Home wasn’t far; just across the waysweep, a little ways under that strange blue dome, and down three flights of stairs. Ze started walking.

At home, ze was asleep in the nest room, and ze was smearing mangareme paste on a broibel in the dining nook.

Dobroc looked up from zir soup. “Oh, good,” ze said, “you’re done at the reactancy.”

Fift smiled, scooped up more paste. “Am I really so bad when I’m in there?”

“Not bad,” Dobroc said. “Just distracted.”

Dobroc only had one body in the Sheltering at the moment. The rest were invisible to Fift—they were out beyond the Sheltering’s Gates in the rest of the world, with all its troubles. Fift put down the smearer, reached zir hand across the table, and took Dobroc’s hand, feeling the ridges and grottoes and channels of zir palm. Dobroc still had the same intricate topography of skin, that adolescent folly of somatic design. Fift treasured it. “How’s it going out there?”

Dobroc shrugged. “I don’t know why I even still do this.”

“That bad?”

Dobroc took a deep breath. “Oh, you know. It could be worse. It’s progress; in some sense, this is the smoothest region-level Episode of the Conversation since—well, since the Unraveling, really! Even five years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to gather this group together, never mind generate a coherent flow. It’s just that . . . it’s still so polarized. There are four speakers from various Shelterings, and two who are middle-of-the-road liberationists or maybe post-liberationists. The rest are, well, you know. They’re not exactly neo-repressionists, or they’d be boycotting the whole thing. But they’re . . . they can’t help but see us as a threat. Why do we shut ourselves up in these secret places? What are we hiding? Why do we think we’re too good for the rest of the world?”

“They say all that?” Fift had crossed the waysweep; ze entered the stairwell.

“Well, not directly.” Dobroc smiled. “This is the Conversation, after all. Lots of citations from the metacommentaries of the eighth work of the tenth cycle . . .”

“Ah,” Fift said, “Ranhulo.”

“Oh, they don’t dare bring out Ranhulo,” Dobroc said. “Higgis and Mathus, mostly, those grumbling pedants. Ranhulo would have gotten it. Ranhulo saw zir own prejudices and crystallized them. If you quote zir out of context, ze can seem anti-Vail, but ze wasn’t. Ze transcended zir own—” Dobroc stopped and grinned. “But why am I telling you this? None of us would be here if not for your new reading of Ranhulo!”

Fift smiled shyly and looked down.

“Anyway,” Dobroc said, “they tried Ranhulo once last year, and Morinti stuffed the elegiac sixth subsection of zir second metacommentary on the eighth work down their throats.” Ze grinned, a grin with a rueful edge.

“Morinti?” Fift asked. “Morinti Bob Elarus of name registry Selfish Turkey 12? Our old comrade-in-arms?”