One can get a starmap loaded up on her everything. "It's over here, see? In the Cradle - like inside the cradle, not making it up - below the Jar."

That gets almost everyone crowding around to look. Someone wants to know which stars all the other stars in the picture are.

Some of them have names and some of them just have long number designations. The app lets them look up what's been found surveying them - deposits of this and that, pretty pictures of gas giants, but nothing else alive.

One of the kids wants to know if the gas giants are as soft and pettable as they look.

"I don't think so, they're like clouds that way. - clouds aren't soft and pettable either, they're just like, fog, only high up."

Shortly the Sesatis mostly want to resume bragging. Five of the kids instead want to put together a thumb war tournament, and then get into an argument about whether they should invite the aliens to join in.

The aliens do not know what a thumb war is.

This kid is very excited to explain! And then they can celebrate learning! A thumb war is just a thing where two people hold hands with their thumbs sticking up and try to force each other's thumbs down and pin them, like in wrestling.

Huh, like a tiny armwrestling contest. Sure, the purples will participate, though they don't expect to do very well against human men.

The adults aren't really interested so they'll probably do fine.

People get a bit quiet as one of the women wants to perform a song she wrote this year.

Ooh, they will be happy to listen to this and look attentively at their everythings for subtitles.

It's a narrative ballad about a woman whose fiancé goes off to war. She learns that he's being held as a prisoner of war (not as a slave) and sneaks into enemy territory alone (there are three verses of people trying to discourage her from this life choice on the grounds that she'll just get captured, that he won't want to marry her afterward anyway, that there's nothing she can do, and that she's desperately needed at home). She spends three verses on a scheme to poison the king, which fails; then she spends three verses on a scheme to disrupt the army's supply lines, which also fails; then she spends three verses on a scheme to sneak her fiancé out of his tower prison, which fails so badly she gets caught. The enemy king is enamored of her cleverness and courage and determination and decides to marry her. She contemplates three more clever schemes to escape, but in the end she doesn't try any of them. She uses her new position as leverage to get her fiancé out, and then lives her life as a queen, terribly sad but still proud and relieved to know the man she loves is safe.

Wow, that's a really compelling storyline. Why wouldn't her fiancé have wanted to marry her if she'd successfully rescued him without marrying the king instead?

"...Because she was, you know, off by herself. In enemy territory. Anything could've happened. And she's - she'd do it again, you can tell she would. The king's insane for wanting to marry her, really," says one of their coworkers. "But, well, rich folks. Soldier types. They don't just want to settle down with a decent wife. - They did back in the olden days when it's set, though. I think."

"...but surely it's very heroic and speaks to her devotion that she'd try to rescue him, if my fiancée did that for me I'd definitely still want to get married..."

"Well, see, heroism and devotion are great for soldiers and their kind but they don't keep the kids fed."

"That's the point," Dira says. "She wants a man who wants a quiet wife but the way she saves him she winds up more the kind of woman that should be a mad king's wife instead. Now, I think he would've married her after and called himself lucky."

"I don't suppose the song has more verses that say how he felt about her at the end?"

The singer gets a speculative look and then announces a new ambition for the coming year.

What a nice holiday. The engaged one wants to have a BABY in the next year and the engineer wants to get all the Amentan buildings on the planet fully up to electrical code.

The Sesatis have questions about the electrical code and about alien babies, and ambitions of their own, and are for the most part glad to know the Amentans like their holiday.

The party winds down into stargazing and eventually one of their coworkers offers to walk them home and encourages them to take some of the leftover figs.

They can see pictures of alien babies if they would like!

They will each take a fig and the escort back to the dorms.

And - things are fine. Modern technology is very popular. Nothing gets Sesat and Azan to leave each other alone like both planning to defend themselves against the fair folk. Azan has to limit the amount of immigrants it will accept, for the first time ever, because of the sheer physical impossibility of taking in as many people as want to leave Amenta. The alien flower they gave to Sesat is prospering.

There's a murder in Sesat, and a kidnapping, and a slave trying to stow away on an Amentan ship with the dead man's son.

The purple who finds the slave in the cargo hold yells for greys and they come by to drag her out.

She shoves the boy at them. He startles awake. "I don't care if you kill me, just take him with you."

"- we're not going to kill you but neither of you are on the manifest so you don't go on the ship."