without his
father's thick accent, so that he never inadvertently crushed their soft hands
when he shook with them, so that he smiled good-naturedly and gave up a
realistic facsimile of sympathy when they griped their perennial gripes.

His father! How wise the old man had been, and how proud, and how _stupid_.
George shucked his uniform backstage and tossed it into a laundry hamper, noting
with dismay how brown the insides were, how much of himself had eroded away
during his shift. He looked at his clever left thumb and his strong right thumb,
and tasted their good, earthy tastes, and then put them away. He dressed himself
in the earth-coloured dungarees and workshirt that his own father had stolen
from a laundry line when he left the ancestral home of George's people for the
society of the soft ones.

He boarded a Cast Member tram that ran through the ultidors underneath Pleasure
Island's midway, and stared aimlessly at nothing as the soft ones on the tram
gabbled away, as the tram sped away to the Cast housing, and then it was just
him and the conductor, all the way to the end of the line, to the cottage he
shared with his two brothers, Bill and Joe. The conductor wished him a good
night when he debarked, and he shambled home.

Bill was already home, napping in the pile of blankets that all three brothers
shared in the back room of the cottage. Joe wasn't home yet, even though his
shift finished earlier than theirs. He never came straight home; instead, he
wandered backstage, watching the midway through the peepholes. Joe's Lead had
spoken to George about it, and George had spoken to Joe, but you couldn't tell
Joe anything. George thought of how proud his father had been, having three sons
-- three! George, the son of his strong right thumb, and Bill, the son of his
clever left thumb, and Joe. Joe, the son of his tongue, an old man's folly, that
left him wordless for the remainder of his days. He hadn't needed words, though:
his cracked and rheumy eyes had shone with pride every time they lit on Joe, and
the boy could do no wrong by him.

George busied himself with supper for his brothers. In the little wooded area
behind the cottage, he found good, clean earth with juicy roots in it. In the
freezer, he had a jar of elephant-dung sauce, spiced with the wrung-out sweat of
the big top acrobats' leotards, which, even after reheating, still carried the
tang of vitality. Preparing a good meal for his kind meant a balance