Fift’s stomach rumbled. Ze was hungry, but Fathers Arevio and Cartassia and Burin had become Near Cuisine enthusiasts, and were manually preparing some kind of complicated feast. (For thousands of years, Fift thought, people have been perfectly content to let their kitchens’ agents interface with their guests’ gastronomic agents to predict and then prepare the perfect meal . . . and now this trend comes along and people start stubbornly trying to figure out for themselves what to slice and grate and slather and heat with what! But wasn’t this whole Near Cuisine business, voluntarily depriving yourself of feed information and agent support, based on the same impulse towards independence and self-reliance as the Shelterings? Not that Fift’s parents would ever admit it . . . )

In another room, Mother Mulis (Chalia’s Mother) and Mother Egathelie (Lumlu’s Mother) stood with Fift at the edge of the playpit. In it, Lumlu was fighting spiders.

“And of course,” Father Thrimon said, lifting zir hands, “where would we be without them? Reactancies. Imagine if all the things we use were shaped by agents alone, without any living person’s eye, ear, or tongue? Far Technology is the basis of our society, but without the human touch . . . well, if you don’t mind my citing the fifth analytical discursus of the twelfth addendum to the alternate codification of—”

“I mind,” said Father Frill, coming into the room doublebodied. “Kind Kumru, Thrimon! Everyone can hear you!” Ve was wearing a tight rainbow unitard, sleeved on one body, sleeveless on the other. Vir powerful bare arms glistened with sweat, and ve was holding practice swords. Ve handed them from one body to the other, left the room to take them away, and sat down on a bench at the wall, looking at Fift. Ve crossed vir arms. “So, Fift. Can you tell us, this time, what you’re making in this reactancy of yours?”

Fift shifted uneasily in zir seating harness.

The hollow windmoan, the pungent figgy electric autumn . . .

In zir sleeping body’s dream, a wind was blowing, clearing away mists—a cold wind. Murkily, ze felt that body shiver.

“It’s not that it’s a secret or anything,” ze said.

Frill snorted.

Lumlu giggled. The spiders were as big as ve was, headless, all bone-white legs. One scurried between two of vir bodies. Wide-eyed, ve stumbled forward to lunge at it.

Fift looked down at zir hands. “I just don’t know what it’s called . . . what we’re making. I mean, it doesn’t have a name yet.”

Frill shook vir head. “And will it have a name? Will it ever emerge from your little . . . fools’ paradise there, your self-exiled-mega-cohort with its head in the sand, your wombtombatum-for-a-thousand, or whatever it purports to be? Are you making something that belongs to the world, that I will one day see?”

A look of concern crossed Thrimon’s face.

“I don’t know,” Fift said. “Maybe not.”