There's a lot of, ah, outsourcing essential parts of being a functional person in this family. It works well as long as we can all be there.

If you say so.

It's not like otherwise we would individually be functional people.

Hard to say, if you've never tried it.

I spent a century in Valimar studying music alone. I learned a lot of music. I - tended to forget that anyone else in the world had internal experiences, or existed at all. Tyelcormo's good for that, but he'll go off hunting with Huan for decades and cease to have any ambitions broader than 'see beautiful places, kill fast-moving things'. Father's ambitions are enough to sustain us all but when he didn't have us he very nearly killed himself.

I meant 'tried to be a functional individual', not 'tried to do without your support system'. The former wouldn't look like a century studying music alone.

Why not? I won a lot of contests, I was thought very highly of.

Which you couldn't appreciate unless that was the exception to your forgetting that people existed.

It was not. I mean, I did think that winning contests was related to the general quality of my work, and I was pleased to receive indications that I was improving.

So I think my point stands.

In what respect is a century spent pursing a highly successful career not 'trying' to be a functional person? What do you think trying would look like?

You're the one who pointed out an enormous gap in that century and asserts that your family fills in for each other in such respects.

We do. Because we have attempted doing otherwise, and it doesn't tend to serve us.

And it sounds to me like you tried 'just not filling in the gaps' and not 'developing mechanisms to compensate for those areas of lesser talent without this crutch'."

It's not a crutch. Any of us are fine alone, unless in Maitimo's case you ask him to trade his wellbeing against something else and the only mechanism he has for making a choice like that is 'am I emotionally strong enough to do it'.

Well, I wish I'd known that before I had to default to 'what would I want in his place'.

Thank you.

By nightfall they're over the spider forest.

I'll skip a sleep; this would be a terrible place to stop even if we weren't in something of a hurry. Anybody else want?

We can skip a few nights even without a song. But go ahead.

So she plays it loud enough for a general audience, then resumes the zoom song.

And by sunrise they're nearing Tumunzahar.

Should I bother turning off Allspeak and recording a message before finding out if he'll talk to me?

What are you going to do if he refuses?