It was night on Endymion, and the pollen hovered, blue and luminescent, in the trees. Isaac’s camp lantern also burned blue. It was designed to interfere with the sensory systems of the planet’s main predator species, blanketing his campsite in a prey-less dead zone. Isaac had seen enough video footage of Endymion’s megafauna to treasure the lantern, and to be scared witless when it seemed to have failed.

“Hello?” chirruped a singsong voice.

Isaac let out a strangled scream before his brain processed the greeting and realized there was no threat. He cleared his throat.

“Hm. Ahem. Hello.”

A nearby shadow detached itself from the jungle dark, apparently unbothered by his scream. “May we come share your light?”

Isaac shifted a little, his heart still racing from the jump scare. “Sure.”

The shadow crept closer, the lantern gradually illuminating its long, froggish shape. The head was oddly formed and too large for the spindly body—a side effect of Endymion’s lighter gravity. The creature sat, cross-legged, beside his lantern, studying him with its bulbous eyes. The wide, lipless mouth turned up in a grin that would have been unsettling, if not for the friendly light in those eyes. The long limbs were bare, the torso covered in a sort of gray fringe that looked like clothing but was actually part of its biology. The Wyland corporation referred to them as homines raniformes, but the ground workers had long ago christened them “potoos.” (Isaac had never seen a potoo bird, but the pictures his coworkers had shown him fit well enough: the peculiar mouth, the creepy cuteness.)

The Wyland corporation itself had no interest in the potoos. Wyland was there for the pollen, his supervisor reminded him. Everything else was bonus sightseeing.

Isaac had made several trips on the collection route, but this was his first potoo encounter. He had been warned about them; the collection areas overlapped with their migratory route, so meeting up with one was inevitable. “They’ll stay till you shoo them off,” Steve had warned. “For weeks at a time, understand?” His coworkers always mentioned the potoos like they were some sort of social head lice, to be gotten rid of at once. But truth be told, Isaac got lonely on the collection runs.

The potoo looked around, gently touching his tent. Isaac had been told that the species was capable of absorbing language. They already knew the dictionary definition of human words—in several languages—but the reality of the object itself often confused them. The creature gave him a long look.

“What are you called?” it chirped at last.

Isaac felt a little embarrassed he hadn’t been the one to ask. “Isaac. What about you?”

“Eye-zik. Eye-zik. Oh, that is very nice.” The potoo bobbled its head side to side in delight, and Isaac realized why its head shape had appeared so strange. It was wearing a hat: a dark-colored ushanka that blended in with the darkness around them. “What does it mean?”

Isaac tried to stop staring at the hat. “Laughter.”

“Oh! The humor or joy sound. We have never heard the sound.” Now the potoo bobbed its head up and down like a rooster. “May we hear it? May we hear the laughter sound?”

“Oh, I . . . I can’t really do it on command. I mean—I could fake it, but it wouldn’t sound right.”

“It must be . . . genuine?”

The word surprised him, and he smiled. “Yeah. Genuine.”

“And that is why it is a name. It means the one named is genuine.”

Isaac swallowed a little. “What are you called? You still haven’t told me.”

“It’s nice of you to ask, but you won’t be able to say it.”

“I’d like to try.”

“Well . . . you’d need a secondary and tertiary tongue.” The potoo made a noise that was half birdsong, half squashing oranges. It looked at him, and he confirmed his inability with a helpless shrug. “But maybe you could give us a human name?”

Isaac looked at the eager, froggish face, and felt he might be able to laugh after all. “How about Dave?”

“Dave,” repeated the potoo reverently. “Dave. Yes, the sound is good. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, to be honest. You just look like a Dave to me.”

Dave bowed. “An honor, to be a Dave.”

---

Isaac was not, strictly speaking, supposed to have been alone when Dave found him. In one sense, yes—collectors were sent out on solo routes, since two collection cylinders in close proximity took twice as long to fill. But on his past routes, Isaac at least had his camera implant, providing Wyland with a live feed of where he was, what he saw. The implants were mandatory for the job. Isaac had heard others complain about the privacy invasion, but the implant comforted him. If he was going to spend three months solo-hiking through an alien jungle, it felt nice to know that there were other humans along for the ride, even if they were only inside his head.

