Probably not forever.

Long enough to cover Orvara?

I think so. If it gets more complicated we'll help.

They found some yellows. If they'll be able to get jobs after. Are the IDs going to be all clean?

He asks Orvara about that.

"We're debating having some kind of marker on them so people aren't caught by surprise."

"Under what circumstances are you imagining they'd be caught by surprise?"

"If they hired a cleaned-up red and then found out somehow, is the principal case we have in mind."

"Do you think anyone will hire a cleaned-up red who they know was previously red?"

"Oh, I'm sure someone with sufficient faith in the process and an eye on their profit margins would consider it, for relatively low-skilled positions."

"In that case the yellows won't earn anywhere near enough money to pay for the other cleanings. Is Orvara going to pay for it?"

"Even the low end of the yellow market can afford houseplants, Neli."

"If it transpires that they can't find work that pays enough to cover the other reds, is Orvara going to pay for it?"

"Now, that's not what we agreed on. We're already supplying observers and IDs."

"Not IDs that give these people a practical chance of getting a job."

"What I mean is that there's usually a fee for a new ID and we volunteered to waive that."

"I do not recommend cleaning your reds if you're not going to make it possible for them to integrate."

"They can integrate as much as people are ready for. We do have freedom of association here."

"I have never heard of an interpretation of 'freedom of association' which extended to the government placing on formal identification papers all information that any person might consider relevant to who they want to interact with."

"Just the sort of thing that's normally on IDs, which includes caste - there's never been such a thing as 'previous caste' before, but still."

"So don't invent it. Put 'yellow' on their ID papers and leave it at that. All you have to do to make this work is not go out of your way to add new rules that will make it fail."

"Nobody's going to be happy if they find out that an employee or, worse, a friend, has been covering up that."

"It's worked for us. People don't want to be reminded of it, they won't go make friends with someone they know used to be red, but as long as they don't have to think about it it's really no big deal."

"Don't reds have those awful slum accents anyway?"

"They seem to learn to stop quite quickly."