Wished he’d had his company. That was saying something.

And because the moment was heavy and fraught with might-have-been’s, he ducked Jeremy’s earnest look and bent down instead and pulled open his under-bunk storage.

Where more than next morning’s socks resided. Where what was important to him resided.

In that moment of emotional confidences he took the chance, dug into the back of it and took out what Jeremy probably had never seen, something hands had made that weren’t human hands.

“What’s that?” Jeremy asked in astonishment, as he sat up and brought out the spirit stick. The cords unwound, feathers settling softly in the air, and the unfurling cords revealing the carvings in wood.

“Something someone gave me,” he said. He was defensive of it, and all it was to him. He thought to this moment he was a fool for unveiling it. But Jeremy’s reaction was more than he expected. It wasn’t puzzlement. It was awe, amazement, everything he looked for in someone who’d know what he was looking at and appreciate what he treasured.

“It’s hisa work,” Jeremy said. “Where’d you get it?”

“It was a gift to me. That’s where I lived. That’s what I did. That’s what I worked all my life to get into.” He handed it across the narrow gap and Jeremy took it carefully in his hands, stick, cords, feathers, and all.

Jeremy handled it ever so carefully, looked at the carvings, at the cords, fingered the wood, and then looked closely at a feather, stroking it with his fingers. “I figure about the cords, maybe, but how’d they make this ?”

He didn’t know what Jeremy was talking about for a moment, and then by Jeremy’s fingers on the center spine and the edges of the feather he realized. “It’s a feather ,” he said, hiding amusement, and Jeremy instantly made his hands gentler on the object.

“You mean like it came off a bird?”

“Not quite like the birds on Earth. They don’t fly much. They kind of glide. Some stay mostly on the ground. Downbelow birds.”

“I never saw a feather close up,” Jeremy said. “It’s soft.”

“Feathers from two kinds of birds. The wood comes from a little bush that grows on the riverbank. Cords are out of grasses. You soak it and put a stick in it and twist real hard while it’s wet and it makes cord. There’s a trick to sticking the next piece in just as you’re running out of the last one, so they make a kind of overlay in the twist. I’ve watched them do it. They don’t braid, that’s not something they invented. But they do this twist technique. If you do a lot of them, you’ve got rope.”

“Wild,” Jeremy said, and fingered the cord and, irresistibly, the feathers. “That’s really wild. I’ve seen vids of birds. I never saw a feather, like, by itself. Just from a distance. ”

“They fall off all the time. You’re not supposed to collect them. Hisa do. But humans can’t collect them.”

“A bird with its feathers falling off.” Jeremy thought that was funny.

So did he. “Not all at the same time. Like your hair falls out in the shower. A piece gets tired and falls out and a new one grows. It’s kind of related to hair. Biologically speaking.”

“That’s really strange,” Jeremy said. “Do you have a lot of this stuff?”

He shook his head. “I’m not supposed to have this one, but it was a gift and the authorities didn’t argue with me. The cops somehow got me past customs.”

“What’s this stuff mean? It’s not writing.”

“They don’t write. But they make symbols. I’m not sure in my own head what the difference is, but the experts say it isn’t writing.”

“This is so strange,” Jeremy said. “What’s it mean?”

“Day and night. Rain and sun. Grain growing.” He became aware that rain and sun, day and night, were words like the feather, alien to Jeremy, with all they meant. Spacers didn’t say morning and evening. It was first shift, second shift. They didn’t say day and night. It was mainday, maindark, alterday, alterdark. And twilight was a time the lights dimmed and brightened again, mainday’s twilight, alterday’s dawn. Stationers were like that, too. But on Downbelow you rediscovered the lost words, the words humans had used to have, words that clicked into a spot in your soul and took rapid, satisfying hold.

Maybe that was why they had to bar humans from Downbelow, and let down only a privileged, special few who could agree not to pick up feathers or stones.

“The little stones,” he remembered to say, “water smoothed them. They tumble over one another in the bottom of Old River as the water flows, just rubbing against each other.” He took account of Jeremy’s literal interpretation of molting feathers, and remembered a question he’d asked of a senior staffer. “You don’t ever see them move. But when Old River floods, it tumbles them.”

Jeremy looked at him as if to see if that was a joke of any kind, and felt the smoothness of the stones. “I was going to ask how,” Jeremy said. “That’s so, so wild. I’m used to old rocks… but these must have been tumbling around a long time.”

“Rocks in space are older,” he said. “Water’s just pretty powerful. It carves out cliffs, changes course, floods fields. Gravity makes it fall from high places to low places and whatever’s in the way, it flows around it or over it.”

“How’s it get high in the first place?”

“Rain. Springs.” More miracle words to Jeremy. He didn’t think Jeremy knew what a spring was.

But Jeremy wanted to know things. That was what engaged him. Jeremy wanted to know. He could liken some things to what Jeremy did know: condensation on high dockside conduits. The big drops that hit you on the head when you were near the gantries.

“It’s just past monsoon, now,” he said, dazed to admit the unfelt time-flow that Jeremy took for granted “Hisa females will be pregnant, grain will be sprouting in the fields and in the frames. There’s a kind that only grows with its roots in mud. There’s a kind that only grows on dry land, in the open fields. We interfered to improve the yield, but the thinking now is that we shouldn’t have, that it’d be a lot better if we’d left the hisa alone and not had them working on the station or anything.”

Jeremy handed the stick back carefully. “Do you think so?” Maybe Jeremy heard the disbelief in his voice. Do you think so? Jeremy asked straight into his privately-held, his cherished heresy. None of the staffers had ever seen it. But Jeremy did. And deserved an answer he’d never give, in hearing of Pell authorities, who could bar him from the planet as dangerous.

“I think maybe they’d gain something from developing at their own pace.” The cautious apology to official policy. But he plunged ahead. “Or maybe they’d gain things from us we never thought of. Or they might die out without us. You know there aren’t that many sites in the world where there are hisa. World population’s given to be, oh, maybe twenty million.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Not for a planet Not at all for a planet.”

Jeremy was quiet for a moment. “Dead-on that Earth’s got a lot.” Jeremy had been there, Jeremy had said so. The fabled and unreliable motherworld. Wellspring of everything they knew about planets. All the preconceptions, all the right and wrong perceptions.

“Yeah,” he said “That’s our model. That’s what we know in the universe. That’s all else we know and it’s a pretty small sample. Twenty million hisa on Downbelow. A lot fewer platytheres on Cyteen.”

“They’re not intelligent.”

“They don’t seem to be.” What he knew said that Cyteen’s platytheres had gotten too successful for their own environment, deforested vast tracts that then became prey to weather patterns. And human beings on Cyteen had determined the planet was more useful and more viable if they killed them all. Environmental scientists on Pell were aghast.

But nature sometimes killed itself. Not all life succeeded. Could life intervene to save life, when the end result would be extinction, or did nature know best?