You might, in other words, be the LAST person in the Groon-regretted world who ANYONE would expect to slip your grip on reality, to be able to humble your pride, let go of your glory, and flounder your way to the sweet, sweet release of collapse.

If you are that person: make this bet anyway.

Because here’s what ZANGO JANGO’s charts are whispering: the next ten days are going to offer you AMPLE opportunity to fulfill it.

Chapter 10

10

Fift and Shria sat, legs dangling over the byway’s edge, watching the parades. The one that had dispersed their riot was far away now, the bulk of it ascending a curved stickywall in Dismal Bunny habitation, other strands overflowing onto nearby stairways. The parades’ cacophony had faded to a whisper-thrum, distorted by sonic damping but still filling Fullbelly. Below them, the glowtubes turned the mellow gold of first evening.

Fift’s legs and back ached. It was hard to look at Shria: the livid purple bruises on vir swollen face, the ruin of vir clothes.

They were the only people left on the byway. Small worker trashrats sifted through the parade’s debris, meditatively munching down the smaller portions, dragging the larger portions away to compost-sluices.

The feed was coming up in spurts. On for five hundred heartbeats, off for a thousand, on for seven hundred, off for two thousand. Most messages were still getting lost en route, but there were also odd ones getting through, things Fift’s attention agents probably wouldn’t have allowed zir to see if they’d been in their right minds. A supposed reproduction of the Vail-hating Tractate of Mulami, excised from the Long Conversation before Pip and Grobbard were born, with various portions newly underlined. Messages from Staids Fift didn’t have any connection to at all. {We know what you and the Clowns and that flowblocking alien are really up to!}, one said. Another: {Who raised you? A good staidchild wouldn’t have been within a thousand bodylengths of such a violence-orgy! I’m derating your parents as soon as the feed allows!} Another: {I like you very much maybe I could come live in your apartment I would be very quiet we could pass spoons and lean our shoulders together almost touching.}

Ze wondered if Shria was getting such messages, and what they said. Virs were probably worse. Ve’d been in unlicensed combat again, off the mats, like when ve was a child. It was far more serious now.

“Vvonda is pissed off,” Shria rasped.

“At me?” Fift asked.