Then, one month into his route, Isaac had been struck by lightning.

Well, not really, as it turned out. But it felt as if he had, when the camera in his brain shorted out. There had been a burst of light, so strong it knocked his head backward like a punch; the next he knew he was lying on his back, his entire body trembling, and his mouth alight with the taste of burned eggs.

It took him some time to sit up, and longer still to stop trembling. Once he did, he tried to check the camera’s status and found he could not connect. Then he tried to send a distress signal, but his AI communications app (ARGONAUT) was also fried, as was the GPS that gave him little nudges on the pollen route.

Isaac fumbled in his pack, trying not to cry. He had a physical map of the route, for emergencies; he opened it across his lap and ran his finger to the nearest checkpoint. He remembered that much from his job training: if anything happened to his implant, he was supposed to make tracks for a checkpoint, where a shuttle would pick him up early.

“Do not try to finish the route,” he recalled the training bot saying. “Wyland’s first priority is the safety of its employees. If you cannot contact Wyland, report to a checkpoint and activate the on-site beacon.”

The nearest checkpoint was only several days’ hike away, but when Isaac reached it, it too was fried.

That was when he’d really begun to panic. His own outage could be chalked up to chance, but the failure of the checkpoint indicated a wider-scale problem, such as a solar flare or even deliberate sabotage. It also meant that unless the next checkpoint he reached was in better shape, he had no choice but to finish the route—truly, completely, on his own.

---

Isaac had been implant-less for five days when he’d run into Dave, and the escape from the ringing, empty silence of his own head was a welcome relief. Normally he kept ARGONAUT turned up to “maximum engagement,” and was used to the bot’s endless stream of chatter. Isaac was not much of a conversationalist, but Dave was. Within an hour of joining Isaac’s camp, he had asked him about his tent, his jacket, his shoelaces, his ears, and whether or not the stuff on his face was vegetation or hair. What’s more, he hung on Isaac’s answers, signaling his attention with a variety of nods and head bobs.

Isaac watched the ushanka wobble from its uneasy perch on Dave’s domish head. It had already fallen off twice. “Okay, I’ve got to hear the story about that hat.”

Dave raised tri-fingered hands to pat the fuzzy earflaps. “Oh, there is not much story. We like your hats, is all. We have never worn hats, and when we first saw a human do so, we too wanted to put something on our head.”

Isaac nodded, slowly. Dave’s use of the “royal we” made it hard to tell when Dave was talking about himself, and when he was speaking about potoos in general. “What was the name of the human who gave it to you?”

“Oh, we wish it were from a human. We traded with one of our own for this. It would have been better as a gift, but still, we are grateful.”

“Wait a sec,” Isaac pulled his own pack closer, rummaging for the bucket hat he wore during the day, to keep off the sun. He would just have to double up on his sunscreen. “Ta-dah!”

Dave tipped his head to the side, momentarily confused by the limp shape, and then his eyes widened in wonder. “Oh! But it is so different! We did not know they came with such variety!” Isaac held out the bucket hat, and Dave took it with careful reverence. He removed the ushanka and slipped on the bucket hat, running his fingers over the shape and burbling happily. When he tried to return it, Isaac shook his head.

“No, man. It’s for you to keep.”

Dave pulled back a little, his mouth agape. “And now it is a far better hat! Thank you, Eye-zik.” He placed the bucket hat back on his head, and after a moment’s thought, put the ushanka back over it. “A plethora of hats.”

Now Isaac did laugh. “Where did you pull that word from?”

Dave gave a shy urp. “Is that a bad word?”

“No, no, it’s just very . . . specific. Like, very human, I mean.” He hesitated. “My boss said you guys had . . . downloaded human language?”

He’d hoped Dave would elaborate, but Dave only fidgeted. “Yes.”

“Can I ask how that works? Doesn’t look like you’ve got many computers handy.”

Again, a fidget. “We can show you, but we’ve been told it alarms some humans. Please know the human our people gathered language from was not harmed in any way.”

Isaac, who had thus far been relaxed, now did a mental check of where in his pack he kept his taser. “Okay.”

