Yes, he decided. It was all Melina’s fault—

A low cough jarred Nelo’s drifting resentment. He blinked as a pair of deep brown eyes peered over his pitted desk. Dark fur framed a face so nearly human that unwary traeki sometimes gave chimpanzees the courtesy due full members of the Commons.

“Are you still here?” Nelo snapped.

The face winced, then nodded to the left, toward the paper storeroom, where one of Nelo’s aides slowly gathered torn sheets from a discard bin.

He cursed. “Not that garbage, Jocko!”

“But Master, you said to fetch waste scraps we can’t sell—”

Nelo ducked under the Great Shaft, a rotating horizontal shank of hardwood, carrying power from the village dam to nearby workshops. He shooed Jocko away. “Never mind what I said. Go back to the vats-and tell Caleb to put less water through the millrace! It’s four months till rainy season. He’ll have us out of business in two!”

Nelo scanned the shelves for himself, finally choosing two reams of slightly flawed sheets, bound in liana vines. They weren’t quite rejects. Someone might have paid cash for them. On the other hand, what was there to save for? Didn’t the sages warn against investing much pride or care in tomorrow?

For all strivings will be judged, and few will win grace…

Nelo snorted. He wasn’t a religious man. He made paper. The profession implied some faith in the essential goodness of time.

“These’ll do for your mistress, Prity,” he told the little chimp, who rounded the desk, holding out both hands. Mute as a rewq, she served Nelo’s daughter in ways no other being on Jijo could manage. Ways that few could comprehend. He handed over one of the heavy packages.

“I’ll carry the other. It’s time I dropped by anyway, to see if Sara’s getting enough to eat.”

Mute or not, the ape was expressive with rolled eyes. She knew this was just an excuse for Nelo to have a look at Sara’s mysterious house-guest.

Nelo growled. “Come along and no dawdling. Some of us work for a living, you know.”

A covered walkway linked the dam/factory to the forest, where most villagers dwelled. Fierce sunlight filtered through a canopy of living camouflage. At noon it took an optimist to think the screen would hide the buildings against a resolute scan from space — and among the Six, optimism was viewed as a mild type of heresy.

Alas, it was not the type of heresy followed by Nelo’s eldest son.

Concealment seemed doubly problematic for the great dam itself. Unlike the ones qheuenish colonists made, bottling small ponds behind barriers that mimicked landslides or piles of logs, this dam spanned half an arrowflight from end to end. False boulders and cascades of melon creepers blurred its outline. Still, many called it the most blatant artifact on the Slope-outside of some ancient Buyur site. Each year, on Denouncement Day, radicals harangued for its destruction.

And now Lark is one of them. Nelo cast a stock complaint toward his dead wife’s spirit. Do you hear, Melina? You brought the boy with you, when you came from the far south. We’re taught genes don’t matter as much as upbringing, but did I raise a son to be a rabble-rousing apostate? Never!

Instead of camouflage, Nelo put his faith in the promise of the founding ancestors who planted their truant seed on Jijo, claiming there would be no determined scan from space. Not for half a million years or so.

He once stressed that point in an argument with Lark. To his surprise, the lad agreed, then said it did not matter.

“I urge drastic measures not because I’m afraid of being caught, but because it’s the right thing to do.”

Right? Wrong? A cloud of dizzying abstractions. Lark and Sara kept bringing up such fluff — arguing with each other for miduras about fate and destiny. Sometimes Nelo found Dwer, the wild boy of the forest, the easiest of his children to understand.

The village carpenter’s shop spewed sawdust, making pipe for Jobee, the rotund village plumber, to splice into homes, bringing fresh water and taking away waste to the septic pits. The comforts of a civilized life.

“Deep shade, Nelo,” Jobee drawled in a manner that invited a soul to stop and chat a spell.

“Cloudy sky, Jobee,” Nelo replied with a polite nod, and kept walking. Not that a few duras’ idle banter would hurt. But if he learns I’m visiting Sara, he’ll drop by later with half the town to find out what I learned about her new pet… the stranger with the hole in his head.

Once upon a time, it had been a fallen chipwing with a broken tail rudder, or a wounded toyo pup. Anything sick or hurt used to wind up in his storeroom, where Sara tended it in a box lined with his finest felt. Nelo had figured his adult daughter finally past that phase-till she returned from a routine gleaning trip a few days ago, with a wounded man thrashing on a stretcher.

Once Nelo might have opposed an outsider, even a sick one, lodging in his daughter’s treehouse. Now he was glad to see anything draw her from a year’s hard work and isolation. One of Sara’s guildmasters had written to him recently, complaining that she was shirking a principal duty of a woman of her caste, prompting Nelo to write back, rebuking the fellow’s impudence. Still, any interest Sara showed in a man was cause for guarded hope.

From the covered walkway, Nelo spied the town exploser and his young son, inspecting an anchor-pier of the great dam. Forbidding and earnest, with deep-chiseled features, Henrik reached into a recessed hole and withdrew a bulb-ended clay tube. Scrutinizing the charge, the exploser held it for his son to sniff.

Nelo was suddenly acutely aware of the mighty lake, lurking behind the dam, ready to sweep away the locks and factories if ever a signal came for Henrik to do his duty. He also felt a pang of jealousy over that knowing tete-a-tete between father and child — the sort that he once had with his own sire. One he hoped to share again, with someone who loved paper as he did.

If only one of the three kids would give me an heir.

I’ll have one yet, he vowed. If I must bribe the sages to command it!

Henrik slipped the tube back inside, resealing the hole with clay.

A low sigh hissed to Nelo’s left, where he saw another person also watching the explosers. Log Biter, matriarch of the local qheuenish hive, squatted by a tree stump with all five legs drawn in. Nervous exhalations stirred dust beneath her blue carapace, and she wore a rewq over her vision strip — as if that would tell her much about Henrik and son!

Anyway, what was Log Biter worried about? Surely this was just routine maintenance. Dole’s human villagers would never sacrifice the dam, source of their wealth and prestige. Only a few orthodox fools wanted that.

And Nelo’s eldest son.

Everyone’s edgy, he thought, turning away. First an abnormal winter, then Ulkoun’s proposition, and Lark’s heresy. And now Sara comes home with a mysterious outsider.

Is it any wonder I have trouble sleeping?

Most villagers’ homes lay safe from the glowering sky, nestled high in the trunks of mighty garu trees, where strains of edible moss flourished on wide branch-top gardens. It seemed a niche made for Earthlings, just as blue qheuens loved lakes, and dry plains suited urrish tribes.

Nelo and Prity had to stop briefly while children herded braying bush-turkeys across the forest loam. A pair of opal-skinned glavers, perturbed while rooting for grubs, lifted their round heads and sniffed haughtily. The children laughed, and the glavers’ bulging eyes soon dimmed, the light of anger costing too much effort to maintain.

It was the familiar rhythm of village life, and Nelo would happily go on taking it for granted, but for his eldest son’s words before leaving for Gathering, when Lark explained the reason for his heresy.