It was rarely warm on Chertkoi, summer or winter. As the night wind gusted, Elva drew more tightly around her a mantle of genuine fur from Novagal. Bors wasn’t stingy about clothes or jewels. But then, he liked to take her out in public places, where she could be admired and he envied. For the first few months she had refused to leave the apartment. He hadn’t made an issue of it, only waited. In the end she gave in. Nowadays she looked forward eagerly to such times; they took her away from these walls. But of late there had been no celebrations. Bors was working too hard.

The moon Drogoi climbed higher, reddened by the hidden sun and the lower atmosphere of the city. At the zenith it would be pale copper. Once Elva had fancied the markings on it formed a death’s head. They didn’t really; that had just been her horror of everything Chertkoian. But she had never shaken off the impression.

She hunted among the constellations, knowing that if she found Vaynamo’s sun it would hurt, but unable to stop. The air was too thick tonight, though, with an odor of acid and rotten eggs. She remembered riding out along Lake Rovaniemi, soon after her marriage. Karlavi was along: no one else, for you didn’t need a bodyguard on Vaynamo. The two moons climbed fast. Their light made a trembling double bridge on the water. Trees rustled the air smelled green, something sang with a liquid plangency far off among moon-dappled shadows.

“But that’s beautiful!” she whispered. “Yonder songbird. We haven’t anything like it in Ruuyalka.”

Karlavi chuckled. “No bird at all. The Alfavala name—well, who can pronounce that? We humans say ‘yanno.’ A little pseudomammal, a terrible pest. Roots up tubers. For a while we thought we’d have to wipe out the species.”

“But they sing so sweetly.”

“True. Also, the Alfavala would be hurt. Insofar as they have anything like a religion, the yanno seems to be part of it, locally. Important to them somehow, at least.” Unspoken was the law under which she and he had both been raised: The green dwarfs are barely where man was two or three million years ago on Old Earth, but they are the real natives of Vaynamo, and if we share their planet we’re bound to respect them and help them.

Once Elva had tried to explain the idea to Bors Golyev. He couldn’t understand at all. If the abos occupied land men might use, why not hunt them off it? They’d make good, crafty game, wouldn’t they?

“Can anything be done about the yanno?” she asked Karlavi.

“For several generations, we fooled around with electric fences and so on. But just a few years ago, I consulted Paaska Ecological Institute and found they’d developed a wholly new approach to such problems. They can now tailor a dominant mutant gene which produces a strong distaste for Vitamin C. I suppose you know Vitamin C isn’t part of native biochemistry, but occurs only in plants of Terrestrial origin. We released the mutants to breed, and every season there are fewer yanno that’ll touch our crops. In another five years there’ll be too few to matter.”