They wind up on either side of him, Zoi sort of draping himself around two of Uamok's shoulders and Kiv hunkered down alongside Raafi, a little farther forward toward Uamok's neck.

They've had plenty of time to get comfy when the play starts! It's set hundreds of years in the past and there is a drought that has devastated the herds. The main character Misokun is pregnant with a female egg (they can tell because of how long it's taking to grow). She has four mates and they're all very excited about the daughter but are worried that Misokun doesn't have enough to eat, let alone enough to eat now and also sustain a herd sufficient to feed the daughter later.

Oh dear.

They do a lot of frantic calculations, but when none of the spren are getting pregnant according to an optimistic schedule due to being undergrazed, one of the mates volunteers to have Misokun eat him so she'll be able to bring the egg to term and keep the herd alive to bounce back in the rainy season. They have a funeral while he's still alive. She eats him (the stage effect is demure about the details).

The spren still don't get pregnant; there's no possibility of eating the ones who are failing to breed now and getting replacements out of the successfully gravid later.

...well, he was warned. (Volunteers? Really? - it's not the weirdest species trait out there, probably.)

They run completely out of cystfruit. Another mate steps up; he reasons that right now he's pretty good eating and later he won't be, and maybe Misokun will be able to grow another couple cystfruits and put them by for the baby. She eats him too.

One spren, and only one, gets pregnant. They meet another family while they're wandering around looking for forage for the animals; they manage to trade some spren straight across to improve the diversity of the next generation. The other family's herd is bigger but they won't share more than that.

One of Misokun's remaining mates tries to run off with the other family. The female doesn't want him - he's another mouth to feed - and returns him to Misokun, who tells him that she'll describe him as having been braver than that to their daughter when she hatches, and eats him.

Only one more spren manages to get pregnant. It's nowhere near enough. The last male says he knows Misokun's going to eat him sooner or later and he'd rather she kill him in his sleep so he doesn't fret about it all day, every day. She does.

In the rainy season, she lays her egg, and the herd is doing well, and she rehearses how she's going to explain the situation to the baby girl.

"That was really well done," he comments when it's over.

"Isn't it?" says Zoi. "Somebody wrote a sequel about the baby growing up with no males around and it's an interesting concept but not as well written."

"I'm not sure I'd follow that one as well. I mean, maybe, but I'm not sure I understand how you do gender well enough."

"What do you mean?" asks Uamok.

"Well, I'm not sure why that would matter. It's unusual but not that rare for a female human to raise children alone, and rarer but not unheard of for a human male to - it's a lot of work, but there's not anything very unusual about it other than that."

"They don't live in a town," Zoi points out. "Their daughter never meets a male while she's little at all."

"I suppose. But I expect that if someone was writing a story like that about humans the concept would be about never meeting anyone else at all, not about gender."

"Huh. Have hummun always lived in towns?" asks Uamok. "Were you created with some towns all ready for you - or knowing how to build them -"

"You know, I'm not sure? I'd guess not. We don't all live in towns even now, though we do almost always live in groups bigger than a family, at least in terms of who you'd see week to week or month to month."

"It used to be just families," Uamok says. "Somebody and her mates and kids who hadn't picked up their own mates yet - maybe a daughter who did have her own mates. Wandering around with hobbled spren."

"Huh. We have nomads like that, but it's tribes, three or four or five extended families, three or sometimes four generations of humans and their herds."

"Well, you're smaller."

"I guess. I think we might be a little more social, too - less prone to fighting, at least."

"Well, you've only seen one fight - right? Or did you see more?" Uamok says. "That probably won't ever happen to me again, I'll be more careful when I pick up more boys."

"Just the one, and humans do get into fights sometimes too, but I'd expect a fight like that between humans to be mostly posturing and neither of them to get seriously hurt."

"Usually that happens with ours too!"

"Huh, all right, maybe it is just the size difference."

"I can carry one of you walking around but not all of you," she adds as the crowd thins out.

"But it's cozy up here," Raafi complains as he slides off her back.

"Didn't you say you wanted padding?" scoffs Uamok. Zoi slides down too. Kiv repositions himself and she trots along with the flow of the crowd.