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in the same language.
    “I saw her at the beach wearing a bathing suit copied out of Vogue. All the Tibetans want to wear modem human clothes. They look like jerks. Act like them, too.”
    “They’re bored with each other,” I said. We still spoke English. “One of the Support guys was coming on to Marianne.”
    “Stop talking English,” Karl said. “Rhyodolite, they’re telling secrets.”
    Molly fished around in a bag she had slung over her shoulder, a cloth bag that blended in with her handspun clothes, and took out a cigarette. Rhyodolite lit it for her—odd to see him trained in male human manners that compensated for our general male dominance. Human male manners reduced him to pet status. I said, this time in Karst One, “Sam was looking good.”
    She sat up and blew smoke at me.
    Rhyodolite signed to Karl and they both got up and walked toward the door Black Amber had gone through earlier. I said, before they passed through the doorway, “Ask Black Amber what she wanted me to come here for?”
    “Company for the Weaverfish,” Rhyodolite said before disappearing around a corner.
    I looked at Molly. She sat up, hunched over, arms and knees covering her body. “I still love Rhyodolite,” she said, “but I need humans, too.”
    “We didn’t run you out.”
    “You loathed seeing me with Sam, to begin with.”
    “Don’t accuse me of being a racist, Molly. There were black and white marriages in the mountains early on. ” I was thinking in my mountain dialect again, translating “early on” into Karst as best I could. “And he has a human relationship now.” What was she after? I looked at her again, and her knees moved apart, thighs loosened. “Molly?”
    She closed her knees. “I don’t want a human sex partner. I just need more human contact. I want to see my nephew.”
    “He’s here now.”
    “But you don’t like me.” She lay back down on the mat, feet sliding to the floor, and smoked her cigarette.
    “So it’s been tense here?”
    Molly’s body wiggled, but she didn’t say anything until she’d smoked the cigarette down to the filter. She stubbed the filter out and said, “We weren’t sure she’d come out of her latest coma. When she came out, she wanted you here. She’s been studying Karriaagzh’s language, the one her brain will process. I can’t imagine why. No, I’m afraid I can imagine why.” Molly pulled herself back into a setting position, and I saw tears spill out of her eyes. “I’m different now, as if being around Gwyngs pulled things out of me, but…”
    I knew what she was talking about; each different species of sapient drew out from each other emotional and mental things we couldn’t get to through our con-specifics. “I tried to live without my own kind, too.”
    “The Tibetans think I’m horrid. They accept you, even after you dumped Yangchenla; they love Sam; I’m…what do the Tibetans call me?” She giggled. Neither of us knew what Tibetans called her, really, but surely they had some fierce little expletive.
    I said, “Yangchenla called me a pouch-hole licker when she thought I was having an affair with Black Amber.”
    “I thought maybe that’s why Black Amber asked for you. Wy’um’s senile and the Gwyngs abandoned him. One of his sisters stole Amber-son.”
    “No, I never slept with her. Wy’um? Amber-son? Oh.”
    “Why didn’t you? Too stinky for Gwyng sex?”
    “I’m not going to answer that. Come visit. Bring Rhyodolite.” I told myself that Molly was, after all, my wife’s sister, and more family than Sam and Yangchenla and their daughter. “Why did Black Amber build such a large house if she has so few other Gwyngs around her?”
    Molly said, “Display. It’s mostly outer shell.”
    Black Amber, Karl, and Rhyodolite came in with four other Gwyng males, all whinging in Gwyng language too complex for Federation computers. The new Gwyngs looked slightly rumpled, as if they’d raised their fur recently and hadn’t