Hrotrun smirked. “There were always Vail and Staid, in the sense that there were always the quick and the sluggish. What is new is all the frippery we put around it. And that frippery, my dear child—all the Midwives’ theories about harmony and balance and two fundamental poles of human being? It’s all to protect the sluggish. I don’t suppose they teach you that in school.” Vir shoulders unhunched and ve ran vir fingers through the iridescent feathers behind vir ears. For a moment, something else penetrated the bland, generic, smooth surface of Hrotrun’s somatic design—something haggard, bony, beautiful. The punters were trying to unload their bets now; the bookies’ odds of collapse were back to two to one against. “In fact, we are all sluggish and weak, ants and termites compared to the people who built themselves in Far History. We made ourselves this weak on purpose. Because someone thought it was sensible.”

Hungry in one of the bodies in the bed, Fift got up, padded down the hall, and entered the eating room. Pip was there, in a formal, woven, cream-colored suit-sarong. Ze looked up at Fift. A stranger might have thought ze looked impassive, but Fift could read zir expression: cold fury.

Viewership in the goopfield was up to thirty thousand and climbing.

“Remarkable,” Mother Pip said, to Hrotrun, zir tone perfectly neutral.

“What?” Hrotrun said, the corners of vir eyes tightening again.

“A remarkably convenient fantasy,” Pip said. “Elegantly designed. I express my admiration. It allows you to be both fundamentally powerful—because truly you are the last remnant of powerful heroes from the Ages Before the Ages—and at the same time explains away your abject failure as a person in this world. A conspiracy of the mediocre has so completely triumphed over the wonderful that the wonderful are to be pitied. We elide the question of how the mediocre managed this.”

In the eating room, Pip looked down at zir soup and lifted the bowl to zir lips.

Hrotrun looked like ve had bitten into a rotten mangareme. “You wouldn’t—”

“I wouldn’t understand,” said Pip. “Obviously, by definition. Much too sluggish. And I am sure that if you were back in the Ages Before the Ages, they would understand perfectly, and acclaim you as a fellow hero, as opposed to a childless, officially censured coward barely tolerated by vir own cohort who cannot even manage to anonymously beat children and effectively evade discovery.”

Hrotrun’s lips curled back. “You are lucky you have the protection of being a Staid—”