The Sheltering’s feed showed Dobroc at home, finishing zir soup, making ready for Shria by shooing the dishes into the kitchen, tidying the study-pit. Shria must be through the Amber Gate by now.

Fift had to go to zir parents’ apartments in one of zir bodies, that was clear. Another body would be asleep in the nest room for hours. And the third . . . ?

Ze could linger here at the Gate watching the world’s feed. Or head back to the reactancy to put in a few more hours in the sweet juicy heart of the stream. Or find a public sleep nook and try to rest. Or go watch Cemerid play rumcaddy down in the arena.

Wherever ze went in the Sheltering, though, ze’d be able to see zir own home. Ze’d be able, if ze wanted, to see Shria and Dobroc engaging in the Long Conversation.

Ze noticed zir hands were trembling in both bodies. Absurd! Shria coming to the apartment should not be an epic opera-game.

Nevertheless, ze went out onto the rough green carpet of the dock with both bodies, towards the robot bat zir agents showed zir. It will be good to have two brains out here to deal with the world’s feed, ze told zirself, though the excuse sounded flimsy, even to zir.

As the bat rose from the dock into the air of Fullbelly, crowded with stickywalls and polypenetrations and bounceroos, Fift watched Dobroc in the apartment, laying out spoons. Dobroc studied one intensely, then polished it with the corner of zir sleeve; as ze did so, the bat moved out of range of the Sheltering’s feed. The image of Dobroc grew fuzzy and gray, stretched and warped, and then dissolved like morning mist . . . and Fift, among Fullbelly’s teeming billions, felt very alone.

Chapter 24

3

The robot bat left Fift at the docking-spires. Ze took a route that avoided zir old childhood home (now occupied by a former neighbor who’d always bet against them and vir smug, unbearable cohort) and went through the grove, up the spoke, to the somewhat less confident end of Slow-as-Molasses.

Zir parents had lived there for thirty years, but ze still thought of it as “the new apartment.” Really, ze still thought of it as “Chalia’s house.”

Ze’d been in Izist when ze heard—no one had even told zir; ze’d stumbled onto it on a general news stream—that homeless Iraxis cohort had merged with Spin-Nupolo; that zir baby cousin Chalia Rigorosa was now zir sibling and ze was elderborn; that zir parents had a home again. Ze remembered the stab of relief and gratitude—Auntie Ellix had come through again—and how ze’d stumbled against Shria and begun to cry. A crying Staid in the riotous carnival of Izist: nothing special, in those days.