Fift did a lookup on ‘terraform,’ but the entry didn’t make much sense. Sort of like digging Fullbelly? “I don’t get it.”

Thavé pinched the bridge of zir nose. “You know, you’d build some enormous vehicle, or a bunch of small ones, and you’d—well, for instance, you could take it to some other planet circling some other star, and engineer that planet so that you can live on it—or in it—and then you live there.”

“What?” Shria said. “But other planets don’t usually have air.”

“Right,” Thavé said. “You’d have to build air.”

“And what about bodylag?” Fift said. “There’s no way you could compensate for that. Your bodies would—I mean, you couldn’t keep them in communication, so . . . they’d . . .” A chill went through zir. One of zir bodies was still asleep, but the third climbed out of the study-pit and started to pace the hallway, wrapping and unwrapping a length of cloth from zir robe. “You’d just fall apart,” that body said, alone in the silent hall.

“You’d have to take all your bodies with you, or not go,” Thavé said.

Shria looked sidelong at Fift. {What in the abandoned void . . . ?} “Let me . . . let me get this straight,” ve said. “You’d have to put some impossible amount of resources into building machines that could push you . . .” Ve frowned, clearly calling on vir agents for calculation. “Push huge masses to . . . other stars.”

Thavé nodded.

“Which are . . . really far away. So it would take . . . lifetimes. And then when you finally got there, they’d be bare rocks or have poisonous atmospheres. No nutrient flow—not even any nutrients in the whole place! Right?”

Thavé raised zir eyebrows in agreement.

“And it would take centuries of work—at least!—to totally . . . deface them into looking sort of like a planet you could live on.”

“At least,” Thavé said.

“And meanwhile you’d be living in a vehicle,” Fift murmured.

“Well, someone would be,” Thavé said.

“And even if you spent huge energies,” Shria said, “you’d just be sending some tiny, tiny part of the people in the world . . . and the rest would have to deal with all the waste and disorganization these ‘star-trips’ created. And the people who did go would be so far away that they couldn’t even talk to their friends and parents anymore, or even see each other over the feed. And everyone would be poorer, because they’d be missing what the others would have given them!” Ve spread vir hands. “And then, after all that expense and heartbreak, you’d have a . . . a world that was . . . pretty much like what you already had in the first place! If you were incredibly lucky! Is that . . . is that what you’re saying?”

Thavé nodded. “Pretty much.”

“What?!” Shria exploded.

“Except you’d have two of them.”

Shria looked at Fift. “That is the most broken idea I’ve ever heard.”