“Well,” Thavé said, and sighed. “I’ve been saying for a while that you ought to diversify. You need to start loosening the stranglehold of consensus. You need a little more . . . room. But I’m not always listened to.” Ze looked at them carefully. “Indeed, the tighter the consensus, the less effect my advice has. I’d also like to see you cultivate more physical displacement—to spread yourselves out a little. Frankly, I would love for you to start building star-ships . . . though your objections to them are eminently logical, Shria. You could at least be expanding more within your own solar system . . . but I don’t seem to be making much headway there, either. Lately it seems like I’m not making much headway anywhere.”

Fift didn’t know what to say to that.

“Sorry,” Thavé smiled. “I’m being maudlin. I don’t want to ruin your outing.” Ze patted zir pocket again. “You’re here to see a show.”

“Is that what you’re here for?” Fift asked, relieved. “I mean here in this pavilion, today? The show? Like us?”

“Certainly,” Thavé said. “And then I’m on my way to visit a friend, another alien. Maybe ve’ll have some ideas.”

“Another alien?” Shria said. “How many of you are there? Are you just . . . traveling beyond the world all the time? Where do you go?”

“Are you leaving the world?” Fift asked. The thought made zir queasy.

“Oh no, no,” Thavé said. “My friend is here, in an Idyll. Good place for those of us who can’t entirely . . . adapt to your ways of doing things. There aren’t many of us at all, I’m afraid. Just a few artifacts of Far Technology rattling around your planet, of whom I am—if I do say so myself—by far the easiest to talk to. And we don’t usually go anywhere; nowadays, traveling between stars means spending a few hundred years cramped into a very old, very fast machine, exposed to a lot of radiation, and without anything to eat. Or breathe. Arduous.”