Giggle. "Shoulder Bella?"

"Do people where you're from talk about having shoulder angels? Or are angels secretly space butterflies that sell pancakes and deliver singing telegrams, it would be par for the course."

"There are, as far as I know, no space angels. Or space anything pretending to be angels. Down beneath the earth among the devils, lots of things changed; I've heard that on the Surface Londoners used to shy away from the word 'damn.'"

"So, it's a thing in cartoons - uh, a kind of way people tell stories I guess? - that if somebody is making a decision they have a tiny version of them with wings and a halo appear on one shoulder and tell them to do the right thing, and a tiny them with horns and a tail appear on the other shoulder and tell them to do the wrong thing, and they pick one to listen to? Shoulder angel and shoulder devil. Sometimes when Bella's not handy to boss me around -"

"Hey!"

"- with all her high quality knowing what to do and all, I pretend I have a shoulder Bella."

"Oh! Neat! I'm trying to do that with my grandparents sorta."

"Trying to be a shoulder Lucy or trying to have a shoulder The Literal Sun?"

"Oh, definitely the former."

"That was my guess!"

"Yeah I love my grandparents but, uh, their culture of origin is not super set up to encourage people to care about tiny mortal humans and the like. I've made more progress with Grandmother than Grandfather on that front honestly just because Grandmother has, uh, ever interacted with humans, whereas l am the closest thing to human Grandfather has ever talked to even indirectly. I've made plans to bring Mother to the Surface at some point to introduce them but there's logistics involved because she's died ever so I have to get her Hesperidean Cider first and that stuff's rare and expensive enough that there's real opportunity cost involved and she's not in a rush or anything."

"You seem pretty close to human to me."

"I mean, yes, I do look super human, that is on purpose, but I am in fact a giant diamond crab who is the granddaughter of a Judgment and a Messenger and they can tell. I--there's this metaphysical Great Chain of Being, that sort of defines how big a deal you are, like, magically, and Judgments are at the top of it and Messengers only a few rungs below and humans are approximately at the bottom and it is extremely visible to a Judgment or a Messenger that I am not at the bottom."

"Wow, such space racism. Spa...cism?"

"I'm not sure to what extent Judgments base their racism on the Great Chain versus causing the Great Chain to exist by being racist. It definitely isn't the case that Judgment prejudice correlates absolutely with the Chain, like, as the offspring of a Judgment and a Messenger my father is actually above my grandmother and her ilk on the chain, but my grandmother is--or was, before all the space crime--a perfectly respectable being, whereas my father is a horrifying mongrel. And there are ways to elevate a person on the Chain, which I have been trying with limited success to learn about, but I haven't gotten the impression that using them is something that will make the Judgments happier with you."

"They don't want more stars around or something?"

"Oh, no, they do, or they wouldn't cooperate with seeding planets with souls, what they don't want is people who are not Judgments getting uppity. I'm not talking about the process of a soul ascending to Judgmenthood, I'm talking about a separate thing called Red Science. No I don't know why it's called that."

"It's not something obvious like the scientists are Communists?"

"I don't know what that is but probably no."

"Political ideology or group of ideologies associated with the color red where nobody owns things, or possibly nobody owns expensive things like factories but you can still have a toothbrush, I'm not clear, and the state controls them collectively instead. It has been tried and seems not to work although it's possible that's just because evil people keep co-opting it, but 'especially co-optable by evil people' is its own sort of problem."

"Oh. No. As far as I know it has no association with any such ideology."

"I guess we will never know why it's called that then."

"Probably not never. But it's not very high on any of my priority lists to be sure."

"You're very optimistic about getting home."

"If I could get here just by falling down a well, getting back is probably within my power. It's definitely within something's power, and my grandparents will not be happy I've gone missing."