The second line had trees for heads, drums in all the branches, and wheels for feet, which spat sparks of all colors. The third line were dancers without heads, each dancer a cluster of arms and legs which met in a center knot, and the dancers sprang and grappled and rebounded in a hypnotic gyre which was both tumultuous and rigidly restrained. The fourth line had wireframe models of habitation structures, adorned with tiny sluices and flywheels and bounceroos and tessellations and anedrals, where their bodies should have been, with hats on top of them and squat arms and legs attached at the sides, and they were drumming the same tattoo.

Then came the flautists, a line of rather ordinary-looking Staids in white, until you noticed that all fifty of them were identical and moving in identical lockstep, as if they were one fifty-bodied person, which made that line the most gasp inducingly miraculous of all.

And the flautists played:

Woodle-deedly-deedly-dee, woodle-deedly-dee,

Woodle-doodly-deedly-dee, deedly-doodly-doo.

And after them pipers, all Vails, their naked bodies painted in gaudy gold and orange and bedecked in glittering bangles, their powerful arms compressing the groaning air sacks that drove the pipes:

Hhrang, hrrang, de-da-de hhrang, hhrang dada-dooda-dee,

Hhrang dada-dooda-dee, hhrang, hhrang.

And after them more Clowns, and more: cavernous carrion birds and hovering swarms of light, bestial rompers and stilt-tall fire dancers; and behind them, a crowd of revelers and hangers-on and wannabes, and vendors pushing carts of comestibles, and bookies’ barkers calling out bets, and freelance serendipity coordinators, and matchmakers and balloon-sellers and portraitists, and commemorative body-garden architects, and rowdies, and reactants, and impromptu school outings with teachers in tow, all following the Clowns.

BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM-ba-de-chiggity, BOOM!

Fift heard all of this with zir own ears on the byway; but ze saw it through the (jerky, intermittent) feed. Zir eyes were on Shria, who had raised vir bloody face to see the Clowns.

This was not the only such parade; the sound there on the byway was deafening, but through the flickering feed, in the quiet of zir parental cohort’s breakfast room in Foo, ze could hear the discordant thrum and jangle of parades throughout Fullbelly, a storm of sound loud enough to overcome the noise inhibitors strewn through the invisibly cobwebbed interspace.

“What I find so strange,” Tigan Melitox Farina of name registry Blue Piggyback Dentition 5 was saying at Fift’s elbow, “is not being able to tell what people are thinking. I mean, it’s so ironic: the biggest news since ever, and no public opinion reacting to it!”

Tigan’s name-cousin, Pom Filigrous Tyrox, sniffed. “I’ll tell you my opinion . . .”

Shria surged to vir feet and lunged at the huge blue rent-a-body with the strangely real eyes. Fift flinched but controlled zir breathing. At the party, ze gasped “No—” and the two Blue Piggyback Dentition name-cousins looked uneasily over at zir.