Dave held up a finger—like ET, thought Isaac—and out of the tip a long tendril unfurled, impossibly thin. It floated, weightless, in the air between them, but Isaac could see it probing the empty space around it, the way an inchworm might. Isaac’s hand moved subtly for his pack, but in the next instant the tendril slurped back into the fingertip and vanished.

“The first of our people to encounter a human used that to contact your language center, in your brain. It did not hurt,” he added quickly, seeing Isaac’s face. “And though it was rude, they did it only because there was no way to ask permission first, since that would require shared language.” Dave tapped his fingers together. “Still, it is . . . very rude to probe another’s mind without permission. Our people have apologized for this, since.”

“And did you . . . ” Isaac nodded at Dave’s hand. “ . . . you did that to someone too?”

“Oh no no. It was only necessary that once. Our people then spread the language to each other, so we would all be ready to speak to a human.”

Isaac didn’t remember how long he stayed awake. But when he woke up the next morning, sure enough, Dave was still part of the camp, and clearly excited to begin trekking together.

---

Endymion was covered in old-growth forest, free from any industrial tinkering, with trees that grew far taller than their terrestrial counterpart. The sheer height of their canopy divided the forest into two zones. The canopy that Isaac walked under, only seven feet or so above his head, was not one of trees but simply herbaceous giants, their enormous leaves splayed on the end of telephone-pole stems. The actual tree canopy unfurled so high overhead it looked like green cirrus clouds. In the space between the canopies, strange creatures flew or floated: shapes that occasionally blotted out the sun, leaving Isaac peering up between the leaves and trying to make sense of the outlines.

Almost everything that lived under the lower canopy was an herbivore of some kind—and also prey for the world above. Most of these small animals kept well out of Isaac’s way, but he routinely encountered herds of fuzzy pink sheep-sized blobs. The blobs did not seem to notice him; they wandered aimlessly, the way jellyfish did. Isaac had once seen a predator from the upper world—or rather, only its beakish appendage, some twelve feet long—plunge through the leafy covering and skewer a blob like it was a hunk of cheese. The blob writhed like a stuck grub, but made no sound, and when the beak was withdrawn, the other blobs made very little effort to relocate.

Isaac took care to avoid the blobs after that. His lantern might have masked his own presence, but he had no interest in being skewered by association.

A different sort of person might have enjoyed Endymion. Isaac knew there were explorers and biologists and xeno-zoologists who would have killed for access. The knowledge made him feel guilty for how much Endymion frightened him, for how little he had truly tried to explore. It was all too big and too strange; he was always longing to finish and take his month-long leave amongst the comforts of civilized machinery. That was why he had kept ARGONAUT on a near constant monologue, trying to pretend to himself that Endymion was an immersive game, and that he had only to take off a headset and the cerulean jungle would vanish.

Things were different with Dave. Dave was the context for the world, the Rosetta stone of blue megaflora. He was proud of Endymion and eager to talk about it, and that in itself was enough to soften Isaac’s perception of the place.

“You think this is something,” he kept saying, “just wait until we hit the mountains. The waterfalls that flow from the upper lakes are considered some of the most beautiful sights of our world.”

And at any rate, Dave was funnier than ARGONAUT.

---

That afternoon, they came upon something Isaac had encountered many times before: a patch of gourds, all growing together in a little cluster. The gourds came up to Isaac’s chest and shone with a queasy, translucent green. The texture looked pleasantly smooth, almost like silicone; Isaac put his hand on one and was surprised to find it warm.

“Oh,” said Dave, in a faint, warning sort of voice.

Isaac jerked his hand back in alarm. “Poisonous?” He had a sensor on his arm that should beep in warning when he approached anything hazardous. That was still working, thankfully. At least he assumed it was.

“Well, yes, if you were to try to eat them. But touching is not dangerous. I just wanted you to be careful, is all.” Dave knelt down in front of the gourd, gazing at it with a kind of reverence. His scrutiny made Isaac look closer as well; he studied the dark, internal shapes and felt a visceral flutter of realization.

“That’s an egg!” he blurted out.

Dave touched the surface tenderly. “Not exactly. But yes, it is my species’ fetal state.”

“What do you mean by ‘not exactly’?”

