Thavé looked at vem quickly. For a moment, ze looked nervously down at zir food. Ze was eating some odd purple strips that Fift had never seen before. Ze stabbed one with a set of eating tines. “Well,” ze said. “In one sense, fine. There’s a lot of homeostasis. You’ve been mostly at peace for a long time. Your economy has decent turnover. Economic class is bound to birth order, which is hardly egalitarian, but at least it’s moderately anti-accumulative. And the system is very efficient at resolving conflict.” Ze put the purple strip in zir mouth and chewed. “You’re good environmental stewards—you’re not running the planet into the ground. Population pressure is low because the resource costs of birthing are growing at about the same rate as life expectancy. I’m not sure how long that can last, but so far you’ve been pretty remarkable at finding new ways to make it more complicated to have a baby, without much help from me.”

Fift couldn’t follow all of this, but ze flagged it to go over later. It sounded like the world was doing fine, but Thavé still looked uneasy. “So what’s the other sense?”

“Well,” said Thavé. “You’re a monoculture. All your shatterballs are in one scoop.” Ze chewed some more, then swallowed. “Which is my fault as much as anyone’s.”

“Really?” Shria asked.

“In a way. You see, there are two main schools of cultural survival management. One encourages many distinct dynamic cultures: conflicts, expansion, booms and busts. You know: populations grow, get rich, develop dense tech. Sooner or later factions chafe against each other or their own internal tensions, and then there’s a big, cathartic war, or a plague that knocks them back down to sparse tech, sparse population.” Ze inspected zir fork. “The first school . . . thinks it’s best not to interfere with this cycle. Like letting forest fires happen naturally to clear out undergrowth? That’s the original, lost sense of ‘wildfire’ in your language, by the way: ‘fire that protects the wilds,’ that keeps the forest healthy. And this school was dominant from, oh, about 350,000 years ago up until 200,000 years ago.”

“It doesn’t sound like so much fun for the culture being managed,” Shria said.

“Well, maybe not to you,” Thavé said. “But you might be surprised. Those cultures are exciting. The sky’s the limit! Rags to riches! To the stars!” Ze waved zir eating tines. “Live free or die! Remember, much of the cycle is upswing. Most people’s lives involve getting richer. You just don’t want to be the generation that rolls triple-nulls.” Ze stabbed another purple strip. “If you brought someone from one of those cultures here, they’d die of boredom. They wouldn’t understand why you’re not spending your time building star-ships.”

“Building what?” Fift said.

“Star-ships. To go terraform other planets.”