Mehitabel giggles. "What about the rest of it - that you could cover more people, and that you could change what from but not per person, and stuff?"

"I couldn't always cover more than one person, actually."

"How did you get to be able to? How did you know when you could?"

"I can tell who I'm covering; that part wasn't hard. As for getting to... I tried for a while once when I was pretty young, and it didn't work at all, and then years and years later I tried again and it worked fine. Maybe I was doing something different, or maybe it was all the practice the first time around, or maybe my Gift just grew an extra trick as I got older."

"Do many peoples' Gifts grow like that?" Mehitabel asks.

"Sometimes. Not that often, but it happens. More often if you use it a lot, and more often than that if you keep trying new things with it."

"Does anyone's Gift ever shrink?"

"Nope. Not that I've ever heard of."

"So Chelsa's won't ever just shrivel up all by itself."

"It would be very unlikely."

Mehitabel frowns. "Drat."

"Anyway, if it shrivelled up too fast, we'd have the same problem as if she just up and died one day. People wouldn't take the transition well."

"Yes, but maybe it could shrivel up slow. And she could go on the broadcast and say whatever Aelise told her to to make people be okay with it. And it would just be shriveling up by itself so she couldn't get mad at anybody."

"You know what else would be nice? Getting a flying pony for Christmas."

"That would also be nice, except I don't know where it would fly up here," says Mehitabel, "and also a flying pony would not make billions of people safe from Chelsa so I don't think it would be as good."

Kers laughs.

"I would like to fly," muses Mehitabel idly. "I think that would be fun."

"You live in the orbital ring now," says Kers. "You can bounce around the zero-gravity sections all you want."

"I want to try that," says Mehitabel, and up she goes and off she traipses.