within the sweet juicy heart of the stream

 Fift could smell

  the pungent figgy electric autumn

 hear

  the windmoan

 see

  the swept-winged shape

   of the scatterhulk of it ascending scatterhulk.

Enmeshed there with zir:

        zir fellows.

Guliu’s mind was there, noticing the tongue-ness of the shape and wanting it

 and Furis and Majendra resisting the tongue-ness of the shape

—plane it down? Curve

 it over?

Horis loving the hiss at the edge of the moan, Jenian

 fairly bouncing with eagerness.

Every hand on the tiller,

 the vessel rises up against the wave,

  for we believe it has a destination, and that we can bring it home.

Hours and hours

 expectation, tension, quickening, aperture

  hours and hours

   in the sweet juicy heart of the stream.

But the body tires; it’s time to go home:

 Fift pulls away . . .

. . . and was suddenly aware of zir hands clenched on the rail of the reactant’s station before zir. Ze relaxed them, stretched zir neck to one side, then the other, and stood. Wobbled slightly and caught the rail again. Took a moment to collect zir bearings. Guliu, Jenian, Furis, Majendra, and Horis sat at their stations, eyes closed. Out of the stream, the shared flow of perception and intention that the others were still immersed in, the windmoan sounded tinny and hollow in the large room (it had been a domestic mat room once, back when this was all a habitation called Temereen). The figgy smell was the same, though it seemed emptier, less meaningful, smelling it with zir own mind alone.

On the way out ze put a hand on Jenian’s shoulder, and ve reached up, absently, eyes still closed, and squeezed it.

Vines grew on trellises around the entrance to the reactants’ hall, heavy with sweet yellow fruit. Fift’s woven robe had the same colors: dark green, bright yellow.

Above the towers of what had once been Temereen habitation and was now Windswept Sheltering, two bright sun-stars burned in an indigo sky. Fift stood for a moment looking at that sky. Ze still wasn’t used to it; even after three years, it made zir nervous.

Ze’d been against the antique kitschiness of papering the Sheltering’s shell with active displays; nor had ze understood why it had to be this Far Historical setting instead of their own world’s soupy-green surface sky. But by the time Windswept Sheltering was picking out wallpaper, it had twenty thousand residents, and since they didn’t want ratings or consensus frameworks inside their borders, that meant big unruly meetings for deciding such things. Fift had skipped the one about the dome.

But the new sky had grown on zir, some. It did make Windswept feel more like an escape: somewhere different, somewhere new. And it was beautiful; the endless subtle shaded blues and purples, the hugeness.

Still, it made zir nervous: a creature out of its burrow, exposed to a sky.