“I’m not”—Fift blundered on in the skywhale. “I’m not going to die of my mistakes. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ll be like Predoria, alone and working in a great hall full of strangers . . .” There was a hard lump in zir throat.

“Oh, for Kumru’s sake,” Smistria said. “Frill, didn’t you say you were fetching zir? What is taking you so long?”

“And maybe I’ll be miserable. But maybe—maybe it’s not enough to hum along like a component snug in its casing, Mother Pip!”

“It’s not zir fault!” Squell cried. “Don’t blame zir. You mustn’t blame yourself, cubblehedge”—ve buried vir face in Arevio’s garment—“for what will happen—”

“I’m almost there,” Frill said. “Don’t take another step, Fift. I’m almost there.”

“No,” Fift said, shrugging away from Frill’s hand. “Don’t, Father Frill. I just—”

Pip squeezed zir eyes shut.

“Maybe it’s better to be miserable,” Fift said in the skywhale, zir voice quavering. “Maybe it’s better to be miserable for a century, if at the end you—you win joy built on honest foundations, Mother Pip, and not on—”

{I’m not going home.} Fift sent zir context advisory agent. {I’m going to . . .} Ze glanced, over the feed, at the local Slow-as-Molasses docks.

There was a crowd at the docks, and for a moment Fift thought it might be another riot. But there were Staids as well as Vails in the crowd, and the Peaceables flanking it were watching silently. They weren’t fighting, but nor were they boarding the bats and whales. They milled around, squatted, leaned against struts and pillars, jostled in groups. Orphans; the emotionally bankrupt; refugees of broken cohorts and closed reactancies; the abandoned and collapsing turned away from the gates of Idylls . . . anyone too low-rated to travel, fetched up against the docks like flotsam, exhausted from fruitlessly begging passage.

“Excuse me,” said the old Staid in the row in front of them (a four-hundred-year-old pedagogical agent arranger), “but I couldn’t help overhearing your fascinating discussion . . . and I said to myself, this sort of thing is so often the result of poor pedagogical agent arrangement! People blame the parents, when in fact the parents may be only indirectly at fault—”

Fift crossed a bridge, and now ze saw the milling crowd at the docks with zir own eyes. Some people there were turning to look up . . . at zir?

“Mine are mood-collared,” said a Vail in the row behind them with a dramatic nimbus of bright orange hair. “Solves the whole problem. I can’t imagine raising staidkids without it. It’s impossible, the things we expect of them! How are you going to get a child to do all this sitting and mumbling without—”

“Such extreme measures,” the agent arranger said, “are rarely indicated, when a simple—”