Fift shrugged. In the hallway, ze tugged and tugged and tugged on the length of cloth. Should they be taunting the alien like this? Ze wondered what kind of conversation ze and Thavé would be having without Shria. Ze couldn’t imagine zirself telling the alien zir idea was broken.

“But of course,” said Thavé, “that is how you all got here in the first place.”

There was a long pause.

“It is?” Shria said.

“Yeah,” Fift said quietly. Ze was hazy on the details, but it sounded right. Before the Age of Roads and Doors. What was it . . . ? “‘On beetly wings soft-kissed by unseen light, / and shimmering with seen . . .’?”

Thavé smiled. “Did you think you were born out of the womb of this planet’s soil?”

Shria frowned. “I guess I never thought about it.”

“They used to say every culture in the Dispersal of Humanity had a central creation story. Yet another theory to toss into the compost-sluice of history.” Thavé leaned back from the table, swinging gently.

“Do you have to go?” Fift asked. “Or can you finish what you were saying, about the two schools of thought?”

“Oh? Right.” Ze put a hand against the table to stop the swing. “So the problem with the Cyclic-Expansionist school is, pretty soon you have a whole bunch of these expanding, collapsing societies, and they run into each other, and you get a lot of offensive weaponry, including these very exclusionist, binary ideologies—you know, ‘all X must die,’ says Y, and ‘all Y must die,’ says X. So you get these cascading cross-cultural cycles of destruction, and sooner or later that sends the whole pattern into an escalating instability that’s no longer manageable. You get to a density of technology where it takes a few hundred years to terraform a planet and only a few days to blow it up, and you can’t manage those swings anymore. Pretty soon you’ve got events that don’t just cull—they extinguish, and you can’t stop them.”

Ze was talking very calmly, but ze wasn’t looking at them anymore. Ze was looking at zir eating tines. It occurred to Fift that this wasn’t theory for Thavé. Ze slid zir hand across the table toward the other Staid. Thavé looked down at it sharply, blinked once, and took it.

“I’m sorry,” Fift said. Shria looked from one of them to the other and pressed vir lips shut.