Lark took the box from the lornik, knowing better than to thank or make eye contact with the shy creature. Unlike chimps and zookirs, lorniks seemed able to bond only with the race that brought their ancestors to Jijo, nearly a thousand years ago.

He lifted the delicately grooved lid of the gift box, which by qheuenish tradition had been gnawed by the giver and could never be used again for any other purpose. Inside, resting on a bed of garu sawdust, several clusters of brown-speckled tendrils quivered, coupled by colored bands of translucent film.

There’s been so little time. I’ve had so many duties. This really is a fine favor…

Still, all told, Lark would rather have gone to the caves and picked his next rewq for himself, as he had done on three other occasions since passing puberty. It seemed strange to choose one out of a box. What was he to do with the others?

Several tentacles raised tentatively, reaching toward the light, then twisting, searching. Only one pair showed no indecision, wafting gently in Lark’s direction, spreading a gossamer web between them.

Well, it’s a humaniform rewq, all right, he thought. It looks new, robust.

To feel diffident was only natural. A person usually held on to a personal rewq for many years. It had been painful to watch helplessly as the last one wasted in its moss-lined pouch, during the many weeks the Egg was silent. Nor could he share someone else’s symbiont. Among humans, one was more likely to pass around a toothbrush than a rewq.

“My gratitude is manifest in acceptance of this unexcelled gift,” he said. Though reluctant, Lark lifted the squirming mass to his brow.

His former rewq had been like a pair of old shoes — or a favorite pair of urrish-made sunglasses — comfortable and easy to use. This one twitched and wriggled in agitated eagerness, palpating his temples in avid search of rich surface veins where it might feed. The gauzy membrane spread taut over Lark’s eyes, rippling with the rewq’s own excitement, conveying nothing more useful than a wave of vertigo. It would take time to reach an understanding with the new creature. Ideally you let your old one teach the new, during an overlapping time before the elderly rewq died.

Ifni’s miracles often have ironic timing. We had to face the aliens for so long without the help rewq might have offered. Now, at a critical moment, they return so suddenly that they may only prove a distracting hindrance.

Still, for courtesy’s sake, he pretended pleasure, bowing and thanking Harullen for the fine gift. With luck, Harullen’s own rewq would be noisy too, and not convey any of Lark’s own mixed feelings.

The heretic leader’s satisfaction was evident in a mincing, clattering dance of feet and dangling claws. The film over Lark’s eyes added a blur of sparks that might be translated qheuenish emotions — or else just static from the excited, untrained rewq.

Then Harullen abruptly changed the subject, slipping into Anglic.

“You know that the time of pilgrimage is almost at hand?”

“I was just writing a letter. I’ll don my robe and join our group at the Wheel Stone in a midura.”

Partly because Ling requested Lark’s presence, the . Sages had granted the heretical faction two sixes among the twelve twelves selected to make the first climb, setting forth to greet the rousing Egg. Since hearing the news, Lark had felt a familiar heat coming from the knob of stone that hung by a thong around his neck. His reminder and penance. No pilgrimage was ever easy wearing that amulet.

“Very well, then,” Harullen replied. “At the Wheel Stone we shall consider the zealots’ latest entreaty before proceeding to join…”

The heretic’s voice trailed off, muffling as he crouched down, drawing all five legs into his carapace, bringing his sensitive tongue into contact with the ground. This time, Lark’s rewq conveyed a vivid image of emotions — a halo depicting distaste mixed liberally with disapproval.

Harullen resumed. “There is another on the trail. One whose stone-hard lineage is belied by disorderly foot-haste.”

One whose what is what? Lark puzzled. Sometimes the way other races used Anglic left him confused. Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing the chaotic human language had become so popular on Jijo.

Soon he also felt ground-tremors, tickling the soles of his feet. A five-beat vibration even more familiar than Harullen’s earlier footsteps. Similar to that rhythmic beat, yet simpler, less aristocratic, a pace too hurried and eager to waste time on etiquette or show.

Another armored form burst into view, trailing twigs and leaves.

Like Harullen, Uthen the Taxonomist was dressed for pilgrimage — in a carelessly draped, once-white rag that flapped behind him like somebody’s old bedsheet. His carapace was a slightly deeper shade of slate than his disdainful cousin’s. Like Harullen, Uthen wore a new rewq, which might explain his stumbling progress, twice veering off the path as if distracted by swarms of buzzing insects. Lark peeled his own reluctant symbiont back from his eyes. He needed no help reading his colleague’s excitement.

“Lark-ark, Harullen-en,” Uthen stammered out several vents, in unmatched timbres. Harullen scornfully turned his cupola while the newcomer caught his breath.

“Come quickly, both of you. They’ve come out!”

“Who’s come—?” Lark began, before realizing that Uthen could mean but one thing.

He nodded. “Just give me a dura.”

Lark ducked back under the tent flap, fumbled for his own pilgrimage robe, then paused by the writing desk. He snatched the unfinished letter from under the folio and slid it into a sleeve, along with a sharpened pencil. Ink was more elegant and wouldn’t smudge. Still, Sara wouldn’t give a damn, so long as the letter got there and contained the latest news.

“Come on!” Uthen urged, impatiently, when Lark reemerged. “Hop aboard and let’s hoof it!” The gray qheuen scientist dipped one end of his shell to the ground. This time, Harullen groaned annoyance. Sure, kids did it all the time, but it wasn’t dignified for an adult gray — especially one with ancestry like Uthen’s — to go around carrying a human on his back. Still, they would move faster now, toward the Meadow of Concealed Aliens, hurrying to see the wonder that had emerged.

If anything, Ling understated when she called them beautiful.

Lark had never envisioned anything quite like them. Not when leafing through ancient picture books, or reading pre-Contact works of space fiction. Not even in his dreams.

In the vernacular of Jijo’s exiled tribes, it was common to call all Galactics “star-gods.” Yet here, strolling a forest clearing, were beings that seemed all but literally worthy of the name, so exquisite were they to behold. Lark could stand it only for moments at a stretch, then had to look away lest his eyes fill with tears and his chest begin to ache.

Ling and the other forayer humans formed a guard of honor around their noble patrons, while vigilant robots hovered. Occasionally, one of the tall stoop-shouldered Rothen crooked a finger, beckoning Rann or Besh to lean upward and explain something, like children called on to recite, gesturing at a nearby tree, one of the tent-pavilions, a herd of spline beasts, or a shy infant g’Kek.

Crowds gathered. Proctors of Gathering, armed with red-dyed sticks, kept people from pressing too close, but there seemed small likelihood of a shameful outburst. Hardly anyone even whispered, so thick was the atmosphere of awe.

The effect seemed greatest on the humans present, most of whom stared with hushed wonderment and bewildered familiarity. Rothen were humanoid to an uncanny degree, with high noble foreheads, wide sympathetic eyes, eloquent noses, and droopy, soft-fringed eyebrows that seemed to purse with sincere, attentive interest in anyone or everything they encountered. Nor were these parallels coincidental, Lark supposed. Physical and emotional affinities would have been cultivated during the long process of uplift, tens of thousands of years ago, when Rothen experts tinkered and modified a tribe of graceless but promising apes back on Pliocene Earth, altering them gradually into beings almost ready for the stars.