"Please extend yourself and grasp that fruit."

Mark looked around. "Are you talking to me, your Admirability?"

Fling tilted her head, and Mark's reflection slid across one of her obsidian eyes. "I was talking to your arm. My own are too short to reach the middle of this platform." She paddled her pink, white-furred forepaws in demonstration. "My legs would leap onto the platform and scatter food and tools, but my stomach is full and heavy. Maybe I should take the leap anyway."

"No, no," said Mark, waving his hands. "Which fruit do you want? This pomelo?" He palmed it like an undersized basketball and handed it to her.

The toxoplasmotic took the fruit in both hands, nose wriggling eagerly. As she brought it to her mouth, her translator flew down, perched for a moment on the rind, took off, and perched again.

Fling reached up with a foot and shooed the translator away. Her hands continued to hold the pomelo in front of her mouth while she sniffed and nibbled.

"Is anything wrong?" Mark asked.

"My translator seems suspicious of this fruit's toxicity, but I am not afraid. My nose and tongue anticipate a new flavor experience."

"We usually peel them and eat the sections," Mark said, but Fling had already pushed her snout into the hole she'd gnawed in the pomelo.

She wore the fruit like a clown's nose while she chewed up and slurped up the pulp inside. The nearby humans made uncomfortable faces, but the nonhumans didn't react. For them, everything at this table was as strange and off-putting as everything else.

The Parturians had only a muted reaction to the taste of the citrus, but enjoyed disassembling it into sections. Promise was told by her translator that if she tried that game, she would acidify her water, so she contented herself with another drunken shrimp. Mix Sty lowered herself onto a whole watermelon and sat like a hen on an egg, munching. The Greaves and Monumentals went straight to the osmanthus cakes, as did most of the humans.

Laura's cake resisted her teeth, then gave, releasing sweetness and the aroma of flowers, honey, and rice. She and Ambassador Li both felt tears come to their eyes, though for different reasons. Yoshida, Qani, and Severo chomped happily away, while Chadwell and Steiner balanced the flavor against the texture, which was rather gummy.

Laura was trying to think of an excuse to get up, walk away from her important guests, and talk to Koen. Pretend there was some sort of culinary emergency? How much time did she have before Graa arrived and did whatever it was he planned to do?

Her breath caught when a bird flew into the clearing and perched on the back of an unoccupied chair. But, no, it wasn't a bird.

It was the size and approximate shape of a swallow, but its head was wrong. Large eyes and a sharp-toothed snout, rather than a beak. The feet were up on the chest, between the spiny wings, allowing the tail to flex and dangle. It looked like a tiny, flying shark.

Another flying shark lit next to the first. A third occupied a branch above and was joined by two more. Others flew fast circles around the table, getting a view of its occupants before flying back into the forest, where something snorted and stomped.

The ground shook. Small animals fled through the undergrowth.

"Oh," said Laura. "The photographer."

Judgment the Bucolic lumbered out of the forest, vibrating with infrasound, the center of a swarm of fliers. He was the size of an Indian elephant.

"You've made a place for me (sarcasm)."

But Proprietress and her crew were already in action. "Oh! Welcome! Welcome, tremendous guest!" A sheet descended from the webbed canopy on invisible threads. In seconds, it swung around and pulled itself flat, extending the apparent surface of the table to twice its original length. White ribbons fell like confetti, but twisted in the air, coiling into perches for the Bucolic's flock.

Koen watched the flocking of the bird-like commensals, wondering if he had any food to serve them. Which of his dishes most resembled skin parasites?

But the longer he watched, the more he focused on the giant creature at the center of the flock. Its skull was very big. "Melons, I think. Chilled." He clapped his hands and gave orders to the nearest Neurospastic.

Condensation sparkled on the bowl and its gray-green fruit as they slid before the snout of the Bucolic Judgment. His tentacular barbells snaked forward.

"Oh, you're feeding my animal body first. You know what you're doing (sarcasm)."

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But the mouth of the Bucolic was already extending. It doubled, tripled in length, the mouth at the tip opening to reveal a set of spade-shaped teeth. These clamped over a melon and pulled it up and in. The proboscis bulged around the melon. Ridges of muscle tensed, and internal teeth crunched down.

A great gust of wind blew from the gill slits over its shoulder.

"That was good."

Koen waited, breath held, for the sarcasm tag. It didn't come.

"My mother fed me melons when I was a kid. If I'd been good."

The fliers took to the air and flew circles around the Bucolic.

"Is he crying?" Koen asked.

"Yes," said Proprietress. "Something like that. You have a talent for multi-species hosting, Chef Koen. Not many people have that."

Koen's teeth clenched. "Well," he said. "Maybe some nonhumans will come see me in D.C."

