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asked again as if she hadn’t understood my own Wrengu, “Why am I here?”
    Marianne said, “Karriaagzh is sendisng over someone who knows their language.”
    “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I asked, touching her on the shoulder.
    “Fine,” she said. “You must go see your sponsor.”
    Karl and I went downstairs to catch a city bus to the transfer point for the coastal buses. He wasn’t sure he liked Black Amber, but he liked some of the other Gwyngs, even if he couldn’t understand what they said, his skull bones still growing, not ready yet for the temporal bone to be replaced with a skull computer.
    The bus ran on an elevated road over the north side slums. Karl spotted Tibetans below us and said, “I don’t want to play with the country humans again.”
    “Karl, they’re relatives, too.” I saw the building where my brother Warren killed himself—his ultimate drug deal. We’d tried to save him, but the brain rebuilding, he thought, was an alien invasion. Why had I bothered to get him off Earth? Something in me died with him. I never was sure whether that part of me needed to die or even precisely what I’d lost.
    Karl and I transferred to the coastal bus at the North Gate. After we adjusted the seats to fit us, Karl pulled out his reader, put a data card in the slot, and began reading. I looked over and saw pictures. A computerized picture book—he wasn’t that different than I was at the same age, even if his best friends weren’t human.
    Then we were out in the country, a sandy coastal plain that Marianne said looked like south Mississippi. On one side of the road, mechanized plows cut across the field like giant shuttles; on the other side, two people of indeterminate species waded out on the flats with tongs and baskets, so primitive a food-gathering system I knew they had to be high officials escaping their terminals.
    I could skip the primitive. “Karl, do you like this?”
    Karl looked down at his reader, shrugged, and said, “If Rhyodolite isn’t there, I’ll be bored. Look, we’re close.” He pointed at Gwyng herds, the large two-ton marsupials that hosted their young, the smaller blood beasts with ropy neck veins, and the latest Gwyng craze, cloned Jersey cows for milk, one-quarter cream.
    About an hour and a half later, the land began to rise, more rocky, more like California or the north coast of Black Amber’s Gwyng Home island, which was foggy and had diurnal bats and near-sapient seal-things. But here wasn’t really foggy, just cloudier than Karst City. “I thought we were close,” Karl said. He looked back at his reader and changed cards.
    “She’s moved,” I said.
    The bus driver said, “Officiator Red Clay, we’re approaching your destination.” I looked ahead and saw Black Amber’s new house. She’d built in stone, not of planks woven together like a giant basket, light coming in at every plank crossing. I’d seen one stone house on Gwyng Home—very superior Gwyngs there.
    The bus seemed to zoom in on the house, which got bigger and bigger. My eyes fooled me, or the relative clarity of the air where I’d expected fog. The huge house rose almost as raw as the bedrock under it, no true right angles—as if right angles belonged to the poor Gwyngs’ plank and plastic building traditions.
    Finally, as the bus began to climb up to the entrance, I saw Black Amber standing under a stone arch entrance, long arms spread, furred knuckles pressing either side of the arch. The stone around her looked both ponderous and unsteady. Black Amber wore a green Gwyng shift, armholes cut out to the waist.
    The bus stopped and Karl and I got off, a flight of steps below her. Lichen everywhere. How, I wondered, did she get the lichen established so quickly? Her face was impassive, wrinkles sagging slightly, folded along her mouth, along her nostril slits, which moved in and out slightly like furred gills.
    “Red-Clay and child,” she said in Karst Two that my computer