"If instead we head out from the house with our hair dyed, leave for the lightleapers from some other destination..."

"I mean, maybe, but you'd still be a lot of people wandering around with no valid ID, traveling by fairy, the fairies might talk..."

"We could explain ourselves but I am concerned they'll try to interfere with our running our colony planet the way we want to."

"They're less Federationy, what do you have in mind?"

"It seems like they don't leverage the thing where they become daeva when they die, is it widely known?"

"Not at all, actually. Should probably tell them."

" - so then it becomes mostly about how they react to that. I'm also expecting people in general to be twitchy about a, uh, invasive species setting up in their universe."

"They don't have your conditioned reaction to having to share space. The reaction won't be unmixed but they'd probably be excited; you're photogenic, more or less, and a lot of people were disappointed that daeva were the only aliens."

"I can send a particularly photogenic team. They can half be pregnant, if that helps."

"I meant photogenic in a broader sense than looking pretty for a camera and I don't think pregnancy will help all that much. Just, you're human-like but interestingly different and don't have an obvious conflict with humanity."

"They'll be less fussed about the caste system?"

"They won't necessarily like it but they don't have the apparently plentiful examples the Federation has of caste systems being stupid. The reds will bother them but you're gonna fix that."

"Working on it. Timine, who's been directing the project, wanted to just put in a work order and grab those reds and let an angel at them but I think my sister-in-law Isel talked her down."

"Need more buy-in first?"

"We may as well do some reds now and keep them contained and show them off while accumulating buy-in but Isel thinks we should pick the reds carefully."

"Mm?"

" - oh, you haven't met - reds work very hard at acting in a way that will not cause even minor irritation on the part of anyone around them, more than the baseline irritation of having to be around a red, and at acting like they definitely would never think about causing you any trouble, and most of them are plainly terrified around clean castes, and if we want buy-in it'll help to have someone who can act normal enough that one can imagine them integrating while still doing the deference thing enough people don't feel challenged."

"Ah-huh."

"We had some in my office during the blizzard. It was unpleasant, and not because of anything to do with pollution."

"Does deference irritate you?"

"They're so terrified - and trying to convince them not to be makes it worse because then they're trying to figure out how not to offend the person they've plainly offended and who clearly wants them to pretend to believe him -"

"I wonder how that could have happened."

"There were - sixty-three incidents recorded last fall of reds lunging at someone and touching them. The reds have interesting taste in who to lunge at, every time they picked an armed cop."

"Fancy that."

"You get a police strike if you push the greys too far - ask them to wear cameras or anything - you get an angry army if you really push it, start calling it murder when the cops shoot unarmed people. We made the reds wear cameras, instead."