Shortly after Vubben spoke, the portal reopened and there emerged from the ship several more floating machines, growling disconcertingly. Each hesitated on reaching the onlookers lining the valley rim. For several duras, the folk of the Commons held their ground, though trembling in foot, wheel, and ring. Then the robots turned and swept away, toward every point of the compass, leaving cyclones of broken grass in their wake.

“Survey probes — these shall commence their duties,” the first messenger explained, buzzing and clicking primly in a formal version of Galactic Two.

“(Preliminary) analyses — these surrogates shall provide.

“Meanwhile, toward a goal of both profit and rescue — let us, face-to-face discussions, commence.”

This caused a stir. Did we understand correctly? Our dialects have drifted since our devolution. Did the phrase “face-to-face” mean what it seemed?

Below, the ship’s doorway began reopening once more.

“Bad news,” Lester Cambel commented gruffly. “If they’re willing to let us see them in person, it means—”

“—that they are not worried anyone will be left after they depart, to tell whose face was seen,” finished Knife-Bright Insight.

Our hoon brother, Phwhoon-dau, shared the gloomy diagnosis. His aged throat sac darkened from somber thought. “Their confidence is blatant, unnerving. Hrrrhrm. As is their haste.”

Vubben turned an eyestalk toward my/our sensor ring and winked the lid-an efficient, human-derived gesture conveying irony. Among the Six, we traeki and g’Keks hobble like cripples on this heavy world, while hoon stride with graceful power. Yet those dour, pale giants claim to find the rest of us equally frantic and wild.

Something, or rather two somethings, stirred within the shadowy airlock. A pair of bipedal forms stepped forward — walkers — slim, stick-jointed, and somewhat tall. Clothed in loosely draped garments that concealed all but their bare hands and heads, they emerged into the afternoon light to peer upward at us.

From the Commons there erupted a low collective sigh of shock and recognition.

Was this a hopeful sign? Out of all the myriad spacefaring races in the Civilization of the Five Galaxies, what impossibly remote chance decreed that our discoverers might turn out to be cousins? That the crew of this ship should ,be cogenetic with one of our Six? Was this the work of our capricious goddess, whose luck favors the anomalous and strange?

“Hyoo-mans-s-s…” Ur-Jah, our eldest sage, aspirated in Anglic, the native tongue of our youngest sept.

From Lester Cambel, there escaped a sound i had never heard before, which these rings could not decipher at the time. Only later did we comprehend, and learn its name.

It was despair.

Rety led single file along a track that now ran atop a broad shelf of bedrock, too hard for great-boo to take root. The slanting, upthrust granite ledge separated two broad fingers of cane forest, which Dwer knew stretched for hundreds of arrowflights in all directions. Although the rocky trail followed a ridgetop, the boo on either side grew so tall that only the highest peaks could be seen above the swaying ocean of giant stems.

The girl kept peering, left and right, as if in search of something. As if she wanted something, rather urgently, and did not want to walk past it by mistake. But when Dwer tried to inquire, all she gave back was silence.

You’ll have to watch it with this one, he thought. She’s been bun all her life, till she’s prickly as a dartback bare.

People weren’t his specialty, but a forester uses empathy to grasp the simple needs and savage thoughts of wild things.

Wild things can know pain.

Well, in another day or so she won’t be my problem. The sages have experts, healers. If I meddle, I may just make things worse.

The stone shelf gradually narrowed until the footpath traced a slender aisle between crowded ranks of towering adult boo, each stem now over twenty meters tall i and as thick as several men. The giant green stalks grew so close that even Mudfoot would have trouble getting far into the thicket without squeezing between mighty boles. The strip of sky above pinched gradually tighter becoming a mere ribbon of blue as the trail constricted. At some points, Dwer could spread his arms and touch mighty cylinders on both sides at the same time.

The compressed site played tricks with perspective as he pictured two vast walls, primed to press together at any instant, grinding their tiny group like scraps of cloth under Nelo’s pulping hammer.

Funny thing. This stretch of trail hadn’t felt nearly so spooky on his way uphill, two days ago. Then, the slender avenue had felt like a funnel, channeling him briskly toward his quarry. Now it was a cramped furrow, a pit. Dwer felt a growing tightness in his chest. What if something’s happened up ahead. A landslide blocking the way. Or afire? What a trap this could be!

He sniffed suspiciously, picking up only a gummy reek of greenness given off by the boo. Of course, anything at all could be going on downwind, and he wouldn’t know of it until—

Stop this! Snap out of it. What’s gotten into you?

It’s her, he realized. You’re feeling bad because she thinks you’re a bastard.

Dwer shook his head.

Well, ain’t it so? You let Rety go on thinking she might be hanged, when it would have been easy enough to say—

To say what? A lie? I can’t promise it won’t happen. The law is fierce because it has to be. The sages can show mercy. It’s allowed. But who am I to promise in their name?

He recalled his former master describing the last time a large band of sooners was discovered, back when old Fallen had been an apprentice. The transgressors were found living on a distant archipelago, far to the north. One of the hoon boat-wanderers — whose job it was to patrol at sea the same way human hunters roamed the forests and urrish plainsmen ranged the steppes — came upon a thronging cluster of her kind, dwelling amid ice floes, surviving by seeking the caves of hibernating rouol shamblers and spearing the rotund beasts as they slept. Each summer, the renegade tribe would come ashore and set fires across the tundra plains, panicking herds of shaggy, long-toed gallaiters, sending the frightened ungulates tumbling over cliffs by the hundreds, so that a few might be butchered.

Ghahen, the boat-wanderer, had been drawn by the smoke of one mass killing and soon began dealing with the crime in the manner of her folk. Patient beyond human fathoming, gentle in a way that gave Dwer nightmares to hear of it, she had taken an entire year to winnow the band, one by one, painlessly confiscating from each member its precious life bone, until all that remained was a solitary male elder, whom she seized and brought home to testify, ferrying the dejected captive in a boat piled high with the fifth vertebra of all his kin. After reciting his tale — a crooning lament lasting fourteen days — that final seagoing sooner was executed by the hoon themselves, expiating their shame. All the impounded vertebrae were ground to dust and scattered in a desert, far from any standing water.

The forbidding memory of that story filled Dwer’s heart with leaden worry.

Spare me, please, from being asked to do as Ghahen did. I couldn’t. Not if all the sages ordered it. Not if Lark said the fate of all Jijo hung in the balance. There’s got to be a better way.

Just where the rocky shelf seemed about to narrow down to nothing, letting the divided tracts of boo converge and obliterate the trail, a clearing abruptly opened ahead. A bowl-shaped depression, nearly a thousand meters across, with an algae-crusted lake in its center and a narrow outlet at the far end. A fringe of great-boo lined the crater’s outer rim, and spindly tufts of the tenacious plant sprouted from crevices between jagged boulders that lay tumbled across the silent mountain vale. The lake’s watery shore was outlined by a dense hedge, appearing at a distance like rank moss, from which radiated countless twisted tendrils, many of them broken stumps. Even where Dwer stood, ropy fibers could be seen half-buried in the dust, some as thick as his leg.