Dave bobbled his head. “A terrestrial egg is not the right picture. Nobody ‘laid’ this.” He gave the potoo-equivalent of a chuckle, shaping his hands around its impressive girth. “Rather it is one of my people.”

“What?”

“At the end of our lives, we lie down, and the pod forms around us. Then it recycles the matter inside.”

Isaac hesitated. “Into a new body?”

“Into a new person.” Dave gave the pod a final, gentle pat, then stood. He walked off as though he had said all that could possibly be interesting about the matter; Isaac stood before the pod a moment longer, trying to collect his thoughts.

“But . . . but how are there more of you?” he called out, jogging to catch up.

“More of me?”

Geez, what a dumb way to say it, Isaac. “I mean, how’s your population ever grow, if it’s one-to-one like that?”

“Our population doesn’t really need to grow. We’re not prey animals. On occasion, though, a pod does split, and two individuals hatch.” Dave smiled. “A special thing, that, to have a hatch-mate.”

Isaac gestured to the cratered scratchings of one of the beaked predators. “What about that thing? It won’t try to eat you?”

“We taste bad.” Dave paused. “Also, we are poisonous. But again, only when eaten.”

---

Several weeks after Dave joined the camp, Isaac woke in the night and found himself alone.

He sat up halfway, still confused by sleep. “Dave?” When no answer came, he reached over and increased the brightness on the lantern. The shadows around him receded—still no Dave.

“Dave?” he repeated. He was caught off-guard by how forlorn the silence felt. “Dave, are you there?”

After several minutes of silence, he lay back down and watched the pollen drift above him like irradiated snow.

Everyone said the potoos stayed. That was their thing: they stayed until pointedly asked to leave. They liked all humans. All of them.

Didn’t they?

---

When he woke the next morning, Dave’s familiar form was there, lying on the mossy ground on the other side of the lantern. He said nothing about having been gone, and neither did Isaac. In the light of day, Isaac was not even sure he hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.

---

“How does this place compare to your home planet?” Dave asked.

“I’m not actually from a planet. More like a . . . like this enclosed space station thingy. Like a big city in space. We have trees and gardens and stuff, but nothing like this.” Isaac thought back to the contained little world of his childhood. The memories were not particularly happy, but somehow, they still made him nostalgic. “I should have said ‘had,’ though. I don’t live there anymore.”

---

He remembered the day after graduation: sitting on that stupid little metal stool, waiting in that stupid little room and wondering why the school didn’t buy some proper chairs.

The proctor, when he entered, had not looked happy. Proctors usually didn’t, when talking to him. “Isaac Deridot?”

“Yeah.”

“You did not finish the exam.”

“Nope.” He shifted on his stool. “Figured the part I did finish told you enough.”

The proctor’s thin mouth compressed still more. “This is serious, Citizen Deridot.”

“I know.”

“Do you? The transcripts from your teachers indicate otherwise. Lack of initiative. Failure to respond to correction. Tendency to distraction . . . ”

He let the proctor go on for a bit, then jumped in at the first pause. “Look, I know I only qualified for the worst-tier jobs, okay? Just tell me what the job is. Break the suspense.”

The proctor’s expression turned even colder. “The community isn’t offering you a position.”

Isaac’s restless posture went suddenly still. “Oh.”

“Your case liaison will help you apply for an off-world position, but until then you will remain in the barracks.”

Isaac remembered the sick, lurching drop at those words. He and his peers had occasionally been threatened with off-world placement, but he didn’t realize such a thing could actually happen. Like parents saying, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it,” that sort of thing. At least the parents in shows seem to say that a lot.

He soon learned that the options weren’t great for those who failed to place within their own communities. There were exceptions; sometimes failure to place was just a matter of population equilibrium. One city would be at max capacity, so graduates would go to another with a lower birthrate. But to have a mark on your record, like he did, which basically screamed “found unsuitable”? Well, no surprise the other communities didn’t jump on that either. There were cities that always needed placements: asteroid-mining companies, or the party-worlds where the ultrarich came to play. But there was a reason such places were always open. Isaac had heard enough stories about what happened there; he understood he was in dire straits. When the Wyland recruiter showed up, he signed the offered papers almost without reading them. Almost.

