“But with a culture like yours, the more mature it gets, the greater the anxiety. When your subcultures meet, they don’t set up a pattern of domination and resistance that leaves nuggets of the smaller culture intact. They tend to just calmly blur together into one amalgamation. Fashions sweep across a whole world. Bangles for Vails one year, flanges the next . . . across a world of a trillion people. A single economic system manages all your social tensions—you don’t have separate, parallel systems for emotions, exchanged possessions, social status, reserve capital, heritage, or prestige, for instance. Just one kind of wealth. It all works smoothly . . . until, maybe, one day it doesn’t. One day there’s a flaw I—or we, you and I together—haven’t foreseen. An edge case. Something virulent that spreads through the culture and takes it down. It doesn’t necessarily happen in an eyeblink, not like in a . . .” Ze put another purple strip in zir mouth and chewed. “Not like in some kinds of cultures. But it might be unstoppable. When a culture like yours falls, it falls hard. And there are few warning signs.”

Fift swallowed. It occurred to zir that zir Fathers were probably still watching zir, and ze wondered what they would say about this. Ze could picture Fathers Smistria and Frill objecting; they loved to argue about history. Though how could you argue with this strange five-hundred-thousand-year-old Staid?

But even Father Smistria would be too polite to message in the middle of such a conversation. Fift queried the surround for how many people were currently observing, figuring ze’d see maybe seven or eight of zir Fathers, and a few of Shria’s.

There were 1,875,203 observers, with more piling in. The pavilion had already put in a bid for reactants to formally confirm its spike in status from hosting the conversation.

Thavé smiled a small, grim smile.

Of course, Fift realized, there would be Cirque-fans following all the Ticket Holders, looking for when the performance would break. And of course there must be scholars who had automated agents tracking Thavé’s movements and behaviors. And somehow that must have been enough of a nucleus that when the alien started talking about the end of the world, the audience boomed.

Fift swallowed, reminding zirself that, even if this was a lot more attention than ze usually got, it was a very small crowd by the standards of real celebrities in Fullbelly. Ze recalled zir classroom lessons in instant-fame comportment: the trick of it was to remember how short attention spans and memories were, not to confuse an anomalous spike with a real change, and to act with dignity and humility, ignoring the crowd.

“Kumru’s feces,” Shria said, vir lavender face blanching to cream-blue. “Fift, did you see the audience we’ve got?”

Fift tried to ignore vem. “So what do we do?” ze asked Thavé, zir voice tight.