“Yeah, but made him what?”

Taince grinned. “It’s all your people’s fault, anyway.”

“Oh,” Fassin sighed, “not this.”

“Well, it’s a Dweller thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah? And so fucking what?”

“Well, who brought that particular little nugget of information regarding kin-kid-hunting blinking into the light?” Taince asked, still grinning. “You guys, that’s who. Seers—”

“They weren’t—”

“Well, Dwellers Studies, whatever.” Taince waved her hand dismissively. “They hunt their children, they’re a long-term, widespread, successful species and they’re right on our doorstep. Some wizzer comes along looking for the latest way to fleece the rich. What sort of lesson do you think they’re going to take from that?”

Fassin shook his head. “The Dwellers have been around for most of the life of the universe, they’ve spread throughout the galaxy but despite their head start on everybody else they’ve had the good grace not to remake the whole place to suit themselves, they’ve formalised war to the point that hardly anybody ever dies and most of their lives’ work is spent tending the greatest accumulations of knowledge ever assembled—”

“But we were told—”

“Albeit in the galaxy’s most disorganised libraries which they show enormous reluctance to let anybody else into, yes, but all the same: they were peaceful, civilised and everywhere before Earth and the Sun even formed, and what’s the one lesson we’ve taken from them with any enthusiasm? Hunt your kids.”

“Your lecture notes are showing,” Taince told him. The Dwellers, notoriously, hunted their own young. The species was present in the majority — the vast majority — of the gas-giant planets in the galaxy, and in every planetary society of theirs that had been sufficiently thoroughly investigated, it had been discovered that the mature Dwellers preyed upon their own children, hunting them singly or in packs (on both sides), sometimes opportunistically, as often in highly organised long-term hunts. To the Dwellers this was entirely natural. Just a normal part of growing up, absolutely a part of their culture without which they would not be themselves, and something they had been doing for billions of years. Indeed, some of those who could be bothered attempting to justify the practice to upstart alien busybodies claimed with some authority that young-hunting was precisely one of the many reasons that Dwellers were still around after all that amount of time to indulge in such harmless fun in the first place.

It wasn’t just their species that was long-lived, after all; individual Dwellers had, allegedly, lived for billions of years, so if they weren’t to use up even the colossal amount of living space provided by all the gas-giant planets in the galaxy (and, they’d sometimes hint, beyond), they had to keep numbers down somehow. And interfering outside species — especially those whose civilisations were inevitably so short-lived that they were called the Quick — would do well not to forget that the Dwellers doing the hunting had been hunted in their turn as well, and those being hunted would have their chance to become the hunters in the future. And anyway, if you had every prospect of living for hundreds of millions of years, being hunted for at most about a century and a bit was such a trivially insignificant detail that it was scarcely worth mentioning.

“They don’t feel any pain, Taince,” Fassin told her. “That’s the point. They don’t entirely understand the concept of physical suffering. Not emotionally.”

“Which I still beg to find unlikely. But, oh, so what? What are you saying? They’re not intelligent enough to feel mental anguish?”

“Even mental pain isn’t really what we understand as pain when there’s no physiological equivalent, no template, no circuitry.”

“That this year’s theory, is it? Exo-Ethics 101?”

A moderately powerful ground-quake shook the surface they were sitting on, but they ignored it. The huge, tattered strips of material hanging high above stirred.

“All I’m saying is, they’re a civilisation we could learn a lot more from than just how to abuse our young.”

“Thought they aren’t even a civilisation, technically”

“Oh, good grief,” Fassin sighed.

“Well?”

“Yeah, well, depends what definition you accept. To some they’re post-civilisational, because the individual groups on each gas-giant have so little contact with each other, to others they’re a diasporian civilisation, which is the same thing expressed more kindly, to others still they’re just a degenerate example of how to almost take over an entire galaxy and then fail, because they just lost interest, or they somehow forgot what the purpose of the operation was in the first place, or they misplaced their ruthlessness and came over all coy and conservational and decided it would only be fair to give everybody else a chance, too, or they were warned off by some higher power. All of which might be true, or nonsense. And that’s what Dweller Studies is all about. Maybe one day we’ll know for sure… What?” There was something about the way Taince was looking at him.

“Nothing. Just wondering. You still sticking to the line you haven’t decided what to do after college?”

“I might not become a Seer, Taince, or anything to do with Dweller Studies; it isn’t compulsory. We don’t get drafted.”

“Mm-hmm. Well,” she said, “time for another attempt to contact the real world.” She rose smoothly to her feet. “Coming?”

“Mind if I stay behind?” Fassin rubbed his face, looked around. “Bit tired. I think we’re safe enough here, yeah?”

“Guess so,” Taince told him. “Back soon.” She turned and tramped off into the darkness, quickly disappearing and leaving Fassin alone with the soft lights of the flier in the vast, unechoing space.

He did and didn’t want to fall asleep, and after a few moments alone thought that maybe he didn’t feel so secure here by himself after all, and nearly went after Taince, but then thought he might get lost, and so stayed where he was. He cleared his throat and sat more upright, telling himself he wasn’t going to fall asleep. But he must have, because when the screams started, they woke him.

He left in the false dawn of an albedo sunrise, Ulubis still well below the horizon but lighting up half the facing hemisphere of Nasqueron, flooding the Northern Tropical Uplands of ’glantine with a soft, golden-brown light. A small yellow auroral display to the north added its own unsteady glow. He’d already said various goodbyes to friends and family in the Sept the night before and left messages for those, like his mother, he couldn’t contact immediately. He’d left Jaal asleep.

Slovius, somewhat to Fassin’s surprise, came to see him off at the house port, a hundred-metre circle of dead flat granite coldmelt a kilometre downslope from the house, near the river and the gently rising edge of the Upland forest. Light rain fell from high, thin clouds moving in from the west. A sleek, soot-black Navarchy craft, maybe sixty metres long, sat on a tripod of struts at the centre of the circle, radiating heat and bannered by drifting steam.

They stopped and looked at it. “That’s a needle ship, isn’t it?” Fassin said.

His uncle nodded. “I do believe it is. You will be going to Pirrintipiti in some style, nephew.” Slovius’s own suborb yacht, a streamlined yet stubbier machine, half the size of the black Navarchy ship, lay on a circular parking pad just off the main circle. They walked on, Fassin in his thin one-piece gee-suit, worn under his light Sept robe, feeling as if he was walking with a sort of warm gel extending from ankle to neck.

Fassin carried the grip holding his formal wear. A pony-tailed servant had his other bag and held a large umbrella over Fassin. Slovius’s chair-tub had extended a transparent cover above him. Another servant held the sleeping form of Fassin’s niece Zab in her arms; the child — up scandalously late the evening before and somehow hearing of her uncle’s summons to Sepekte — had insisted she wanted to say goodbye to Fassin and wheedled her grandfather and parents into granting permission, but then had fallen back asleep almost as soon as they’d left the house in the little funicular which served the port.