“Right. Well, so there had been almost no contact between the two races since the indigo drove the gulden out of the valley two hundred years ago. So the fact that Casen Solvano went off to study the gulden was this amazingly shocking thing. He would resurface every few years and give anthropological papers on ‘The Lifestyle of the Gulden Tribe’ and things like that. Then he’d disappear again. He was considered a nutcase, but he was actually pretty valuable because he brokered some of the deals between races that got more of the city built. There’s a plaza named after him somewhere on the west edge of the city. I’ve never been there.”

“So then, this girl,” Nolan said patiently. “Kitrini? Is that her name?”

Melina nodded. “Solvano had a son named Anton—who took his father’s name, by the way, not his mother’s, though I’ve never been too clear on what kind of strange woman he could convince to marry him. Probably some low-caste girl willing to take any husband. But this Anton, he was like some wild man. He was practically brought up among the gulden—I heard some story that he never saw his grandmother’s land till he was ten years old. They sent him to City College, and he blew away all their test scores. I mean, he was brilliant, but he was totally lunatic. He started agitating for the admission of gulden to City College, and for equal rights in the city for guldmen and guldwomen. Until Anton Solvano came around, you know, the gulden couldn’t own property in the city. They still can’t own it in-country, of course, and I don’t expect that will ever change. But he did a lot for the gulden within the city limits.”

Melina took a sip of her coffee while Nolan waited impatiently. “Like his father,” she continued, “he had studied anthropology, and he produced all these really inflammatory papers about the differences between the indigo and the gulden. I mean, pretty brutal assessments of the indigo, calling them a primitive matriarchal feudal system and questioning all sorts of inheritance laws that had been in existence for centuries. Most people tried to ignore him but he did have an impact, and all sorts of debate groups were started to discuss some of his observations.” Melina smiled. “Anton Solvano is probably the reason you’re here in the city today. He called the female-dominated blueskin society barbaric, inefficient, and repressive, and he made a lot of young men his age start questioning their roles in their mothers’ houses.”

“And then he had this daughter,” Nolan prompted.