“Nature is taking hold of this world again, Father, moving beyond the patterns imposed by its former tenants.”

Nelo had been doubtful. How could unsapient life change a world in less than a million years? Without a guiding race to tend it, as a farmer manages a garden?

“It’s what declaring a world fallow is all about,” Lark went on. “Letting it rest and recover without interference.”

“Without the likes of us, you mean.”

“That’s right. We aren’t supposed to be on Jijo. We do harm simply living here.”

It was the moral dilemma of the Six. The ancestors of each race had felt they had strong reasons to come so far in sneakships, planting outlaw seed on a forbidden world. The Scrolls spoke of crime blended with desperate hope. But Nelo’s son stressed only the felony. Moreover, Lark and his comrades planned finally doing something about it. A grand gesture at this year’s Gathering, atoning for generations of guilt with an act of devotion, both holy and terrible.

“What foolishness!” Nelo had protested. “When civilization finally resettles this galaxy, there’ll be no sign our kind ever lived here. Not if we live righteously, by Egg and Oath. What you plan will make no difference!”

In any quarrel with Dwer, there would have been defiant shouting. But Lark was even more frustrating to talk to, masking his purist heresy behind an obstinate civility he must have inherited from his mother.

“It doesn’t matter if our crime is never discovered, Father. What matters is we don’t belong here. We simply should not exist.”

Villagers saluted their paper-crafter as Nelo and Prity passed by. But today he only glowered, wishing acridly that his offspring wouldn’t vex him so-first by neglecting his wishes, then by inflicting the ferment of their disturbing ideas.

Several boats lay berthed at the town dock. Nimble, sleek-furred noor beasts scampered across the masts, tending lines and camouflage shrouds, as their kind had been trained to do for centuries by the tall, long-snouted hoon. The crew of one vessel helped some local men load a cargo of glass and metal, scavenged from a Buyur site upriver, destined for reprocessing by the smiths of Ur-Tanj town, or else bound for the dross pits, far out to sea.

Normally, Nelo might have paused to watch, but Prity tugged his sleeve, urging him upward, into the blue-gray branches of the grove.

As they turned, sudden shouts blared. Men dropped their burdens and hoon sailors crouched, splaying shaggy legs. Creaking tree trunks swayed like the ship masts as lines snapped and ripples stitched the water. A cloud of leaves poured from the forest, filling the air with spinning spiral forms. Nelo recognized the basso rumble of a quake! Spine-tingling fear mixed with a strange thrill as he pondered whether to try for open ground.

The tumult passed before he could decide. Branches kept swaying, but the walkway planks ceased vibrating and the watery ripples vanished like dreams. Relieved sailors snorted. Villagers made reverent hand gestures, for Jijo’s flexings were sacred omens of the planet’s healing force, even when they brought riotous ruin. Once, a century ago, a more violent quake had brought forth the Holy Egg, a blessing worth all the pain that accompanied its birth.

Oh, Mother Jijo, Nelo prayed as the last temblors faded. Let things go well at Gathering. Let the sages talk Lark and his friends out of their foolish plan.

And perhaps, he dared add, let Dwer also meet a girl of good family and settle down?

He knew better than to ask a third wish. Sara wouldn’t want him invoking a deity in her favor. Not unless it were Ifni, the impartially capricious goddess of numbers and fate.

When his pulse steadied, Nelo signaled for Prity to lead. Their route now spiraled up a massive garu, then along branch-tops spanned by rope guideways. Nelo’s feet moved by habit and he barely noticed the height, but the bundle of paper grew heavy in his hands.

Sara’s treehouse perched so high that daylight spread for hours across one wattle wall. Nelo gripped a guide-rope while crossing the last stretch. The naked sun was so unsettling, he nearly missed noticing a square-sided cage, made of braced rods, that hung from a pulley next to Sara’s sky porch.

A lift! Why is a lift attached to my daughter’s home?

Then he recalled. It’s because of the Stranger.

Pungent aromas wafted from the house — tart, musty, and sweetly slimy. Peering inside, Nelo made out slanting rays of light, stabbing through louvered blinds. Sara’s voice could be heard, muttering unhappily from another room. His hand raised to knock on the jamb, but paused when a pair of shadows loomed from within — one a cone-shaped outline of circular tubes, taller than Nelo’s head. Nubby feet propelled the bottommost ring, making squishy sounds as it neared.

Two ’roller-hoops framed the smaller creature, whose slim torso ended with a pair of graceful arms and four eye-tipped feelers that peered all ways at once. One wheel squeaked as this entity rolled forward, revealing the spotted brain case and droopy eyestalks of an elderly g’Kek.

If any two citizens of Dolo Village could make Nelo feel spry at his age, it was this pair. In all the life-history of their two species, no g’Kek or traeki had ever climbed a tree.

“Cloudy skies, papermaker,” the wheeled one said.

“Deep shade, Doctor Lorrek. And to you, Pharmacist.” Nelo bowed twice. “How goes your patient?”

Lorrek’s Anglic was superb after years serving Dolo’s mostly human populace.

“Astonishingly, the injured man gains strength, soothed by Pzora’s special unguents” — the doctor bent a stalk toward the traeki whose ninth torus looked flushed from hard medicinal labor — “and helped by the care he receives in this clean air.”

This was a surprise. The Stranger had seemed a goner.

“But his wounds! The hole in his head—?”

Shrugging had originally been a human gesture, but no one did it with more poise than a g’Kek.

“A fatal mutilation, I feared. Clearly the outlander owes his life to Pzora’s secretions, and your daughter’s swift action, hauling him from that foul swamp.”

The traeki pharmacist then spoke, turning its jewel-like sense organs, its voice wavering like an untuned metal harp.

“i/we help gladly, though our synthesis rings near-swoon from the effort. Unguents of rare potency were needed. Yet it seems difficult to please.”

“How do you mean?”

“Only here, up high where germs are scarce, might the work be done. Miss Sara’s abode is ideal, and she will let no other take the patient. Yet she complains so! Aggrieved, she speaks longingly of an end to her work-disruption. Toward getting us all out of her hair.”

“It’s just a metaphor,” Lorrek explained.

“As i/we assumed. Its paradoxical dissonance we/i esteem highly. May her selves understand that.”

“I’ll see that she does,” Nelo told Pzora, smiling.

“Thank you all, excellent Nelos,” the young traeki responded, slipping into plural form, “i/we hope for serene work, when we return this evening.”

Lorrek wrapped his eyestalks, and Nelo needed no rewq to read the old g’Kek’s silent laughter. “Serenity is good,” he agreed dryly, coughing behind a hand.

He braced the elevator cage, first for the heavy traeki to shuffle aboard. Then Lorrek rolled in, his left wheel wobbling from untreatable degenerative axle disease. Nelo pulled the signal rope, calling an operator far below to start the weight-driven winch.

“Has anything been learned about the Stranger’s identity?” Lorrek asked while waiting.

“Not that I heard. Though I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.”

So far, even merchant traders had failed to recognize the unconscious man, implying he came quite a distance, perhaps from the coast settlements or even The Vale. No one in Dolo knew Melina, either, when she arrived long ago, with a letter of introduction and a baby on her hip. The Slope is a bigger place than we’re used to thinking.