“Technicalities.” Hesychast waved him off. “A thousand years. The Cheetah Palaces didn’t last that long, nor the Jellyfish Eaters, nor the classical Maia. And perhaps neither will we. By size and sheer variety the Oriati Mbo ought to be in constant chaos. Certainly, in every conceivable measure their lives are inferior to ours. They die more often, and younger. They have less wealth and fewer opportunities to climb society. They suffer pitiful diseases. They are our inferiors in every way … except that they’re happier. They’re happier than us.”

“It’s as if everything we do to them is somehow absorbed. Countered. Nullified.” Farrier looked at Hesychast in feverish, hateful excitement, and Baru flinched when he turned to her. “As if they’ve been rendered—”

“Causally closed.” Baru sat bolt upright. “Is that what you’re afraid of? They have the secret you need?”

“Exactly!” Hesychast slammed his fists on the table in excitement. “They have the key to an eternal empire. By accident or ancient design they know how to endure—even if they don’t know they know.”

“But of course,” Farrier said, his eyes locked on Baru’s, begging for her keenest attention, “he and I do not agree on the nature of that secret. He believes it is fleshly. Physical. A medicine or technique of indoctrination. I fear something far worse.…”

Hesychast silent now. Farrier went on:

“Imagine an idea like a disease. It spreads because it makes people happy. It makes them happy by convincing them to be content with what they have. Why invent a better fire when you can feel warm in the cold? Why save your children when you can shrug off their deaths? The Oriati Mbo, they say, is a happy land. A land of ancient philosophers and artists. They take care of each other and they accept their lot in life. And so they do not need to better that lot.

“Can you imagine a greater threat to our destiny? A more terrible fate than pleasant, blissful decay?”

Hesychast and Farrier fell back into their chairs, breathing hard. Baru stared at them with her chopsticks halfway to her mouth, quite paralyzed. She was thinking many thoughts at once. One was a thread of fury. When she had asked her teachers in school why she’d been happier before the Masquerade’s arrival, they had told her just what Farrier now said about the Mbo. The primitives were always happier in their ignorance. Before they realized what they lacked.

Some part of all this was Incrastic smoke. But Farrier and Hesychast thought that smoke was solid.

“You want immortality,” she said. “And you want them turned on each other, Farrier? So you can get your schools into them? Your coins? Your roads?”