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kindness, at least the bland, indifferent attention a dairy farmer would give a profitable herd. A high-ceilinged loft over a sponge warehouse had been transformed into a rudimentary nursery, given over to the care of the half-crippled hag who may or may not have been The Fox’s mother. In exchange for a daily quart of gin she saw that the infants were fed, if irregularly, and cleaned perhaps less often than absolutely necessary. The Fox, who maintained his own apartments three floors above, was not inconvenienced by either of these derelictions. Indeed, once he knew that his experiment was viable, he took no especial interest whatsoever in any of his charges for the first year and a half. After that, his only interest lay in the weekly accounting of their income. He trusted in his genius and the smoothly operating machine he had created.
    For the remaining decades of his life, Hipner Pilnipott devoted himself to writing his memoirs, an encyclopedia of criminal techniques and a long-running series of popular teenage romances.
    But let it not be thought that the children were in any way abused or maltreated or that they lived in conditions that were particularly substandard—at least as compared to what they would have suffered if left in their original environments, had they survived at all. Indeed, given the increasingly bilateral state of Tamlaghtese economy—the rapidity with which its population was being divided into two classes: the very small number who were benefitting directly from the introduction of spaceflight versus everyone else—Pilnipott’s children actually fared better than the largest proportion of the citizenry. He made certain they realized and appreciated this and that they grew up to despise the plump, pink children who were being pampered like suckling piglets in the big houses across the river and smugly confident they were more fortunate than the gaunt children scavaging ashcans in Transmoltan alleys. Pilnipott’s children, repeated assured that this contempt was real, hated tenfold in return.
    The Fox’s progeny gazed, from their loftily assumed position, with disdain upon those on whom they preyed. They were educated, skilled, appreciated, feared, invisible—a special, unique class of their own and Pilnipott was scrupulous in making certain they never forgot that.
    As soon as the children were able to walk, or at least stand unaided, they were expected to begin repaying The Fox for his generosity. For half a day, from dawn to noon, they underwent intense indoctrination by the Faculty. They were taught to read, write and reckon, for The Fox recognized the criminal utility of literacy (the need, for example, to write a ransom note or perhaps a memo informing a teller that she’s being held up. There was no excuse, The Fox earnestly believed, for these things not to be done in the best penmanship. To do otherwise offended his sense of the aesthetic. Slovenliness in details reflected upon him ). For the remainder of the day, from noon until whenever they were returned, the children were leased out, as we have seen, to beggars, charlatans and shoplifters, who found the presence of a dewy-eyed toddler adding verisimilitude and engendering trust, or found tiny fingers or slim, lithe bodies useful in any number of ways. Those children who had some talent for mimicry or acting commanded the highest prices, for they could be trained to impersonate the blind, crippled or otherwise handicapped. These were allowed to attend special classes on prosthetic makeup and appliances, enabling them to all the better impersonate the afflicted. The older children, from eighteen months to two years or so, he allowed to operate independently if they showed sufficient talent and ability and these he released into the streets like an army of light-fingered monkeys. So confident was he in their indoctrination that he never doubted their trustworthiness.
    Somewhere between the ages of five and ten, the children were