Swirls of snow, dancing up, sliding across the crust as the boots broke through it . . .

“So you’re latterborn again.” Umlish smirked. “We should congratulate you.” Ze took a step closer, and Shria, bony and cold and nine years old, quivered. “Your parents should have made sure you had the appropriate agents for a trip to the surface. They do seem very distracted. I wonder if they might still be a bit overburdened?”

Panaximandra on vir pillar, in vir glimmering, glinting exoskeleton: “Who were those parents? Those lucky people, who were given the right to create life? Note that I say given! They did not take the right, as their due, as their inheritance, as their destiny as human beings—”

Shria stood up, dropping a mossy stick. Vir jaw clamped down hard, suppressing vir quivering. Ve looked across the clearing at Perjes and Tomlest, and vir eyes blazed, daring them to laugh.

“. . . hardly egalitarian,” Thavé said, “but at least it’s moderately anti-accumulative . . .”

Umlish’s eyes were slightly narrow-set, and they burned with scorn. “Shria doesn’t want any Younger Siblings. Ve was glad to get rid of that little baby—”

Shria, nine years old, shaded by purple songfronds, electric with pride, as vir parents placed vir baby sibling in vir arms. The tiny mottled red face, eyes scrunched closed, the tiny head resting in the crook of Shria’s elbow—

“—weren’t you, Shria?”

“. . . you’ve been pretty remarkable,” Thavé said, poking at zir food, “at finding new ways to make it more complicated to have a baby, without much help from me . . .”

Roaring anonybodies. Panaximandra, gleaming: “Every one of you can be a Hero. Every one of you can be a Mother!”

“FREEDOM! VALOR! CONQUEST! BABIES!”

Panning up from the boots: a mass of figures trudging through deep snow, bundled in thick clothing . . .

“We might be allowed to see,” Hrotrun snapped, teeth gritted in vir too-symmetrical face, “a child . . .” Vir voice broke. “Ooh, look, a child! Passing by . . .”

“But with a culture like yours,” Thavé said, staring at zir eating tines, “the more mature it gets, the greater the anxiety . . .”

Panaximandra slitted vir eyes in contempt. “You insects rearranged the furniture of the hive you live in, and rearranged it again.”

Fift’s eyes widened. “You hit me . . . because I was a Staid.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Hrotrun snapped. “We don’t hit Staids!”

An elbow cracked against Fift’s temple, and ze crumpled down—

Fift shuddered involuntarily. Ze looked so pathetic, a little scrap of beige and white in that blue-and-red tumult, flopping down like a tossed-away rag . . .

The view panned up from the boots, revealing bundled figures, trudging through the snow, and behind them: glittering airships, naked sky, a cold blue surface dawn. It was personal footage, a recording through the eyes of some single individual. Some orphan deportee’s furtive, smuggled footage of the Pole?

Hrotrun. “We just clown for your amusement and service you sexually—”