it would be a good idea for those families to try to befriend and socialize native elementals to be translators and magic helpers, especially if it isn't convenient to teach them Anitami.
They could talk to the elemental response team about bringing them along next time they respond to an elemental in their area, or just go up to one if they find one, and they should be very gentle and patient about things the elementals don't understand and find out what they are interested in and offer to help with that.
Statisticians think maybe it is something in freshwater clams. The population of the southern hemisphere, where spring is approaching, promptly starts eating tons of freshwater clams. Several governments pass laws that only pregnant people can buy freshwater clams. Charities spring up to help pregnant poor people afford freshwater clams. Everyone everywhere prohibits reds from possessing, ordering or eating any freshwater clams.
The little mages are all loved very much (except for this one, whose mother is an alcoholic and whose father is depressed; neither of them play with him and there's only sometimes food. Grandma's pursuing a custody case.) They are being taught Anitami as best their caretakers can manage it, which in some case is regular tutors and in some cases watching Anitami children's television shows. In some countries they are protected national assets with security teams assigned; some countries are ignoring them.
In Calado someone's private security shows up to take a purple mage baby away for a better upbringing. Then more security shows up to argue with the original security, and the baby's mother flees with the baby in the ensuing chaos. She is arrested for disobeying security directives and sterilized on arrest because the private prison in that district has a contract with a hospital that does sterilizations. She is released without charges but billed for the arrest and the sterilization; she can't afford it and is arrested again for unpaid fines.
The first little mage's Fire friend, with some Maurabel coaching, sells youth boosts and buys the little mage food and brings him to playgrounds and talks to him in Anitami.
The second little mage's Lightning friend can't figure out how to get a valid Calador work permit, can Maurabel just pay her fines off miscellaneous bribe money she has sloshing around and import the family to Anitam by any chance?
He makes the case for that. Just the little mage and her parents who can't have more children anyway, not that much of a strain on Anitam. It takes a while and some favor-trading but eventually they can have visas.
Calado refuses to let them leave. The mage is a valuable national asset. And can only be swapped for another mage.
Calado tries to make their mage come back by arresting extended family for treason for helping them escape, but then decides not to do that. The parents work overtime getting money to send back for the prison costs. The little blue collects all twelve elementals, assisted by the willingness of her parents to have their estate transformed so they all have lots of space to live.
The southern continent's latest batch of children is in fact eighty percent mages!
(So to people who have the most affinities? Or the most elemental friends?
A social worker notices a red baby leaving glowing spots on his mother's shirt and has him executed.)
"People who work there for long enough have a feel for which judgments are actually going to win out and it feels less chaotic. But it's not a good environment for anyone who lives there, not at all."
(Maurabel makes sure the southern hemisphere has dark places for reds to leave messages for Shadows, if they want.)
She'll probably come up with an entrance exam based on what she finds from the first batch - neither elemental friends nor number of affinities would be decisive on their own - but she can also admit more students from some places than others.
They survive, after a fashion; Ices can do stasis.
Maurabel gets a shadow-walk ride there with her translator Ice to try to bring them out of it. She warns everyone beforehand that sometimes this does not work and patients just die instead and this is incompatible with Shine healing. Would anyone rather leave their stasised relative in stasis until the field of magic has maybe advanced or do they want her to undo it now as best she can, ~90% odds per?
There's a lot of people here and they know more about medicine than humans do but her world's been studying magic intensively with a lot of collaboration for about six local years and still (she checked, she gets a news bulletin every time she goes to clear more purchased elementals and would have heard) hasn't improved on what Maurabel learned in school.
They are doing well, aided by their elemental caretaker/assistants! The one with neglectful parents now lives with Grandma, who won her custody case. The Calador expat has lots of friends and really likes Anitami food. Some families did muster the money to send their children to the blue one's estate, and she gets along splendidly with her new yellow and green friend and their accompanying elementals.