In the event that Endymion’s environment proves to be hazardous, I agree not to hold Wyland Inc responsible for any health problems caused, provided these hazards were unforeseen and not due in any way to Wyland’s negligence.

“Is Endymion hazardous?” he had asked the recruiter.

“Not to our knowledge.” She smiled at him. “Wyland has been conducting expeditions for over a year now, without any sign of adverse effects. Don’t worry about that. It’s just legalese.” And because Isaac was nineteen with no other future to speak of, he didn’t. Worry, that is. At least not enough to keep from signing the paper.

---

“And you’ve never been to your home planet?” Dave asked.

“No. It’s too far away. Like really far away. The starliners that go back have to pass through a wormhole, and the tickets are crazy expensive.”

“That means . . . ” Dave hesitated. “ . . . they cost a lot of money?”

“Yeah.”

“What is ‘money’?”

“Well, it’s . . . ” Isaac looked at the foliage around him, with its distinct lack of vendors or mini-marts. “Don’t you guys have stuff you . . . trade with? Like if someone else has something you need or want?”

Dave thought for a moment, then pointed tentatively to his ushanka.

“Yeah, like the hat! How’d you get the hat?”

“We gave our friend a cool rock.” Dave traced the outline in the air. “It was shaped like a leaf.”

Isaac nodded. “There’s not really anything you need, is there?”

Dave shook his head. “Not really.”

---

One morning they came upon a lake whose waters shimmered an exquisitely clear violet. Isaac knew better than to touch an alien lake, even if his sensor did identify the contents as genuine H2O, but inwardly he longed to dive in. Dave did, though he seemed to understand why Isaac wouldn’t and did not pester him to join. Isaac was surprised by how poor of a swimmer Dave was; what with the frog comparisons, he had expected the potoo to have a natural aptitude and laughed a little to see him flop and flail like a kid who’d just learned to swim a full pool-length.

After the swim, Dave showed him how to skip stones with flat, translucent things that turned out to be shed scales from some ultra-predator. Something in the scales triggered the flight reflex of the lake’s small fish, and the water’s surface erupted in a flurry of wriggling, feathered shapes, which looped and fluttered in the sky for an astonishing length of time before splashing back down. Isaac spent longer by the lake than he should have, if he was going to maximize his potential as a collector, but who was to know, with his implant broken? When he and Dave resumed their walking sometime later, Isaac felt a strange buzzing contentment in his chest, as though he’d taken a truly full breath for the first time in his life.

“Is this all you do?” Isaac asked Dave. “I mean, not in a bad way. Is this all you have to do? Walk your migration route?”

Dave bobbed his head. “Walk and look, look and walk.” His voice took on a softness that Isaac now recognized as contentment. “A good life, we think. Though we know we have not seen much, compared to you.”

“Yeah?” Isaac spied another of the rock-scales and slipped it into his pocket for later. “How old are you?”

Dave tilted his head to one side. “Let’s see . . . how to say it in your timescales . . . ? Mmm . . . four months.”

“Four months?” Isaac stopped. “No, Dave, a month is like, thirty days.”

“We know.”

He stared. “You’re . . . a kid?”

“Well . . . we don’t grow up, not like you do. We hatch as adults. And we can share things with each other, things like language, knowledge of the ecosystem, stuff like that.” Dave looked at him, obviously curious. “Humans live with their parents, though, early on? When you’re in your . . . your infancy?”

“Usually. Usually, yeah.”

Isaac remembered the little file they’d shown him, back at the city-run youth center where he’d been raised. All the genetic info he’d ever need, parental names not included. As a donated embryo, he was forbidden to try to make contact. Whoever his parents were, they’d had all the children they wanted, and he would not be legally recognized as theirs. He existed to strengthen the civilization of his city-sphere. A noble role, the center’s warden liked to say.

Isaac often wished he had left the file unread. It was unpleasant, reading the AI predictions of how long he was likely to live (seventy-eight) and which organ was most likely to fail first (his liver). And all this aside, his file had had two blatant red flags.

Projected IQ below client’s requested minimum.

Mild learning disabilities likely.

“Don’t try to guess why you weren’t implanted,” the center’s psychiatrist liked to say. “It’s a complicated question, and the answers are never obvious.”

