Laura stood there, shivering with the effort of stopping herself from running away while she had the chance.

Why had she wasted time calling mix Sty? She had to stop panicking. Stop panicking! "Let me just call him. I'm calling him." She fumbled for a cell phone that wasn't there. "Translator! Call Mark. Mark. No. I don't care. You have a photographer waiting. No. Yes. Now. No, I can't talk."

The lizard-birds streamed back in, filling the room like a scene from a horror movie.

"Human Mark is nowhere nearby?" asked Judgment. "This is a new example of junior-species lack of organization. This is the best outcome to a morning of travel by omnibus (sarcasm)."

Laura grabbed her translator. "I'm sorry. We didn't know you'd been scheduled to come here. You can of course wait in our embassy until Mark arrives. I called him and he's just leaving the residence of the Pick ambassador now."

"I am impressed by your name-dropping (sarcasm)."

Laura winced as if she deserved that. "He will be here as soon as possible."

"I'll assume that is an idiom, since the literal meaning is obviously inaccurate." About half the swarm left the room. Another arrived. "Where can I wait?"

"In the embassy of course," Laura forced herself to say. She could find a way to house eighty-some lizard-birds. She would feed them and talk to them while she waited for Mark and Koen to get back, because she had to.

"In this building? Your knowledge seems extensive (sarcasm). This building has major accessibility issues."

All Laura wanted was to say "Fine, I don't care, go away." Instead, she forced her curiosity open as if shucking an oyster.

"What do you mean? I am sure we can fit all of your…flock into our conference room."

The lizard-birds rotated again, some leaving, others arriving through the window. "My soul is not the issue. My body also needs care. He cannot wait all day on the street."

"Your…" Laura walked to the window. She leaned out.

On the street below, surrounded by a swarm of lizard-birds, stood a creature the size of an Indian elephant.

On one earth, fish crawled out of the sea. No, not those fish.

The line that would give rise to the sharks and rays also produced the xenacanthids: long, slippery, venemously-spined creatures that hunted the brackish bayous of the late Devonian. This was just when land plants had evolved to the point where they could support an ecosystem of prey. Shark-like predators waited in ambush at the edges of shallow ponds, lunging forward on their front fins to snap up passing invertebrates. These powerful fins were also useful when the pond dried up.

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The problem with life on land is that it weighs a creature down. Air does not support flesh the way water does, so a terrestrial animal must evolve a rigid support structure. The xenacanthids did, but not from their flexible, cartilaginous skeleton. Instead, successful land-walkers were those with stronger and larger denticles on their fins. These tooth-like skin structures grew and fused into plates, interlocking aground the legs, fanning out across the chest and groin, and rising to cup the torso. Like their invertebrate prey, the fish evolved exoskeletons.

Imagine the following diversification and extinction events. Terrestrial sharks occupied every niche, from runner to flier to burrower. On one earth, they grew very large.

For this lineage of giant herbivores, eyesight became a problem. Through one evolutionary misadventure or another, these placid browsers could not see well enough to defend themselves from predators. Predators of course took advantage of this sensory deficit, and the most successful grazers were those that cultivated a relationship with sentries.

A species of small flying animal—not in fact anything like a lizard, but a kind of terrestrial shark—lived on the backs of the large browsers. These lizard-birds fed on the parasites that lived between their hosts' armor plates and gill-flaps. And they had excellent vision.

The reader can probably imagine at this point the selective pressures that followed. Predation pressure assured that the tight lines of communication evolved between grazer and flier. Environmental change rewarded those grazers with more complex, cooperative behavior. Larger, more interdependent herds necessitated some means of rapid communication, and there were already these flocks of fliers everywhere.

Flocking behavior is one of the classic examples of emergence.1 Even a simple set of rules enacted by tiny-brained individuals can branch out into impressive feats of calculation on the level of the whole flock. Memories can be kept, strategies can be passed on, events can be simulated in the flock, and the resulting plan enacted to gain real-world prizes. Swarm intelligence, the hive mind, is known in many Convention species.

This species called itself the Bucolics. The cow-turners.

Up close, the nonhuman was even more elephantine. Its snout hung like a jaw-tipped accordion, dangling a pair of tentacles to the ground. A great horizontal horn stuck out from what might have been the shoulders or the back of its skull. If there was any distinction. Lizard-birds clung to its massive, armored flanks or buzzed around its head, as if whispering secrets.

"What now?" asked Judgment.

Laura bowed to him. "We have nowhere in the embassy to accommodate you, Bucolic Judgment."

"A very positive example of junior species hospitality (sarcasm). It was worth the wait for you to come down to the street and deliver this news personally (sarcasm). I will come back tomorrow."

Laura no longer felt like screaming. Nor like she wanted to lie down and go to sleep for the next three days. She'd had time on the ride down to fold up her panic and put it away. Now, she had a plan, and would not be turned aside by any giant sarcastic whatever-this-was. She had asked her translator to recommend a place to feed her guest.

"Bucolic Judgment, please don't go."

The cloud of lizard-birds flexed away from Laura, back again. Tiny red eyes squinted. "You have alternate plans for my afternoon?"

Laura wouldn't give up. Would. Not.

She had her translator bug. In the omnivator, she had asked it the name of highest rated local eatery. The translator bug assumed she meant "highest rated by humans," and there was only one place in the city that had been patronized by any humans at all.

"May I buy you lunch?" Laura asked. "There's a place called…Paps?"

1Reynolds, Craig (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. SIGGRAPH '87: Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 25–34.