That is indeed less shitty. It isn't not shitty, and moving from Anitam would be hard (she'd have to learn the language to get along unaccompanied, she'd have to learn local regulations, she'd have to adjust her curriculum, it'd impose costs on all the kids who have studied Anitami and aren't language geniuses).
"Rates of extrajudicial violence comparable to those experienced in communities with a comparable crime rate, adequate prenatal nutrition and access to the resources to train their own doctors and provide their own medical care, reflected in childbirth and infant mortality rates comparable to impoverished clean people, enforcement of contract law so that people have to pay them for their work, answers to the questions 'what do our reds want from their government' and 'how are we responsibly incentivizing good behavior among our reds'."
Maurabel publishes this list. She's not making any promises - after all, it is possible that multiple countries would suddenly do all these things at once, and there is only one of her! - but they would be So Impressive and would definitely at least get you lots of Shadow-finding help and free air artifacts even if she cannot put her school in you.
Yeah some of 'em will risk it!
Maurabel finds a cooperative Shadow who will do transport in exchange for being read bedtime stories. Reds reading to her is fine. (...wild elementals are predictable in their hobbies; more flesh-people-acclimated ones fixate on the oddest things.)
The red auditors take diligent notes and spend all of their visit in red districts and then go home and report to Maurabel. Maurabel gives the country in question a dozen air artifacts and offers to introduce the Shadow who likes bedtime stories to whoever is on their interplanetary exploration team; she will consider them for field trips and possible satellite campus.
This one teaches green kids and finds elementals really fascinating and is so upset about people mistreating them. This one runs grey after-school programs and has opinions about letting young children be young children and have play-focused learning. This one teaches orange kids and has a elemental friend who lives in her apartment's rooftop gardens.
Kids can go to the zoo! (The greys and purples race around and climb on everything and beg for candy from the vendor carts; the yellows and oranges walk patiently and take pictures and ask questions, even a few of them who look longingly at their racing-around classmates.)
Kids can go to the museum! (The greys and purples are bored.)
Kids can go to the amusement park! This gets all of them excitable and inclined to race around and plead for snacks.
Grey kids get sticks and have swordfights! One of the orange kids shuts this down as irresponsible! One of the purple kids wants to know how to operate the cotton candy machine and gets a lesson from an amused vendor. Everyone goes on a roller coaster except a few kids who think that looks horrifying and no fun at all.
Maurabel ignores them! The red kids cling to their Adamants' hands.
"There are two class sessions for every class session's worth of material I'm covering," Maurabel says, "after the first day, which is introductory stuff, and after we've checked all your affinities which will be over the next couple days one at a time. You can come to the morning one or the afternoon one - I might start asking people to pick one over the other if they're very differently popular - and if you're having trouble, you can attend both for the extra practice. Any questions?"
"I'm going to keep them on the same schedule, because that way if you're not sure of yourself you can come in the morning and return after lunch if you need to. If a lot of people are doing that then it's pretty likely the second session will be more review- and depth- focused than the first, which will just go over my curriculum as I first had it in mind."
No, not those, they don't have to memorize those, although if there are hybrids in the room they should introduce themselves just so everybody knows their names. The Shadow/Adamant is Iron, she knows that purple girl's Air/Stone is Dust...
There is also a Glass/Ice (Crystal) and a Stone/Wood (Jet) and a Glass/Shine (Rainbow) and a Water/Fire (Steam) and an Earth/Water (Clay) and an Air/Ice (Snow) and an Air/Lightning (Storm).
Turns out everybody present has at least one of Water, Fire, Glass, Air, or Lightning! So they'll do those. (Tiya has Water and Juin has Glass. Juin also has Air but will be using the material-halo option for now.) They are going to learn to use those elemental senses. Maurabel borrows an elemental of each type as TAs and walks everybody through how to connect to the elemental's magic and watch while they use their special sense. Then they will be able to try on their own. (The Water and the Glass will have halos up while they touch the reds, and shed them after.)