Except that they were, in his case. He knew full well why he’d been passed over. He’d always hovered at the bottom of his academic class. Timed tests paralyzed him, and once he read his file, the paralysis seemed to calcify. Somehow, knowing it came predetermined made it harder to fight. Halfway through his graduation exam, he’d hit a wall and had sat there, staring blankly at the swimming, wobbling words, sinking deeper into his own panicked quagmire. Why keep on slogging? Last place was last place, right?

“But not you?”

Isaac started a little at the question. He glanced at Dave, and the potoo’s tender expression made him uncomfortable.

“Can we talk about something else?”

Dave nodded. “Sure sure sure. What would be better?”

The two walked in silence for several minutes before Isaac’s mind returned to an earlier question.

“What were you talking about earlier: walking and looking and all that?”

“Yes?”

“Well . . . ” the question felt silly now, knowing Dave’s true age. “At some point, you’ll need to . . . to find a Mrs. Dave, right?” Dave gave him a funny look, and he had the sudden panicky thought that maybe Dave was a Mrs. Dave, or that the potoos were like earthworms and gender was a moot point altogether. “Or a . . . partner Dave? Reproduce. Is what I mean. Reproduction.”

“We are doing that. Now.”

Isaac flushed scarlet. “You . . . you—but—I—what?”

Dave erupted into little spasms of potoo-laughter. “Oh, Eye-zik, not with you!”

“Huh,” said Isaac, his face growing even hotter.

“We are always exchanging our DNA,” Dave continued. He gestured to the surrounding landscape, and Isaac peered curiously around, through the twinkling light of the pollen.

The pollen.

Oh no. Isaac lifted his hand to one of the glowing beads. “You mean . . . this?”

Dave nodded. “We are the migratory, animalia sex of our species, and this,” he laid his hand on one of the tall, pollen trees, “is the plantae sex. We take in DNA particles from all the trees we pass, just as we shed the particles embedded in our skin.”

Isaac turned in a circle, staring at the trees that spread across the planet’s surface in a long, clustered line, finally understanding the need for the potoos’ continual migration.

“Shit,” he whispered under his breath. “Shit.”

---

The pollen, the stupid, stupid pollen. The three cylinders he collected would be cooked down into a pint’s worth of extract, which Wyland could turn around and sell for roughly three million dollars. Any human who took a swallow of that precious potion would pause the aging process, completely, for six months. Immortality at $94,000 a swallow.

Provided, of course, that you kept buying more.

---

That night, Isaac turned off his automated pollen collector. He couldn’t shake the fear that he was taking too much—that Dave would not be able to get all the DNA he needed. The potoos were solitary, after all, despite their sociability. Was that why? Did their physical nature demand it? He might get written up for the shutdown back at the base, but without the implant recording him, he could always pretend the collector had malfunctioned on its own. Either way, Isaac found himself less and less concerned about what happened once he reached base. In some sense, he refused to believe he ever would reach it.

Sometimes Dave still slipped away at night, but Isaac no longer worried. The potoo was back in camp every morning, and the new day would roll into the same pleasant pattern as its predecessors.

And then he just had to get curious.

---

“It’s funny to me that you guys are so small—compared to the rest of your planet, I mean.” They had stopped for a rest, and he was gnawing on one of the awful, synthetic meal-sheets that made up his entire on-planet diet. “Humans are larger than most earth animals, and I guess I figured you guys would be one of the big dogs on your planet too.”

Dave looked down at his hands, and the lavender hue of his face lightened a bit. Isaac could not tell if he was embarrassed or disappointed.

“Dave? You okay?”

“Yes, I . . . ” Dave turned his head side to side, his gaze sweeping the forest floor. “It’s just . . . this is not our birth form, Eye-zik.”

Isaac felt a peculiar twisting in his gut. “What? You mean . . . like, you’ll change, as you age?”

Dave lifted his gaze. “We mean we are in this form for your comfort. We have tried to make ourselves like you. To be like humans.”

“All of you? As in, all of your people?”

“All the ones who have interacted with humans.”

“Well, wh . . . what do you look like normally?” Then he realized a more pressing question. “And you can change at will? You can all change your shape at will?”

