At least he can feel some joy, she thought. Take the way he beamed, every time she approached. It felt strange and sweet for someone to be so reliably happy to see her. Perhaps if she were prettier, it wouldn’t be so befuddling. But the handsome dark outlander was a sick man, she recalled. Out of his proper mind.

And yet, she pondered further, what is the past but a fiction, invented by a mind in order to go on functioning? She had spent a year fleeing memory, for reasons that had seemed important then.

Now it just doesn’t amount to much.

She worried about what was going on up in the Rim-mers. Her brothers stayed close to her thoughts.

If you’d accepted Taine’s original proposal of marriage, you might have had little ones by now, and their future to fret about, as well.

Refusing the august gray-headed sage had caused a stir. How many other offers would there be for the hand of a shy papermaker’s daughter without much figure, a young woman with more passion for symbols on a page than dancing or the other arts of dalliance? Soon after turning Taine down, Joshu’s attentions had seemed to ratify her decision, till she realized the young bookbinder might only be using her as a diversion during his journeyman year in Biblos, nothing more.

Ironic, isn’t it? Lark could have his pick of young women on the Slope, yet his philosophy makes him choose celibacy. My conclusions about Jijo and the Six are the opposite to his. Yet I’m alone too.

Different highways, arriving at the same solitary dead end.

And now come gods from space, diverting us all onto a road whose markings we can’t see.

They still lacked a sixth for the concert. Despite having introduced string instruments to Jijo, humans traditionally played flute in a mixed sextet. Jop was an adept, but the farmer declined, preferring to pore over his book of scrolls. Finally, young Jomah agreed to sit in for luck, equipped with a pair of spoons.

So much for the vaunted contribution of Earthlings to musical life on Jijo.

Hidden under Blade’s heavy shell, the mirliton groaned a low, rumbling note, soon joined by a mournful sigh from one of the jugs under Blade’s left-front leg. The qheuen’s seeing-band winked at Ulgor, and the urs took her cue to lift the violus, laying the double bow across the strings, drawing twin wavering notes, embellishing the mirliton’s basso moan. A multilevel chord was struck. It held…

The moment of duet harmony seemed to stretch on and on. Sara stopped breathing, lest any other sound break the extraordinary consonance. Even Fakoon rolled forward, visibly moved.

If the rest is anything like this…

Pzora chose the next instant to pile in, disrupting the aching sweetness with an eager clangor of bells and cymbals. The Dolo pharmacist seemed zealously unaware of what er had shattered, rushing ahead of the beat, halting, then pushing on again. After a stunned instant, members of the hoonish crew roared with laughter. Noor on the masts chittered as Ulgor and Blade shared looks that needed no rewq to interpret — equivalents to a shrug and a wink. They played on, incorporating Pzora’s enthusiasm in a catchy four-part rhythm.

Sara recalled being taught piano by her mother, from music that was actually written down, now a nearly forgotten art. Jijoan sextets weaved their impromptu harmonies out of separate threads, merging and diverging through one congenial coincidence after another. Human music used to work that way in most pre-Contact cultures, before the Euro-West hit on symphonies and other more rigorous forms. Or so Sara had read.

Overcoming shyness, Jomah started rattling his spoons as Blade puffed a calliope of breathy notes. The hoonish helmsman inflated his air sac to answer the mirliton’s rumble, singing an improvisation, without words in any known language.

Then Fakoon wheeled forward, arms swaying delicately, reminding Sara of gently rising smoke.

What had been exquisite, then humorous, soon took on a quality even more highly prized.

Unity.

She glanced at the Stranger, his face overcome with emotion, eyes delighting in Fakoon’s opening moves. The left hand thumped his blanket happily, beating time.

You can tell what kind of man he used to be, she mused. Even horribly mutilated, in awful pain, he spends his waking time enthralled by good things.

The thought seemed to catch in her throat. Taken by surprise, Sara turned away, hiding a choking wave of sadness that abruptly blurred her vision.

Tarek Town appeared soon after, perched between the merging rivers Roney and Bibur.

From afar it seemed no more than a greenish knoll, like any other hill. Grayish shapes studded the mound, as if boulders lay strewn over the slopes. Then the Hauph-woa rounded one last oxbow turn, and what had seemed solid from a distance now spread open — a huge, nearly hollow erection of webbing, festooned with greenery. The “boulders” were the protruding tips of massive towers, enmeshed in a maze of cables, conduits, rope bridges, netting, ramps, and sloping ladders, all draped under lush, flowing foliage.

The air filled with a humid redolence, the scent of countless flowers.

Sara liked to squint and imagine Tarek in other days, back when it was but a hamlet to the mighty Buyur, yet a place of true civilization, humming with faithful machines, vibrant with the footsteps of visitors from far star systems, thronging with sky-craft that settled gracefully on rooftop landing pads. A city lively with aspirations that she, a forest primitive, might never imagine.

But then, as the noon crew poled the Hauph-woa toward a concealed dock, no amount of squinting could mask how far Tarek had fallen. Out of a multitude of windows, only a few still shone with million-year-old glazing. Others featured crude chimneys, staining once-smooth walls with the soot of cook fires. Wide ledges where floating aircraft once landed now supported miniature orchards or coops for noisy herd chicks. Instead of self-propelled machines, the streets swarmed with commerce carried on the backs of tinkers and traders, or animal-drawn carts.

High up a nearby tower, some young g’Kek sped around a rail-less ramp, heedless of the drop, their spokes blurry with speed. Urban life suited the wheeled sept. Rare elsewhere, g’Kek made up the town’s largest group.

Northward, crossing Tarek’s link to the mainland, lay a “recent” ruin of stone blocks — the thousand-year-old city wall, erected by the Gray Queens who long ruled here, until a great siege ended their reign, back when the Dolo paper mill was new. Scorch marks still smeared the fallen bulwark, testimony to the violent birth of the Commons-of-Six.

However many times she passed through Tarek Town, it remained a marvel. Jijo’s closest thing to a cosmopolitan place, where all races mixed as equals.

Along with hoon-crewed vessels, countless smaller boats skimmed under lacy, arching bridges, rowed by human trapper-traders, bringing hides and wares to market. River-traeki, with amphibious basal segments, churned along the narrow canals, much faster than their land-bound cousins managed ashore.

Near the river confluence, a special port sheltered two hissing steam-ferries, linking forest freeholds on the north bank to southern grasslands where urrish hordes galloped. But on a sloping beach nearby, Sara saw some blue qheuens climb ashore, avoiding ferry tolls by walking across the river bottom, a talent useful long ago, when blue rebels toppled the Queens’ tyranny — helped by an army of men, traeki, and hoon.

In all the tales about that battle, none credits the insurgents with a weapon I think crucial — that of language.