“Yeah,” Shria said. Ve glanced at Fift as if to say, Should we tell zir? Fift nodded. “We have Tickets.”

“To the Cirque?” Thavé said. “Me too.” Ze patted zir pocket.

“Oh,” Shria said.

Fift looked intently at the alien. It felt like ze should ask something important. It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, meeting someone from somewhere . . . else. But it was confusing. What should ze ask? Are you really half a million years old? (That seemed improbable; how could anyone live that long? But it said so right on the lookup entry: Thavé’s bodies were ordinary, grown recently, but Thavé zirself was a creation of some lost Far Technology that no one . . . not even Thavé . . . understood anymore.) What’s it like being an alien? What could Thavé say to that? Dumb questions. There were some standard phrases, traditional expressions of politeness towards an older Staid, but they felt wrong. Was Thavé even really a Staid? Ze was older than Staid and Vail, right? Ze could ask that: Are you really a Staid? But that would be shockingly rude, maybe not the best way to start a conversation with an alien.

“What do you think of us?” Shria said.

“Of the two of you?” Thavé asked.

“No. Of all of us.” Ve gestured around and above the pavilion, towards Fullbelly, the surface, the world. “I mean, you’re pretty much the only one who has something to compare us to.”

“What a good question. You know, I’ve been here twenty thousand years. I’ve kind of gotten used to it.” Ze pursed zir lips.

Ze looked so ordinary, Fift thought. It was as if Fift saw the scene doublebodied: one body’s eyes seeing an ordinary, rumpled, middle-aged Staid; the other seeing some strange cold alien thing with secret, incomprehensible meanings, plans, and intentions.

“It’s been a long time,” Thavé said, “since I . . . compared you to anything.”

“Really?” said Shria. “It seems like you would do that all the time.”

Thavé scratched zir head. “Well, just in one sense: I think about your survival. I spend a lot of time comparing you to other places, worlds that survived a long time, or a short time. More than I should, actually, because I don’t think it helps. But in terms of, I don’t know, the food, the clothes, the genders, the language? Twenty thousand years is a long time. I’m part of your society now. I mostly compare you to your grandparents. Like, I think, ‘I miss threedee, will that come back?’”

“You think about our survival?” Fift said.

“Yes,” Thavé said. “That’s sort of my job. I’m a survival consultant.”

“And how is our survival doing?” Shria said.