She went to her ration pack and extracted a container of vegetable masala, wondering if the mild curry might smell enticing to Whiff. After thumbing the pad, she waited five seconds, then peeled back the top. Steam rose as she detached the spoon, and the fragrance was—

Whiff lurched to his feet.

Shit. What’s wrong?

Then he stumbled out of the camp, into the undergrowth and darkness.

‘Hell’s teeth.’

She took a few seconds to direct some of her beeswarm to sweep the surroundings, looking for Whiff. As an explorer she might be a neo, but when it came to coding, she could practically make a biofact sit up and beg. Her bees were smart, and sure to find him.

The masala smelled wonderful, so she tucked in.

Later that night, she lay on the ground in her sleeping suit, watching an arc of small holos: viewlogs from her bees. In the images, Whiff was squatting, hunched as he chewed on raw vegetables, his body language furtive.

Don’t anthropomorphise.

But perhaps she was reading him correctly, and there was some imperative - cultural, medical, aesthetic - that made him eat alone.

In the morning, he would be back. Somehow she knew.

When she flicked the holos out of existence, only the vault of stars in black sky remained, the vastness of the universe cradling all its fragile creatures for the precious seconds of their lives. A feeling of awe carried her into sleep.

Sharp remembered Bittersweet’s childish antics, making fun of poor untouchables eating their vegetables in the open. He’d been embarrassed by his little sister then. Now he realized there was a lesson in the memory - he should think of the fragile creature as intelligent but uneducated, aware but uncivilized.

And so he returned to its - possibly to her - campsite. As for her name, it approximated to Sweetash, an internal contradiction that become more pleasing the longer he considered it.

With the aid of the shining device, they tried to extend their range of linguistic understanding . . . and spent the whole day struggling. Finally, they made a leap in abstraction, moving beyond names, from Sweetash and Sharp to you and I.

Two words in a day. It would take a long time to learn the art of conversation at that rate.

Sweetash did not eat in front of him, perhaps understanding her mistake. When evening fell, he retreated to his own spot out in the undergrowth, and after eating, he curled up, trembling in the cold. His sleep was strange and disjointed.

On the third night, he slept inside Sweetash’s camp, within the ring of protective devices, wrapped in a cloak that warmed from inside itself. Everything was strange, so different from his village where a thousand subtle scents told him, at any time of day, of others’ presence, of how he should behave.

And there was another kind of onrushing pang inside him, triggered perhaps by the stress of being here.

But the strangest thing of all was Sweetash’s conjuring box, the shining case that could do more than create intelligent insects and broadcast scents. For one thing, it could display disembodied pictures - moving pictures - hanging in the air. The colours were not quite right - perhaps to accommodate Sweetash’s small, unslitted eyes - but he knew what the images were: pictures from inside the little insects’ minds. He figured that from seeing himself and Sweetash, inside one of the pictures, from the viewpoint of an insect that was hovering overhead.

She controlled them, did Sweetash, directing her insects to observe Sharp’s people as they lived their ordinary lives.

But then they ventured further, and showed such sights!

Some images came from parts of Mint City he had never seen - several sequences came from the Librarians’ Enclave, he was sure of it - and then from cities far away, places he could never hope to visit.

Yet it was the ordinary domestic scenes that fascinated Sweetash most. And her reaction to seeing a mother teach her children - the young ones taking delicate nips, their faces smudged with maternal blood - was extraordinary: Sweetash stumbled away, crouched over, and spilled the contents of her stomach on the ground.

Some kind of ritual of her own?

Over the next few days, when they weren’t extending their vocabulary through the device, Sharp and Sweetash watched these scenes of life together, including several Sharings, the expressions of triumphant pain so different from Father’s awful experience. Then it was back among Librarians, watching them work with sand-frames, making little patterned marks Sharp did not understand. And then there was a Convocation, with Librarians from far away, such a mix of fur coloration that he could not understand how they could Share knowledge at all. Except that, in what looked like Sharing ceremonies, no blades were produced. Instead, sand-frames or patterned clay were passed around in lieu of flesh.

Sharp grew bored and poked around the camp. But Sweetash remained fascinated, and finally the implications were obvious. Librarians’ writing was arcane, a thin approximation of knowledge, a faint taste of true learning’s richness - but it allowed communication between strangers whose flesh might be mutually unpalatable.

He returned to the display and hunkered down beside Sweetash. Together, they continued to observe.

All was blood and pain.

Rekka found herself haunted by so many of the images she watched. Her own genetic mother had tried to kill her - there was so little she knew of India and the Changeling Plague, so much her adoptive parents would never tell - and at first the cruelty inside families here reminded her of childhood nightmares. But then she realized how much the parents suffered for the sake of love, and in that moment her view of Whiff and his people underwent a permanent change.

Nevertheless, several of her watchful bees remained hovering overhead, laden with toxins deadly to any native form.

For exercise, they took long rambles along the ridges and escarpments, sometimes venturing to village boundaries, never inside. Rekka trusted Whiff to keep them downwind, unnoticed.

After a time, she amended her log. Now attuned to the subtleties of scent, she renamed her friend ‘Sharp’.

Staying close to him on their excursions, she could appreciate the play of muscles beneath his dark fur that rippled in the wind. Sometimes she stroked his arm as they walked. And it seemed to her that two dark buds on his forehead were growing bigger by the day.

Soon he would be sprouting antlers. For Sharp’s people, puberty looked to be a rapid procedure.

Her beeswarm kept busy, observing the native people who knew written language, the bees’ femtoscopic spectrometers analysing airborne molecules on the scene, allowing her to cross-reference between scent and script.

Few of her wilder speculations made it into the zipblips she transmitted at night. She received only short acknowledgements from Mary Stelanko, as team leader; there was no communication with the rest of the team. None of the others had made contact, but they had plenty of observational data, much of it downloaded into Rekka’s biofact.

For practical purposes, she was alone with Sharp.

It was fifty days into the project when, late on a warm afternoon, she found herself staring at Sharp’s strong body and flushing all over. Local male and female forms were astoundingly analogous to Earth’s, and her watching bees had long confirmed Sharp’s maleness. Perhaps some form of mutual gratification could be—

No.