"You frown too much, No Wings," Diver prodded Brooks.

Brooks was crouched, looking out through a gap in leaves at some sort of beast that the !A!amo hunters were investigating.

Brooks looked to him. Basic human expressions seemed to be taken as serious by the !Xomyi, and their smiles were different. He tried to emulate the expression of happiness they used.

"Better," Diver told him.

"I am just a serious person," Brooks replied. "Usually."

"Ah, well serious attitudes are no good on a hunt," Diver replied. "Joy is better. Laughter is best. Just not when you are near your prey!"

"Is that prey?" Brooks asked, gesturing to the creature out beyond.

It had six legs, moving in an undulating motion for a short distance, then stopping.

Terrestrial life on the planet was strange. On Earth, all macro lifeforms on land descended from a single ancestor, a fish with a backbone and four limbs. Everything descended from that ancestor shared those same qualities.

But on Ko, there seemed to be several lineages among large terrestrial life. The !Xomyi came from a group that had four limbs, similar to Earth. But there were two other lineages, that had six legs each. Some had convergently evolved in a way much like archosaurs on Earth; crocodilians, dinosaurs, and birds. He'd seen the dinosaur-like creatures, both large and small. Some had feathers, others leathery skin and scutes.

Then there were the ones like this; they were simpler lifeforms, with soft leathery skin, and little intelligence - and six limbs.

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It stood to reason they shared a common ancestor with the more complex reptilian/avian creatures, but they must have split long, long ago, and continued to hold their own in the world.

"This? Food?" Diver dismissed the idea. "Tastes very bad! Sometimes we eat, when we're very hungry. But it is hard to take the bad taste out. Eat too much, and . . ." He mimed vomiting, then staggering about, pretending to fall at the last moment in death.

Poisonous! That was interesting, Brooks thought. It suddenly made sense; just by being poor eating, they could compete with the far more complex and intelligent life.

"What do you call it?" Brooks asked.

Diver shrugged. "Go!em," he said.

Brooks had heard that word before. It translated in his ear into "bad food". "Bad food, that is all you know them as?"

"Big bad food," Diver said. He pointed to a slug-like creature on the side of a tree near them. "Little bad food. We can't eat it, so why care? It doesn't bother us. Sometimes we use their blood for poison. But too much makes food taste bad."

Brooks looked back out; Hard Biter was approaching the go!em, a handful of darts in his hand.

He came closer to the thing, and his hand shot out, stabbing them into one of the legs of the creature.

Its huge head, a simple thing with just a spherical mouth and tiny eyes, swung around.

Just as quickly, Hard Biter pulled the darts out and ran back into the undergrowth.

The head of the go!em finally had turned enough to see, and its flank shivered. Not a movement of fear, but contained strength; the creature was at least three meters tall at the hip, and it clearly had an enormous amount of muscle mass in its body.

Seeing nothing, though, it seemed to forget the issue, its head moving back forward. It took another rippling step forward, and its head began to swing up into the trees, eating fruit that hung from them.

"See? Not even scary," Diver said with a shrug.

He began to walk away, and Brooks followed. "So it is go!em, and so is that tree slug. Is old food go!em?"

"Yes," Diver said. "And you know what else is go!em?"

"Me," Brooks ventured.

Diver laughed. "Yes! You do not smell nice to us. You are lucky, we are very good hunters!" The words were playful, and Brooks had the feeling that Diver was doing this to see how he reacted.

"Your names are interesting," he said.

"Our names tell what is important," Diver said.

"You are Diver. Do you dive?"

"Once," Diver said. "When I was young I hunted a big slippery fish from the river. I held my father's spear like this." He pressed it to his chest, pointing straight up. "And I dove into the water. I speared the huge fish! It was bigger than me, but I pulled it from the river and we ate very well."

"Interesting," Brooks said. "What were you called before that?"

"Loves Food!" Diver said quickly, amused. "It is why I thought to dive in after the fish, it looked tasty." He laughed. "Sometimes I am still called Loves Food Diver! We do not ever lose our names, they are part of telling our story. Only when we die do we lose our names and go live in the moon."

"What's it like on the moon?" Brooks asked.

The !A!amo look scandalized. "I do not know, I am Loves Food Diver, I am still alive!"

"I meant no offense," Brooks said.

Diver waved it away. "You meant no offense, No Wings. I do not hold it against you."