Lorq sprang for the jaw, got his fingers around the lower lip, and started scrambling. “Give me a hand?”

“Just a second,” Prince said. Then, slowly, he put his shoe on Lorq’s fingers and mashed.

Lorq gasped and fell back on the ground, clutching his hand.

Ruby giggled.

“Hey!” Indignation throbbed, confusion welled. Pain beat in his knuckles.

“You shouldn’t make fun of his hand,” Ruby said. “He doesn’t like it.”

“Huh?” Lorq looked at the metal and plastic claw directly for the first time. “I didn’t make fun of it!”

“Yes you did,” Prince said evenly. “I don’t like people who make fun of me.”

“But I—” Lorq’s seven-year-old mind tried to comprehend this irrationality. He stood up again. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

Prince lowered himself to his knees, reached out, and swung at Lorq’s head.

“Watch—!” He leaped backward. The mechanical limb had moved so fast the air hissed.

“Don’t talk about my hand any more! There’s nothing wrong! Nothing at all!”

“If you stop making fun of him,” Ruby commented, looking at the rugae on the roof of the stone mouth, “he’ll be friends with you.”

“Well, all right,” Lorq said warily.

Prince smiled. “Then we’ll be friends now.” He had very pale skin and his teeth were small.

“All right,” Lorq said. He decided he didn’t like Prince.

“If you say something like, ‘let’s shake on it,’” Ruby said, “he’ll beat you up. And he can, even though you’re bigger than he is.”

Or Ruby either.

“Come on up,” Prince said.

Lorq climbed into the mouth beside the other two children.

“Now what do we do?” Ruby asked. “Climb down?”

“You can look into the garden from here,” Lorq said. “And watch the party.”

“Who wants to watch an old party,” Ruby said.

“I do,” said Prince.

“Oh,” Ruby said. “You do. Well, all right then.” Beyond the bamboo, the guests walked in the garden. They laughed gently, talked of the latest psychorama, politics, drank from long glasses. His father stood by the fountain, discussing with several people his feelings about the proposed sovereignty of the Outer Colonies—after all, he had a home out here and had to have his finger on the pulse of the situation. It was the year that Secretary Morgan had been assassinated. Though Underwood had been caught, there were still theories going around as to which faction was responsible.

A woman with silver hair flirted with a young couple who had come with Ambassador Selvin, who was also a cousin. Aaron Red, a portly, proper gentleman, had cornered three young ladies and was pontificating on the moral degeneration of the young. Mother moved through the guests, the hem of her red dress brushing the grass, followed by the humming buffet. She paused here and there to offer canapes, drinks, and her opinion of the new realignment proposal. Now, after a year of phenomenal popular success, the intelligentsia had accepted the Tohu-bohus as legitimate music; the jarring rhythms tumbled across the lawn. A light sculpture in the corner twisted, flickered, grew with the tones.

Then his father let out a booming laugh that made everyone look. “Listen to this! Just hear what Lusuna has said to me!” He was holding the shoulder of a university student who had come with the young couple. Von Ray’s bluster had apparently prompted the young man to argument. Father gestured for him to repeat.

“I only said that we live in an age where economic, political, and technological change have shattered all cultural tradition.”

“My Lord,” laughed the woman with silver hair, “is that all?”

“No, no!” Father waved his hand. “We have to listen to what the younger generation thinks. Go on, sir.”

“There’s no reservoir of national, or world solidarity, even on Earth, the center of Draco. The past half dozen generations have seen such movement of peoples from world to world, there can’t be any. This pseudo-interplanetary society that has replaced any real tradition, while very attractive, is totally hollow and masks an incredible tangle of decadence, scheming, corruption—”

“Really, Lusuna,” the young wife said, “your Scholarship is showing.” She had just taken another drink at the prompting of the woman with the silver hair.

“—and piracy.”

(With the last word, even the three children crouching in the mouth of the carved lizard could tell from the looks passing on the guests’ faces that Lusuna had gone too far.)

Mother came across the lawn, the bottom of her red sheath brushing back from gilded nails. She held her hands out to Lusuna, smiling. “Come, let’s continue this social dissection over dinner. We’re having a totally corrupt mangobongoou with untraditional loso ye mbiji a meza, and scathingly decadent mpati a nsengo.” His mother always made the old Senegal dishes for parties. “And if the oven cooperates, we’ll end up with dreadfully pseudo-interplantary tiba yoka flambe.”

The student looked around, realized he was supposed to smile, and did one better by laughing. With the student on her arm, Mother led everyone into dinner—”Didn’t someone tell me you had won a scholarship to Draco University at Centauri? You must be quite bright. You’re from Earth, I gather from your accent. Senegal? Well! So am I. What city…?” And Father, relieved, brushed back oak-colored hair and followed everyone into the jalousied dining pavilion.

On the stone tongue, Ruby was saying to her brother, “I don’t think you should do that.”

“Why not?” said Prince.

Lorq looked back at the brother and sister. Prince had picked up a stone from the floor of the dragon’s mouth in his mechanical hand. Across the lawn stood the aviary of white cockatoos Mother had brought from Earth on her last trip.

Prince aimed. Metal and plastic blurred.

Forty feet away, birds screamed and exploded in the cage. As one fell to the floor, Lorq could see, even at this distance, blood in the feathers.

“That’s the one I was aiming for.” Prince smiled.

“Hey,” Lorq said. “Mother’s not going to … “ He looked again at the mechanical appendage strapped to Prince’s shoulder over the stump. “Say, you throw better with—”

“Watch it.” Prince’s black brows lowered on chipped blue glass. “I told you not to make fun of my hand, didn’t I?” The hand drew back, and Lorq heard the motors—whirr, click, whirr—in wrist and elbow.

“It’s not his fault he was born that way,” Ruby said. “And it’s impolite to make remarks about your guests. Aaron says you’re all barbarians out here anyway, doesn’t he, Prince?”

“That’s right.” He lowered his hand.

A voice came over the loudspeaker into the garden. “Children, where are you? Come in and get your supper. Hurry.”

They climbed down and went out through the bamboo.

Lorq went to bed still excited by the party. He lay under the doubled shadows of the palms above the nursery ceiling, transparent from the night before.

A whisper: “Lorq!”

And: “Shhh! Don’t be so loud, Prince.”

More softly: “Lorq?”

He pushed back the netting and sat up in bed. Imbedded in the plastic floor, tigers, elephants; and monkeys glowed. “What do you want?”

“We heard them leaving through the gate.” Prince stood in the nursery doorway in his shorts. “Where did they go?”

“We want to go too,” Ruby said from her brother’s elbow.

“Where did they go?” Prince asked again.

“Into town.” Lorq stood up and padded across the glowing menagerie. “Mommy and Daddy always take their friends down into the village when they come for the holidays.”

“What do they do?” Prince leaned against the jamb.

“They go… well, they go into town.” Where ignorance had been, curiosity came to fill it.

“We jimmied the baby sitter,” said Ruby.

“You don’t have a very good one; it was easy. Everything is so old-fashioned out here. Aaron says only Pleiades barbarians could think it quaint to live out here. Are you going to take us to go see where they went?”