Coda;
["So, some of us in my neighborhood are planning a Splurge in a few months," says the hearse driver, who Subtle - Infra, to his online friends and acquaintances - had not been totally sure was even ex-red until this very moment. Their eyes meet in the rear-view mirror, just for a moment, before the driver returns his attention to the road. "Not, like, a real big one? Not like a full-district one. But something. I know you got a kid, you should bring her."
The third member of their crew, a girl half Subtle's age who he knows is born-purple, busies herself steadying the full stretcher as the hearse takes a turn in the road. She very much has the attitude of someone who isn't sure if she ought to be hearing the conversation, or if she wants to, or if she ought to want to.
The district where Subtle grew up was a Winter Splurge kind of district, but at this point the "when is splurge" debate isn't something he finds he really cares that much about. Heck, biannual seems like a pretty good idea to him, at that. He grins. "Yeah, that sounds great. Just let me know when. We'll bring a dish."
Subtle's daughter goes to Splurge halfway across the city. She goes to purple schools in her own neighborhood, where she does well - not exceptionally, but well.
When she is two, her parents tell her about her brother, the one who died of a fever a couple seasons older than she is now, the winter before he would have been cleaned.
When she is five and finishes training as a plumber - a cleanplumber, still trying to decide whether she ought to train as a rotation plumber, too - she gets accepted to emigrate to the Tapai colony world, and two seasons later she sponsors her parents' applications as well. Subtle and his wife leave Amenta, and have their third child - second clean, second surviving - in the last spring they're both fertile; their first grandchild is born the same year. Their son-in-law is born-clean.
It's not possible to really keep current on news from another planet, most of the time, not the way it had been to keep tabs on other countries on Amenta. But Subtle eats up reports from Miovay; when he can, he buys goods imported from Miovay. Sometimes he fantasizes about growing his hair out, letting the purple dye fade. He never does.
Most of his great-grandkids have naturally purple hair.
He dies at the age of thirty-eight, and the rotation workers who collect him are a pair of born-purples he trained.]
