Pip looked dour. Ze didn’t need to send anything for Fift to know what ze was thinking. The spider has escaped the playpit, zir expression said. We will have to settle for an insincere formal apology, and we will look like fools.

Fift cleared zir throat. “You seem really . . . tied up in this whole Staid and Vail thing.”

Hrotrun almost choked. “What? What are you talking about?”

“You seem like . . . you think everything wrong with your life is Staids’ fault, right?”

“Oh, please,” Hrotrun said, contemptuously. “From citizen investigator to Idyll introspectionist. If you haven’t learned anything from what I said, you are incapable of it. Now let us end this.”

“But,” Fift said, doggedly, “you’re a Far Historical index design technician . . .”

“What does that have to do with anything? Do you even know what that is, by the way?”

“I know what Far History is,” Fift said, though zir idea of it was vague. The Ages Before the Ages . . . incomprehensible differences in thinking, partially bridged by incomprehensibly sophisticated automated processes . . . Then ze thought of what Thavé had said: that’s how you all got here in the first place. “It’s . . . before people came to the world. All the other worlds people lived on before.”

“Yes, yes,” Hrotrun said, softening a little. “What we know of them—what we can know of them. Much of what we have is just data—it hardly deserves to be called information, much less knowledge. And much of the supposed knowledge is generated by Far Theoretical engines which are themselves almost incomprehensibly strange. Which is where indexing comes in . . .” Ve caught vemself beginning to lecture and tightened vir lips in a thin smile. “Not that anyone cares about that anymore.”

{Fift, that is enough.} Pip sent. {This line of inquiry is not appropriate.}

“But Vail and Staid . . .” Fift felt a rush of blood to zir face. Ze avoided looking at Pip. It was a stupid thing to ask; ze’d lost the thread of what ze’d been trying to do. But one of the messages in zir incoming queue, from one of the Staid admirers zir brush with fame had generated—one Dobroc P., who Fift had accepted contact from because Dobroc was somehow connected to Father Thurm—Dobroc had asked, and the question had struck Fift. It was a daring question; and it was suddenly, somehow, Fift’s own question. So, despite the blood pounding in zir ears, ze asked it: “. . . I mean, there didn’t used to be Vail and Staid. In Far History, I mean. So how can . . . how can it all be about . . . that?”

Pip tensed.