Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada (Human, Drithane)

The Union's charter has a great deal to say about off-world delegations, and Gleann na gCaorach's arrangement with the charter was the arrangement every valley on Drithane had: the delegation could bring what it liked, provided it slept under somebody's roof. A guest under a roof is a person. A delegation in a compound is an institution, and Drithane had crossed forty light-years, once, specifically to be governed by fewer of those.

So the Survey Corps team came to Sorcha's holding — four of them, correct and courteous, with instrument cases that outnumbered their personal bags three to one — and Sorcha did what a warden does with guests in a crossing week: fed them, walked them through the dark-down times, and watched how they took it. You learned a guest fastest by how they treated the dark. One of the four asked whether the light custom was enforced, and wrote down her answer — by nobody — with the particular care of a man who suspected he had misheard it. Another asked, more usefully, which direction the first sparks would come from, and accepted depends which shoulder of the band we take first as a real answer, which it was; her grandmother's generation had argued the same question with the ark's own astronomers before the survey people ever came back to the sky.

The rabbit was on the manifest as a courtesy animal, which Sorcha had read twice, because the manifest otherwise itemised its cargo down to the spare gasket. Livestock she understood; the delegation's quartermaster had said morale, in the tone of a man quoting a form, and the rabbit had sat through the introductions with her ears at a diplomatic half-mast, being handed politely from one lap to another like a treaty provision.

By the second evening the treaty provision had established herself in the wool basket by the stove — and Sorcha, who had spent a working life reading animals because a shepherd who can't is a shepherd briefly, noticed that the basket the rabbit had chosen was not the warmest one. It was the one with the view of the room.

She mentioned it to nobody. On Drithane you did not embarrass a guest by noticing them too accurately, and the rule did not say the guest had to be a person. But she topped up her assessment the way she'd top up a ledger: the visitors' instruments watched the sky, the visitors watched the instruments, and the smallest thing on the manifest watched everything else, with the patient, unhurried attention of something that had been taught that watching was work. Her collies had the same look at gather time. She had never once seen it on a pet.