Dave nodded. “We are much larger than you, otherwise.” He blushed again. “I change sometimes at night, while you are resting.”

Isaac dropped the meal-sheet, thunderstruck. Such a simple question, and one that no human had ever thought to ask.

“Can I see what you look like?” he said at last.

Dave tucked his head down a bit, in a sort of hunch. “I’m afraid you’ll be frightened.”

“I won’t. Not if I know it’s you.”

Dave made a low, buzzing sound, as though trying to decide. Then he got slowly to his feet. “All right.”

Dave spread his hands, reminding Isaac of the religious icons he’d once seen in a history class. Then Dave’s skin boiled, and in the span of a breath he was changing and then changed. Isaac had stood when Dave did but sat now, not because he had meant to, but because his knees had given out.

The creature that stretched above him stood some thirty feet high, slender as a young tree. Its skin was ebony but iridescent as oil, and as his eyes tracked orange and vermillion hues across the surface, he did not seem to be looking at skin at all but into a window of night that rolled with violent auroras. The eyes of the head melded with the midnight skin, and the mouth was beak-like now, long and sharp like ibis-headed Thoth. He counted six limbs, but what their use was he didn’t know, because the creature was hovering, and the gossamer orange that surrounded it on either side was not truly wings, though wings was the best human word for it. The wings hurt his eyes even more than the iridescent skin, but it was a brilliant hurt, like sunlight on a field of snow. And it was not until the creature had vanished, shrunk back into the funny, squat form of his friend, that Isaac realized he was trembling.

Dave cooed apologetically, patting Isaac’s head and shoulders. “Oh, oh, oh, I am sorry, I have scared you.”

Isaac struggled to control his breathing. “Why are you . . . what . . . what are you doing?” Seeing the real form made him recognize the froggish potoo body for the miserable downgrade it was. “Why don’t you always look like that? Why would you ever change to . . . ” he could think of no way to end the sentence that did not sound like an insult.

Dave seemed to understand. He smiled a little. “But we would never have met you, otherwise. You would have been too afraid of us, in that form.”

What a rotten trade, thought Isaac. The pollen collector felt suddenly heavy on his back.

---

“Dave,” he blurted out, “could the pollen change, if it wanted to? If you wanted it to?”

Dave gave a soft blep-blep. “Change . . . the pollen?”

“Yeah. You can change your body. Could the trees change the pollen?”

Dave looked at him, still baffled, and Isaac plowed ahead.

“Like, say some creature . . . ate the pollen. Because it kept them healthy. Could you . . . make it so it didn’t? So it did nothing, I mean?”

“No creature eats the pollen, Eye-zik.”

“But could you,” Isaac pressed. “If one did. Could you change it?”

“We don’t know.” Dave’s face wrinkled in either confusion or displeasure. “Please, Isaac, let us talk of something else.”

---

One morning, Isaac woke up and noticed Dave’s color did not look quite right. He watched his friend uncertainly from the corner of his eye. Dave’s movements had a shuffly quality that hadn’t been there before, and his large eyes looked sunken and glazed.

“Dave?” he asked. “Dave, buddy, you okay?”

Dave glanced over at him. He had a distracted, dreamy look on his face. “Oh yes. Thank you.”

But once they began walking, Dave struggled to keep up. He kept pausing for no particular reason; Isaac would turn around and find him staring abstractly at a branch, swaying a little as though blown by the wind.

“Are you sick?” Isaac asked, lowering his voice a little without knowing why.

Dave opened his mouth as though to answer, then collapsed in a heap.

“Dave!” Isaac ran back to him, vaulting over a fallen branch. “Dave, what’s wrong?” He knelt beside the potoo, who was turning gray around the eyes. It was the pollen he’d taken, he’d done it, he’d hurt Dave . . .

“Nothing is wrong,” Dave answered faintly. “It’s just that my time is ending.”

Isaac stared. “You mean you’re . . . ” Dave’s skin turned grayer, even as he spoke. “ . . . dying?”

“Yes.”

Isaac fumbled in his pack, trying to find his first aid kit. His hands shook, and when he opened the kit, the bandages spooled out like streamers. He had a variety of treatments, but they were all for humans—who even knew if they were safe for potoos?

