“You know, the old Staid over there.” Ve pointed at a stout, round-shouldered, heavy-bosomed person in a white suit. Ze looked no older than Father Grobbard. “Do a lookup. Thavé. Zir name is Thavé.”

That was all that lookup gave for the Staid across the Pavilion: Thavé. A single name, and some obscure pointers. “What name registry?” Fift said, trying to figure out how to navigate the pointers.

“You have to look in general info, as if ze were a country or something. Ze predates name registries.”

“Wow.” Fift found the entry. Ze’d been expecting a bare minimum: identity, publicly disclosed locations, wealth, profession. But looking up Thavé was like looking up some ancient monument: scholarly articles; illustrated profiles from quaint lifestyle magazines of three hundred years ago; incomprehensible thousand-year-old political cartoons; annotated analyses of scholarly articles; dramatizations and satires of events ten thousand years in the past for stage, viz, immersive, voice-play, circus, and hoaxgame; bibliographies of annotated analyses of scholarly articles; schoolchildren’s essays; manifestoes, denunciations, tributes, satires, jokebooks, songbooks, recipes; parodies of bibliographies of annotated analyses of scholarly articles. Thavé was, apparently, half a million years old; and wasn’t that—Fift tried to remember—older than the world?

“Ze’s twelve-bodied,” Shria said, “with six public locations. Can you imagine having twelve? It makes my head hurt.”

“Let’s go talk to zir,” Fift said.

“What? Really?” Shria sounded horrified or excited; Fift couldn’t tell which. “Are you serious?”

“Sure.” Ze stood up. Ze felt a little fear prickling zir scalp, but weren’t they rich today? Didn’t they have Tickets? “Maybe ze’s part of the show.”

“Oh, maybe!” Shria said. “Hey, maybe it’s not really zir!”

“What?” Fift frowned. “But we did a lookup.”

“This is the Cirque, remember?”

“You think they can mess with lookup? Shria . . .”

Shria shrugged. “Who knows?”

Fift slid out of zir harness and onto the ground. Ze bowed to zir mangareme fluffy; it dipped once in acknowledgement and flew back to the kitchen. “Let’s go.”

“Okay . . .” Shria took zir arm. “Kumru! I never knew you were so brave, Fift.”

“What’s brave about it? Ze doesn’t eat people.”

Thavé was sitting at a table alone, zir white hat in the harness beside zir. Ze was spinning a globe of tea with one hand, occasionally sipping from it, and reading a long, folded black-and-white paper. No one around them was paying any attention to zir. Ze looked up, unsmiling, as they approached. Fift’s step faltered for a moment, but ze kept going.

Thavé took zir hat out of the harness and put it on the table.

“Hi,” Shria said.

“Hey,” Thavé said. “Sit down.”

They sat.

“Are you really . . .” Shria said.

Thavé smiled. “The alien? Yeah.” Ze chuckled. Zir eyes flicked to Fift, then to Shria, doing a lookup. “You’re a bit far from home, I think? Looks like you’re having a good day.”