“Ah yes, the protection we so kindly accord the sluggish. Well, perhaps you would like to come start an unlicensed riot with any of the adult Vails in my cohort. That would be a convenient way around the fact that you are not worth accompanying to the mats; they could simply beat you senseless in the courtyard. Might give your ratings a boost. And now we must go. Give my regards to the ancient heroes of legend. Fift?” Without another glance at Hrotrun, Pip turned and walked back towards the elevator. Fift followed, forcing zirself not to look back in zir body.

Pip took a long slurp of soup.

Over the feed, Hrotrun stood in the middle of the goopfield, quivering. Vir feathers had fanned out in sharp lumps. Ve was not slouching, though. Ve looked wakeful and in pain.

Bookies’ odds of vir collapse, in the next three months, were even.

Viewership had peaked at fifty thousand and was gradually trailing off.

Pip dropped the bowl. It fell to the table and rolled itself into a ball to keep from spilling its contents. Ze stared at Fift.

Fift swallowed. “Well, um. Thanks, I guess. I guess you . . . handled that.”

“Is it not clear to you,” Pip said, “that that was a disaster?”

“Well . . .” Fift coughed. “I mean, clearly at the end there you supplanted vem.”

“Yes,” Pip said, as if speaking to an infant. “It was I who supplanted vem. Was that the question? Was it in question whether I could supplant a slackwitted, childless, firstborn coward? No, it was not. That was not to be the match, was it, Fift? You, Fift, were to supplant vem. I was to observe mildly with parental pride. My presence was not ideal, but it seemed to be warranted. But Fift, now I have been seen by fifty thousand viewers to engage as an equal with this . . . creature, this anonybodying scrounger. Ve strikes my Staid child in a riot, and I am forced to critique vir crankish power fantasies and . . . to threaten vem—however sarcastically, threaten vem!—with an informal match with your Fathers! And why, Fift? Why has this cohort now engaged adult-to-adult—and traveled to Wallacomp to do so—with a childless residential cohort of fifteen transients in Kumru-abandoned Tentative Scoop?”

“Because I wouldn’t do what you said,” Fift said sullenly.

“Is that why? I am not asking you to produce what you think I want to hear, Fift. Think for yourself. I am ready to listen.”

In the elevator, Pip stood stiffly beside zir amid the strange, rich flowers.

In the bed, Fift fell asleep (to zir great surprise), plunging into dim dreams of following Shria through an underwater reef: murky water, bright fish, zirself a fish, and Shria, too.