Juna closed her eyes and inhaled. Almost, she thought, almost she could believe she was back on Tiangi, but there were subtle differences in the scent of the forest, sweet fruitiness where there should have been musk, and the underlying scent of vegetable decay was less pungent. But these were tiny differences. She heard a buzzing noise whiz past her head, and then back again, and opened her eyes to see a shimmering green and purple hummingbird hovering in front of her, clearly puzzled by the red flowers on her shirt. She laughed and the hummingbird zoomed off into the forest. Moki and Ukatonen laughed with her, their skins a riot of blue and green. It was good to be back in a jungle, any jungle.
The director of the park guided them through the visitors’ center. The Tendu followed dutifully, though it was clear that their minds were elsewhere. After a torturous half-hour of being guided, centimeter by centimeter through the exhibits at the visitors’ center, Juna finally laid a hand on the director’s arm.
“Seiior O’Brian, your visitors’ center is amazing, but perhaps we would learn more from it after we have seen the forest,” Juna suggested tactfully.
“Oh, of course, Profesora,” he said, and showed them out of the over air-conditioned visitors’ center, and down a path into the forest. Moki and Ukatonen’s ears were fanned wide and quivering, their nostrils dilated. The park director began droning statistics at them again. They heard none of it. There was a rustling in the treetops and a patter of falling leaves. It was the last straw. Moki was up the tree in a twinkling, vanishing into the canopy. A minute later, something whirled down out of the branches onto the path. It was Moki’s shorts. Juna fought back a peal of laughter. She picked up the shorts, and looked at Ukatonen, who was quivering in his eagerness to follow Moki, held back only by the iron discipline of the enkar.
“I suppose,” she said dryly, “that you should go after him, en. I’m a bit too pregnant for clambering about in the trees.”
Ukatonen nodded, and vanished up into the trees like a green shadow. Juna smiled wistfully up at him, wishing that she could follow the Tendu. But her body was growing ungainly, and someone needed to keep the officials off their backs for as long as it took for the Tendu to come back. She turned to the director, who was staring up into the trees, a horrified expression on his face. She fought back a sudden surge of laughter.
“Shall we continue with the tour, Senor O’Brian?” she said.
“But the aliens— ” he began.
“The Tendu will be fine, Senof O’Brian. They live in a rain forest. This one is different, yes, but they will be careful.”
“What if they get lost?” one of his aides said.
Juna shook her head. “It would be like getting lost inside your own house. We will see them when they are ready to return.”
“But— ” the director began.
“It will be all right,” Juna assured him. “The Tendu won’t hurt anything, and I very much doubt that anything in this forest could hurt the Tendu.”
Ukatonen swung through the trees, feeling the branches swing and sway under his weight. They were heavier here than on Tiangi, and the canopy was lower to the ground. He was as blue with joy as a clear morning sky, and so was Moki. At last, panting, he swung to a halt. On Tiangi, he could have moved at this pace from dawn to dark, but here on Earth the heavier gravity and months of inactivity made him tire more quickly. But it was enough to be here, in a forest on another world. It was worth all the months of deprivation and waiting to be here.
Moki swung up beside him on the branch, pink flickers of excitement forking across his body and down his arms and legs.
“What shall we do first?” Moki asked.
“Sit for a while and listen. You may practice your ang-ar-gora here, where it was meant to be practiced.”
So they sat, still as the branches they sat on, as the afternoon progressed around them, bringing them a parade of animals, small and large. Lizards crawled over them, tongues flickering at their strange scent, birds flew past, and a slow-moving, furry animal munched on leaves only a few feet away, oblivious of their presence. They seemed like friends, strangely transformed, yet familiar in their roles in the forest.
As the afternoon light became golden and slanting, hunger drove them to move. Moki found a tree ripe with fruit, and they ate till their stomachs bulged. Then they found a suitable tree and built a nest.
Neither of them spoke of going back. Ukatonen knew Eerin would understand. They had waited so long for this, and the humans were only allowing them a few scant hours. It wasn’t enough, and Eerin knew it as well as they did. Moki would begin hungering for his sitik in a day or two. They would go back then. It would throw the humans’ precious schedule off, but this was more important. How could he know a world without living in its wild places?
A deep burgundy ripple of irony coursed over Ukato-nen’s skin. Before he’d come here he would never have thought of such a thing as wild places. On Tiangi, everything was wild. Here, there seemed to be almost no wilderness. How could the humans stand to be so cut off from the wild places of their world? He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath of the richly scented air, so different, yet so soothing. He felt more at home here than he had since he left Tiangi. The weight of these months of isolation fell away, and he slid into a deep, relaxed sleep.
He woke an hour or two after dawn, feeling as frisky as a courting tillara. Moki had already gone out and gotten breakfast. There was fresh fruit, some young fern shoots, and one of the slow-moving mammals they had seen the day before, neatly butchered and lying on the inside of its coarse, greenish-furred skin.
“I didn’t know what was protected here,” Moki said, “so I tried to take a little of several different things that seemed plentiful.”
Ukatonen flickered acknowledgement. “We will only be here a few days. I don’t think that we can alter the balance very much in that time. Still,” he added, “we should try to eat as little meat as possible.” He helped himself to a piece of fruit, swallowing it with evident delight.
Juna, meanwhile, was busy trying to calm diplomats horrified by the crumbling of their carefully planned schedules, and appease government ministers certain that the aliens were dying from snakebites or were slaughtering endangered species by the score.
Juna patiently stood her groutTd. She explained to the diplomats that the nature of her bond with Moki meant that the roaming Tendu would return in a day or two, and reassured the government ministers that the Tendu knew how to survive in the forest, and that they would avoid poisonous snakes, and would not wantonly destroy the forest. On the third day, she went out with the search party. They spent all day exploring the forest, using dogs to try to track the Tendu, with no luck at all. When they returned to camp at sunset, Moki and Ukatonen were waiting for her in her tent. They had slipped into camp several hours before, in a test of Moki’s skill at ang-ar-gora.
Juna briefed them about what had been happening at camp. Then they slipped like shadows through the dusk, back into the jungle. Juna finished freshening up and went to meet with Seiior O’Brian, to discuss what to do next. As she sat down, there was a loud crashing in the trees overhead. Moki and Ukatonen scrabbled down the trunk of a tree. Juna smiled inwardly at the racket they were making.
“Siti?” Moki called loudly, a very convincing note of fear in his voice, “Siti, are you there?”
“Moki!” Juna called. “I’m right here!” She ran to embrace him, and he clung to her as though he had not seen her for months. Ukatonen came up behind him. Juna reached out to embrace the enkar. Altogether it was a most touching and convincing homecoming.