Fift knew that, though it still seemed strange. Ze’d been inside Mother Pip for ten months. Singlebodied, because zir other two bodies hadn’t been fashioned yet. That was an eerie thought. Tiny, helpless, one-bodied, unbreathing, zir nut-sized heart drawing nutrients from Pip’s blood. “Why did Pip get to be my Mother?”

Now Grobbard was clearly smiling. “Have you ever tried to refuse your Mother Pip anything?”

Fift shook zir heads solemnly. “It doesn’t work. Ze’s always the Younger Sibling.” That meant the one who won the argument. But it also meant the littlest child, if there was more than one in a family. Fift wasn’t sure why it meant both those things.

Grobbard chuckled. “Yes. There was a little bit of debate, but I think we all knew Pip would prevail. Ze had a uterus and vagina enabled and made sure we all had penises for the impregnation. It was an exciting time.”

Fift pulled up the feed and looked up penises. They were for squirting sperm, which helped decide what the baby would be like. The egg could sort through all the sperm and pick the genes it wanted, but the parents had to publish something or other to get the genome approved, and after that it got too complicated. If someone got a penis they’d have one on each body, dangling between their legs. “Do you still have penises? One . . . on each body?”

“Yes, I kept mine,” Grobbard said. “They went well with the rest of me, and I don’t like too many changes.”

“Can I have penises?” ze said.

“I suppose, if you like,” Grobbard said. “But not today. Today you have something more important to do. And now I see that your Father has baked you new clothes. So rinse off, and let’s go upstairs.”

“Obviously I’m not talking about the details of the . . . process,” Father Smistria said, flinging vir arms wide.

“I should hope not,” Father Squell said. “Hold still, Fift!” Ve gripped Fift’s head firmly between one pair of hands and stooped over zir in another body to gently scrape away the last of zir hairs with the depilator. “It’s completely inappropriate to discuss it at all, Smistria. It’s a Staid matter, and that’s all there is—”

“I’m not discussing it,” Smistria said. Ve squirted oil onto vir palm and rubbed it into another of Fift’s scalps. “I certainly don’t want to know anything about what goes on in that room, for Kumru’s sake.”

“I should hope not!” Father Squell said.

Fift was in bright white shifts, like Father Grobbard always wore, and Mother Pip mostly did. All of zir was scrubbed and polished, one of zir heads was already shaved and oiled, and zir fingernails and toenails were trimmed. In the body that was already done, ze got up from the wiggly seating dome and wandered across the moss of the little atrium.