Suddenly he was impatient to be off. “Well, no sense worrying about it now.” He motioned for Rety to lead the glaver again. “You’ll be assigned a junior sage to speak for you, so you won’t face the council alone. Anyway, we don’t hang sooners anymore. Not unless we have to.”

His attempt to catch her eye with a wink failed, so the joke went flat. She studied the ground as he retied the tether, and they resumed moving single file.

A rising humidity turned into mist as they neared the noise of plunging water. Where the trail rounded a switchback, a streamlet fell from above, dropping staccato spatters across an aquamarine pool. From there, water spilled over a sheer edge, resuming its steep journey toward the river far below, and finally the sea.

The way down to the pool looked too treacherous to risk with Rety and the glaver, so he signaled to keep going. They would intersect the brook again, farther along.

But the noor leaped from rock to rock. Soon they heard him splashing joyfully as they plodded on.

Dwer found himself thinking of another waterfall, way up where the Great Northern Glacier reached a towering cliff at the continent’s edge. Every other year, he hunted brankur pelts there, during spring thaw. But he really made the journey in order to be on hand when the ice dam finally broke, at the outlet of Lake Desolation.

Huge, translucent sheets would tumble nearly a kilometer, shattering to fill the sky with crystal icebows, bringing the mighty falls back to life with a soul-filling roar.

In his fumbling way, he once tried describing the scene to Lark and Sara — the shouting colors and radiant noise — hoping practice would school his clumsy tongue. Reliably, his sister’s eyes lit up over his tales of Jijo’s marvels beyond the narrow Slope. But good old cheerful Lark just shook his head and said — “These fine marvels would do just as well without us.”

But would they? Dwer wondered.

Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn’t that what “sapience” is for?

Someday, he hoped to take his wife-and-mate to Desolation Falls. If he found someone whose soul could share it the way his did.

The noor caught up a while later, sauntering by with a smug grin, then waiting to shake its sleek back, spraying their knees as they passed. Rety laughed. A short sound, curt and hurried, as if she did not expect any pleasure to last long.

Farther down the trail, Dwer halted where an outcrop overlooked the cascade, a featherlike trickle, dancing along the cliff face. The sight reminded Dwer of how desperately dry he felt. It also tugged a sigh, akin to loneliness.

“Come on, sprig. There’s another pool down a ways, easy to get to.”

But Rety stood for a time, rooted in place, with a line of moisture on her cheek, though Dwer guessed it might have come from floating mist.

They do not show their faces. Plans might go astray. Some of us might survive to testify. So naturally, they hide their forms.

Our scrolls warn of this possibility. Our destiny seems foredoomed.

Yet when the starship’s voice filled the valley, the plain intent was to reassure.

“(Simple) scientists, we are.

“Surveys of (local, interesting) lifeforms, we prepare.

“Harmful to anyone, we are not.”

That decree, in the clicks and squeaks of highly formal Galactic Two, was repeated in three other standard languages, and finally-because they saw men and pans among our throng-in the wolfling tongue, Anglic.

“Surveying (local, unique) lifeforms, in this we seek your (gracious) help.

“Knowledge of the (local) biosphere, this you (assuredly) have.

“Tools and (useful) arts, these we offer in trade.

“Confidentially, shall we (mutually) exchange?”

Recall, my rings, how our perplexed peoples looked to one another. Could such vows be trusted? We who dwell on Jijo are already felons in the eyes of vast empires. So are those aboard this ship. Might two such groups have reason for common cause?

Our human sage summed it up with laconic wit. In Anglic, Lester Cambel muttered wisely—

“Confidentially, my hairy ancestors’ armpits!”

And he scratched himself in a gesture that was both oracular and pointedly apropos.

The night before the foreigners came, a chain of white-robed pilgrims trekked through a predawn mist. There were sixty, ten from each race.

Other groups would come this way during festival, seeking harmony patterns. But this company was different-its mission more grave.

Shapes loomed at them. Gnarled, misgrown trees spread twisted arms, like clutching specters. Oily vapors merged and sublimed. The trail turned sharply to avoid dark cavities, apparently bottomless, echoing mysteriously. Knobs of wind-scoured rock teased form-hungry agents of the mind, stoking the wanderers’ nervous anticipation. Would the next twisty switchback, or the next, bring it into sight — Jijo’s revered Mother Egg?

Whatever organic quirks they inherited, from six worlds in four different galaxies, each traveler felt the same throbbing call toward oneness. Lark paced his footsteps to a rhythm conveyed by the rewq on his brow.

I’ve been up this path a dozen times. It should be familiar by now. So why can’t I respond?

He tried letting the rewq lay its motif of color and sound over the real world. Feet shuffled. Hooves clattered. Ring nubs swiveled and wheels creaked along a dusty trail pounded so smooth by past pilgrims that one might guess this ritual stretched back to the earliest days of exile, not a mere hundred or so years.

Where did earlier folk turn, when they needed hope?

Lark’s brother, the renowned hunter, once took him by a secret way up a nearby mountain, where the Egg could be seen from above, squatting in its caldera like the brood of a storybook dragon, lain in a sheer-sided nest. From that distant perspective, it might have been some ancient Buyur monument, or a remnant of some older denizens of Jijo, aeons earlier — a cryptic sentinel, darkly impervious to time.

With the blink of an eye, it became a grounded starship — an oblate lens meant to glide through air and ether. Or a fortress, built of some adamantine essence, light-drinking, refractory, denser than a neutron star. Lark even briefly pictured the shell of some titanic being, too patient or proud to rouse itself over the attentions of mayflies.

It had been disturbing, forcing him to rethink his image of the sacred. That epiphany still clung to Lark. Or else it was a case of jitters over the speech he was supposed to give soon to a band of fierce believers. A sermon calling for extreme sacrifice.

The trail turned-and abruptly spilled into a sheer-walled canyon surrounding a giant oval form, a curved shape that reared fantastically before the pilgrims, two arrowflights from end to end. The pebbled surface curved up and over those gathered in awe at its base. Staring upward, Lark knew.

It couldn’t be any of those other things I imagined from afar.

Up close, underneath its massive sheltering bulk, anyone could tell the Egg was made of native stone.

Marks of Jijo’s fiery womb scored its flanks, tracing the story of its birth, starting with a violent conception, far underground. Layered patterns were like muscular cords. Crystal veins wove subtle dendrite paths, branching like nerves.

Travelers filed slowly under the convex overhang, to let the Egg sense their presence, and perhaps grant a blessing. Where the immense monolith pressed into black basalt, the sixty began a circuit. But while Lark’s sandals scraped gritty powder, chafing his toes, the peacefulness and awe of the moment were partly spoiled by memory.