I looked at Pasek. He spread his hands in a gesture of total innocence.
Of course, I followed her.
The “we” soon became evident. They were Aila’s entourage. Six children materialized from various points along the path—two from behind a storage building, three who had apparently been waiting just inside the tree line, and one very small boy who appeared from nowhere and immediately attached himself to my left side.
They were all staring at me.
I had faced worse odds in worse conditions. I told myself this.
They wore varying expressions of wariness. The children had heard I was acceptable but were conducting their own assessment. I decided the best approach was to treat them directly, without making a performance of it. “All right,” I said, loudly enough for Aila to stop and turn. “What are we doing?”
Aila straightened. “I’m showing you the Junu trees that makejunversyrup,” she said. “And where I saw the metal bird.”
She had me there. I wanted to see both of those things. We traveled into the forest, which grew darker and cooler as the trees became thicker and taller, shielding the understory from the rays of hot summer sun.
I already knew what the Junu trees looked like. They had bark nearly black in the shade—dark green in full light, roughand ridged at the base where the roots broke the soil surface and spread. Aila and her friends led me to a stand of them deep enough into the forest that the village sounds faded. The children spread out around us in a loose ring, still watching. The small boy had not released his grip on my sleeve.
“The Wint-ti birds nest up there.” Aila pointed to the high branches, where I could make out the dense, woven shapes of nests settled into the forks. “They’ve always nested in Junu trees. Nobody knows exactly why.”
“What do they look like?” I asked.
“Small. Blue-gray.” She considered. “Loud.”
“Very loud,” confirmed one of the other children, a girl with a serious face and big brown eyes.
“Their droppings fall into the soil around the roots,” Aila continued. She crouched and pointed at the ground beneath us. Dense clusters of small white mushrooms grew in the dark soil nearest the root bases, hugging the ground. “The droppings make the conditions right for these.”
“What are they?”
“We don’t have a name for them in quadrant dialect. Gra’ma calls them root-flowers, but they’re not flowers.” She reached out and touched the edge of one, lightly, with one finger. “They attach to the roots. Right here.” She showed me where the white growth had spread across an exposed section of root, matted and close to the surface. “And when they do, they change the sap.”
“Change it how?”
“I don’t know. They make itjunver.” She said it with the confidence of a child who had never had reason to question it. “Gra’ma says it’s just how nature works sometimes.” She stood up, satisfied with the explanation. “We tap the trees…” She showed me a small healed scar in the bark, circular, where a tap had once been. “And the sap runs out. Then we boil it down.”
“That’sjunversyrup,” finished the serious-eyed girl.
I looked at the trees. The nests above, the birds responsible for the soil, the mushrooms that required that exact soil, the roots they attached to, the sap they altered. One species requiring another, requiring another, in a chain that had likely taken eons to develop and was producing something the quadrant apparently needed badly enough to trade across systems. You couldn’t manufacture this. You couldn’t pack it up and relocate it. You couldn’t force more of it by increasing pressure on the people who tended it, because the people weren’t the limiting factor. The birds were. The mushrooms were. The trees were.Naturewas.
I stood in the forest and was very quietly alarmed, and said nothing about it.
“And I saw the metal bird right over there.” She pointed toward a section of trees that was slightly thinned. “I followed it through there and got lost.”
My gaze followed the path she pointed to and the likely route the probe went after that. It didn’t make me any less alarmed to see that the probe was here, in the thick of the Junu trees.
“Can you show us something?” the little boy at my side asked. He had a slight lisp, so his “something” came out as “somefing.”
“Like what?”
He pointed to the thick device on my wrist. “Like that.”
Six pairs of eyes dropped immediately to my wristband. Children were predictable, at least in that.
“Fine.” I crouched down and they crowded around me, oblivious to the notion of personal space. I pulled up a star map first. It was small, but I set the device to projection mode, and a glowing network of planets and stars lit up in the air above my wrist. It wasn’t a large projection. The device wasn’t made for that, but the children gasped in awe and leaned in closer. “Here’s a section of the quadrant we’re in.” I used my other hand torotate the hologram. “And here…” I moved my fingers to zoom in on a small blue light. “Is our planet, Podnos-9.”
No one moved or spoke for one glorious moment.
Then: What is that planet? Is that a star or planet? Are there people on that dot? What do they eat in space? Why is that dot red? How come we only have two moons?
