Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada (Human, Drithane)

The second delegation was smaller than the first — three of the Survey people she already knew, one engineer she did not, and the engineer was not human, which the advance message had said plainly and the valley had spent two weeks not quite believing.

Sorcha met the Chthonari at the shuttle apron and revised, in the first minute, most of what the message had let her imagine. Small — forearm-to-torso small, low and dense, six-limbed, moving over the frost-broken ground with the unhurried competence of something that had never once in its life worried about falling. The guests-under-roofs custom had kept her up two nights over this one; you cannot billet a burrow-dweller in a box bed and call it hospitality. She offered what the holding had: the old stone cold-cellar, cut into the hill behind the house, dry-walled by her great-grandmother's generation. The engineer went in, was quiet for a while, and came out and said — through the flat little voice of a translation pendant — that the cellar held a good note, and that her great-grandmother's people had known what they were doing with a load.

Sorcha had been complimented on the holding before. Never once from the inside of the wall. She found it landed deeper than it had any right to.

The engineer's cargo ran to instruments, as Survey cargo did — ground arrays, this trip, because somebody at the far end of the fold route had read the first visit's report and asked the question the valley had never thought to ask about its own sky: what does a crossing do to the world, while the world is busy watching it. And one item on the manifest was not an instrument, or was, depending on how you held the word. A carry-burrow, sealed for transit. The engineer opened it in the cellar doorway and something small and low and six-limbed came out — kin-shaped to the engineer, a quarter the size — pressed itself flat to her great-grandmother's stonework, and went utterly still.

"It is not equipment," the engineer said, in the tone of an old argument. "There is no form for what it is. There has never been a form. It listens better than my arrays do, and it was owed a rock."

Sorcha looked at the little thing lying against her cellar wall like a hand laid flat on a chest, and did not need the sentence explained. She had dogs that read hills. This read houses. "Then it's a guest," she said, and that was the whole of the paperwork Drithane required.