"It's actually a bad idea to try to steer a shadow walk if you don't absolutely have to. Shadows are miles better at it and can bring passengers. We will definitely cover flying - I don't have enough Air to do it without help myself but I have books and we can figure out the rest. And we're going to cover artifacts for sure, what artifacts do you want to make?"
She resumes the lesson! She would like them all to come to their individual appointments with guesses about their affinity strengths if they can. Magic you're better at is easier, feels more available - there's not a lot of strength difference when you don't know what you're doing yet but there's some - and if they manage to make a magic sense work and then try with others (their elementals are encouraged to student-hop) the ones they are better at will be sharper and easier to sustain and interpret and steer.
And she has already found amenable elementals that cover the dozen for the reds. Sigh.
"I should concretize the thing where if they, for example, advocate murder, they will be asked to leave; 'for example' isn't good enough," says Maurabel to her orange TAs, "is there some standard I could copy?"
"The school I worked at had a policy against disrupting the classroom environment - saying the reds should be dead wouldn't count but saying one of your classmates should would -"
"It is the policy of their governments to kill red mages, are you planning to enforce a ban on discussing laws currently in place -"
"We would have someone take a student to a separate room to talk if they were making inappropriate comments."
"Yes, I recommend that over sending them home, especially if their parents are at work and there's no one to make sure they get home safely - that's less of a concern here, obviously -"
"They should really be getting a non-magical education too - save that kind of discussion for civics class -"
"Oh, I agree there, it's very off-topic -"
"I think having someone take disruptive students aside for a talk should work fine -"
"- depending whether the point is to correct misbehavior or show off to the reds that it's taken seriously -"
"Ewwww. They're here, that's enough of a point made."
Then Tiya and everyone else who stayed get plenty of individual attention while she walks through the day's concepts again!
And then she writes to everyone's parents. Ice translates appropriately per parent for her.
Everybody gets:
[Name of child] has the following affinity scores:
(Please note that affinity scores only reflect unassisted abilities and any mage can tap elementals where necessary to perform relevant feats of magic.)
But some of them also get:
I am afraid that there have been some disciplinary issues with [name of child]. While I can't force any two children to get along, outbursts of violent fantasies or name-calling aimed at other students are not conducive to the study of magic. If I have to continue to remove [pronoun] from the class for not meeting a minimum behavior standard with respect to their classmates they will have to learn by following along with video lectures instead, which I expect to be markedly less effective. This sort of behavior problem might also make befriending elementals for long-term arrangements more difficult. I hope you can help me convince [name of child] that learning magic is a better use of time than lashing out at other students.
None of Salali's teachers have ever had disciplinary problems with her. Maybe it's you.
Errie tells me that there are red mages in the class, despite red mages being prohibited in every jurisdiction, and that one of them has a Shadow elemental companion and will be learning shadow-stepping. I think this reflects an appalling lack of judgment on the part of the magic school and I commend Errie for her refusal to participate in such nonsense.
Maybe you shouldn't put them in a classroom with reds.
That sounds like such a hard problem to fix. I'm sure you've given lots of solutions due consideration. I favor putting the garbage out.
The kid who called Tiya a disgusting shitrag is the one whose grandma has custody. She writes back:
He shouldn't have to deal with that. Maybe there could be an evening session with no reds?
Maybe. If that seems likeliest to you you can withdraw Salali and reenroll her when some of the current students are able to teach; there will be more selection available then.
A withdrawal form is attached if that is how you and Errie would like to express your protest.
You're not the first to suggest this. You can withdraw Tobarak and reenroll him when some of the current students are able to teach; there will be more selection available then.
There's only one of me. There are two sessions a day to allow review for slower students (since I can't track them in the way conventional for Amentan school systems) and I'm using my evenings to produce air artifacts and work on other developments for terraforming so I'm reluctant to add a third, especially if specific students would be expressly and individually forbidden from attending through no fault of their own.
My daughter is cripplingly shy and the only person she spoke to outside the family was her Shine. After she got home from class for the first two days she stayed up until well past midnight showering and crying and gagging, so I chose to withdraw her. She hasn't spoken to anyone since he left and she still spends all her time showering. I hope you're proud of yourself.