“What are you doing?” Dave asked, curious as ever.

“This is the medicine I have.” Isaac fumbled over the various shots, powders, and pills. “What’s—what’s wrong with you? Can you tell? What do you need?”

“Oh, Eye-zik.” Dave gave his hand a tender pat. “Nothing is wrong. My body is reaching the end of its lifespan. It’s not made to run any longer.”

“But . . . but you told me you hatched, like, four months ago!” They had walked together for two months since then.

“That’s right.”

“But . . . but . . . ” Isaac felt his chest heaving. “You told me about the waterfalls. Like you’d been there—the waterfalls at the end of the route.”

“In a way, we have. Many of our ancestors have been there, many times. We have seen it in many seasons. We have seen it when it was young.”

“So, like . . . you’ll be back. When you hatch. You’ll be back again.”

“No.” Dave shook his head. “Our child will hatch. They will have our knowledge, but they will not be . . . me. They will be their own, new person.” Dave’s face turned briefly solemn. “They might not even like hats. But they will have their own chance to try everything for the first time, to . . . oh, why are you crying?”

Isaac was crying. Not the stoic thing the movie heroes did but sobbing so hard it shook his whole body. “It’s too fast. You can’t die yet, it’s too fast.”

“Please don’t cry. My life has been so nice, every day of it. I’m very pleased with it.” Dave smiled. “Very.”

Isaac could not get control of himself. “It’s . . . not . . . fair . . . ”

Dave patted his knee. “I know, Eye-zik. You’re very brave, to live so long.” He sighed. “I did not want to make you sad by mentioning it, but to live years and years and years . . . ” Dave shivered. “It’s a hard lot you’ve been given.”

Isaac worked hard to catch his breath. “We just . . . we just became friends.”

Dave flushed pink at the word friends, and his eyes wrinkled up in a wide, potoo smile. “No, Eye-zik—we were lifelong friends.”

---

Dave’s skin turned back to its natural ebony the closer he got to death. The auroras in the blackness faded, pulse by pulse; in the end, he curled up tight, tighter than Isaac would have thought possible. Then the last of the orange light flickered and went out.

Several minutes later, Isaac noticed the green already beginning to sweat from Dave’s pores. As he watched, the old skin began to split; in half an hour, the shell of Dave had dropped away completely, revealing the great round shape of the silicone egg. Isaac put his ear to the surface and told himself he could already hear movement inside.

He stayed camped beside the egg for the rest of the day. Dave had told him earlier that it took only two weeks for the new potoo to grow. Isaac would have waited, but he couldn’t bear to see a Dave who wasn’t Dave, a Dave who’d never met him.

At the end of the evening, he draped the bucket hat gently over the egg pod’s top, then left.

---

Isaac walked alone for four more days, no longer following his pollen route. Instead, he used his paper map to find Dave’s waterfalls. He stood at the bottom of the thunderous cascade and let the violet water form droplets on his face and hair. His route’s final checkpoint was only two days’ hike away, but he wasn’t heading there anymore. At least not yet.

The potoos, Isaac understood, were not safe. He knew that Wyland’s current excursions were just the beginning. The fact that the pollen was a necessary part of the potoos’ life cycle did not matter. Wyland would take more, and still more. They might even try to take the trees. The potoos would not understand the threat until it was too late; by then, the humans’ presence would be too strong for them to shake off. The only way to stop Wyland’s demands was to disrupt their supply. Isaac looked down at his own arm, tracing the veins under his skin. All the potoos had to do was nullify the pollen’s effect on humans. And he was certain they could—with him as a test subject, they could do it.

“What are you going to do with yourself, Mr. Deridot?” he heard the proctor chide. “How do you plan to accomplish anything worthwhile?”

Just watch, Mr. Conrad. Hope you aren’t invested in Wyland stock.

That night, as Isaac sat beside his camp lantern, he heard the snap of a twig on his camp’s periphery. The potoo that crawled from the underbrush was smaller than Dave, with a more mustardy skin tone, but with the same friendly, curious eyes.

“May we share your light?” it chirped at him.

“Sure.” Isaac waved his hand in a gesture of invitation. “Come on over. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”