Assuming Mark hadn't just been blowing smoke. No, of course he hadn't. Alright, yes, Mark did sometimes seem to promise he'd get Koen out of trouble, then put him in the exact middle of trouble. But that had been the plan all along: get Koen out of the Zogreion and into Washington D.C. Wasn't that good? It must be.

Koen couldn't bring himself to distrust Mark. For goodness sake, they'd eaten together.

At the table, Laura watched. "I'm wondering," she said. "Admirable Self-Flinger? The Bucolics say their minds are distributed in their birds, but I wonder if their brains are really mostly in the big elephant body."

"I believe you're right," said Fling. "But what does that matter?"

Laura remembered who she was talking to. "I think it matters," she said carefully, "because hospitality is taking care of someone's animal needs. Isn't it?"

Arch-Beacon Clay attracted her attention with a twirl of laser light. "What you are describing is spirituality. Spirituality is the care of the animal that is you."

"A spiritual animal?" Fling flicked her ears and tail and bared her rodent teeth. "How perfectly ridiculous."

Laura thought about that and reached for a mooncake.

She did not need to think: unwrap the mooncake, break it in half with my fingers, look around to make sure nobody minds I'm eating it this way, squeeze it slightly to feel the filling give, and position the piece so my teeth come down squarely on the crust.

She simply thought "mooncake!" and then, in contentment, "mooncake." Promise the Metruian would have understood. So would Mr. Grumbles.

Koen, in contrast, did not treat his mooncake right. He ate it in quick bites while doing a half-dozen other things, and his reactions to it were mechanical habits. Identified: waxy crust, vanilla flavoring, resistant, gummy filling, crumbly egg yolk. His conscious mind spared a brief moment to wonder how long this thing had sat on a shelf before being transported to the Zogreion and finally consumed. A spasm of self-recrimination that he hadn't made his own mooncakes from scratch was followed by the soft oppression of the thought that he might never have the chance again.

Koen had not paused to savor any of the food he'd made tonight. He couldn't. He tasted constantly, analytically, mechanically. Working for Ambassador Li, Koen had learned about the importance of texture. The crispiness of lotus roots, the crunch of taro puffs, the bounciness of snail meat. The goose was juicy, with a crisp skin and a pleasant smoky flavor from whatever wood the Greaves had used in its roasting.

"Promise sends her compliments," said Proprietress in Koen's ear. "She says the goose tastes soft but mildly spiny."

"Perfect," said Koen, and the quality of the light changed. The lanterns hung by the humans and Neurospastics seemed suddenly dimmer. Less important.

Within Neurospastic webs, mirrors and lenses clicked into new positions. Parturians and Pick cocked their heads. With a grunt, Digeridoo flopped over onto one side, allowing one eye to peer upward, where the Moon had risen above the clearing.

It shone from within concentric clouds of artifice, blasted, cracked, chopped up, and stitched back together. Tonight, though, on this and many other versions of earth, it was full.

A full Moon presents visually oriented creatures with both opportunities and problems. Moonlight allows daytime activities to continue, including hunting. Thus it was that Metruian, Monumental, and Quotidian felt the need to keep an eye pointed upward, and the savanna-born humans, Parturians, and Toxoplasmotic felt the thrill of dread and eagerness that inspires religions. Fancy Death and Scuttly, ambush-predators both, went very quiet and watchful. The Neurospastics' puppets capered while the spiders themselves retreated further into shadows. Only Arch-Beacon Clay was emotionally unaffected. He directed his laser rangefinders at the sphere of rock that dominated the higher orbits of his current gravity well, waited the one-point-three seconds for the reflection to be returned, and felt a certain satisfaction. His thoughts might be translated as, Hello, big sister.

A shape occluded the Moon.

It was a flier, piloted with such skill that it appeared to be a living animal. It swooped out of the frosty light like a thousand human myths and lowered a silver rope. Down the rope slid what appeared to be a man in a cape.

His landing was perfect, as if practiced over countless hours. His cape was made of chromium scales, and more metal gleamed silver on his legs, arms, and chest. Between enormously broad shoulders, his crested helmet was small, as if sized for a chimpanzee.

On the right shoulder of the steed perched a bird, dazzling and resplendent.

His shadow indeed covered the dining humans, for a source of brilliant light shone, apparently unsupported, from behind him. Its scintillant beams cascaded past fluttering ribbons, scattered rainbows from diamond pendants swinging from chains whose links were yet smaller chains, and limned armor of gold. So much gold, in fact, that Mr. Grumbles needed a counterbalancing weight on his other shoulder. This took the form of a jewel-encrusted idol.

General Graa stretched his neck, raised his beak toward the lesser light of the Moon, and let out a series of rasping croaks. "Fear me!"

"Finally!" said Fling. "I've been waiting all night." She took up a mooncake and began to nibble.