You could have suggested he talk with her about why she stopped going to school and how she felt about it, instead of feeding him some bullshit where you're heroically standing up for the rights of reds by forcing scared isolated two-year-olds into classrooms with them. I assure you that lots of kids who desperately wanted to quit will keep going to class now, no matter how miserable they are, because the thought of losing their closest friend is even worse. Congratulations.
Parent writes Shine letting him know that whatever Maurabel said their daughter didn't ask to be withdrawn from the class and has no anti-red prejudice, she just couldn't stop gagging and it was very alarming. And they thought it might get better if she withdraw and went back home but instead she hasn't spoken a word since Shine left and is still showering for eight hours at a time so they'll reenroll her if under those circumstances he'd choose to come back, it can hardly be /worse/.
Thank you.
Students whose parents haven't withdrawn them continue to optimistically skip the morning section if the reds are there but then attend with minor grumbling if they're still there in the afternoons. Some of them have apparently been told that they lose this nice house and the opportunity for mommy and daddy not to work all day if they get in trouble at school, so they should do whatever they're told if they like having three meals a day and their parents home in the evenings. An enterprising green manages to convince the other greens that greens attend all day because they love learning, and an enterprising yellow similarly to convince the yellows that yellows take advantage of extra practice time so that they can get unusually careful and precise. The blue girl asks her elementals which session they'd like to attend.
"Not especially. I'm already spread pretty thin between artifact development and teaching and I don't have any special advantages at nonmagically educating them. Ice, does their visitation visa cover -"
"- yeah, I think residence-to-study allows them to go to Anitami schools."
"Dunno.
Maybe we could have all emailed before the classes started telling about ourselves so people would know the reds already. Instead of them being a surprise. They could have started out not going to both sessions so people felt like they had a little control over it. There could have been a glass wall.
She could have not sent an email that made you all want to leave. You could have asked me and we could have talked and even if after that you wanted to read about reds and then left then I wouldn't have thought you were gone forever because you hated me."
"A few kids are going to come back when there are more choices of teachers. Some of them alienated their elementals temporarily or permanently, who handled this with various amounts of grace - I helped but only a little. Rest of them are coping and the red students are keeping up."
"Might have worked if Voa weren't such a major exporter. And if he'd been able to convince them not to countermand it for six months. And with a couple thousand casualties, but - I can see how that'd seen like a good tradeoff, facing down the apparent inevitability of a mass slaughter..."
"I'm teaching these kids everything they need to know to... If they see an elemental with red hair, or a confused one who landed all birdlike in a red neighborhood and then walked out, they'll be able to turn them into their micromanaged perfect slave so they will cut it out because obviously it's so horrible and they mustn't be allowed -"
"Abolishing slavery, enacting population controls everywhere, wars are way down, universal access to birth control and abortion, universal vaccination. Or do you mean on reds in particular. We got rid of the social workers and got 'em cameras to stop police brutality and arrest people who take advantage of them. They have internet access and can lead the same online lives as anyone."
"It's purple. And grey but only in the sense greys'll always be the bulk of your discipline problems. The farther removed you are from it the better you can cope when it comes up - it's hard to have a crippling phobia of people you only see through the windows of midnight garbage trucks..."
"Naively I'd think you'd just apply Water healing, it does poisons, pretty low on the detail work, bam. Since the thing you want to clean is in fact completely fictional it seems like whether that does the trick or not depends on how good your spiel is. Earth should be able to do genes and transfusions and transplants but it might be insanely difficult to learn how. A filter for what -"
"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 -"
"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."
"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."
Snuggle. "Tapa kills kids born without a credit. Peka was leasing one - unexpected pregnancy - and behind on payments, so she joined the army. Telkam heard this and decided Peka and Katin - our oldest, she's over there -" He gestures. Katin is playing with her baby cousins. "- anyway he decided they should just run away to Anitam and we could make Aitim fudge the papers."