At home, Fift bolted from the empty hallway near the study-pit. Ze turned a corner and ducked into the sleeping alcove to where ze lay, struggling out of bed. Ze helped zirself up and ran, doublebodied, downstairs to the breakfast room.

Ze almost fell off the stairs. Ze righted zirself and ran on, slammed zir shoulder into the wall on the left, and stopped. Something was wrong. Something was—

Foo had stopped rotating. Ze was compensating for a motion that was no longer there.

More than the lights, this filled zir with panic.

“Foo stopped,” ze said to Shria. They were looking up at the strange dancing stars. Most of them were slowing to a halt.

“I know,” ve said. Ve took zir hand, vir cool palm filling the space Thavé’s warm one had left.

Four of Fift’s parents were sitting around the table, and Father Smistria was pacing. They looked up as ze clattered down the stairs. Squell and Nupolo and Grobbard held out their arms. Fift came and sat among them, nestled in their embraces. Their eyes were all distant, engrossed in what their other bodies saw.

“What is it?” said Shria. “Is it the Cirque?”

Fift turned to Thavé, but the alien was gone, zir eating tines still lying on the table, piercing one of the strips. Zir hat was gone, too. Lookup showed only four public positions for zir twelve bodies, all of them far away.

There was a sudden gasp from many throats, and a few sharp cries. Fift looked up.

Bright streaks of light were moving through the darkness, impossibly fast. They spun loops around Foo and Stiffwaddle and Undersnort and Wallacomp habitations, leaving trails of brilliant white that faded behind them. They swung through the space of Fullbelly, dodging elevator-strands, sluice-cables, and lonely, still whirligigs, illuminating them into incandescence, casting weird flickering shadows on the faces of bounceroos and stickywalls and polypenetrations. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight. Eight blazing somethings whooshing through Fullbelly’s space; terrifying, like dangerously gifted creatures from some forgotten mythology.

Then all eight objects, scattered through Fullbelly, flipped or turned or spun and headed back, dodging and weaving through the structures, heading towards one another, heading for a collision.

Shria pulled Fift to vem; ze stumbled from zir chair and held vem. Ze tensed in Shria’s arms, in Nupolo’s, in Squell’s (and nestled, loosening, in Grobbard’s).

The eight terrifying speeding things crashed into one another in one enormous flash of light, sending up a shower of sparks which tore through Fullbelly and disappeared.

At the next table, two doublebodied, obviously latterborn Vails—one lanky and almost naked, the other with emaciated, etched muscles, one pair of blue wings, and one pair of red wings—began to applaud.

People stared at them. “Don’t you get it?” the winged one said. “It’s the Cirque!”

“We have Tickets!” the almost naked one said.