It is important to understand that when Dolly nods her head in agreement that she knows what a hippo is, what she is actually picturing in her mind’s eye is some sort of omnivorous crocodile. There is absolutely no doubt in her heart.

“Well,” she says, hesitantly, “I should argue for our hunting, right? Our behemoths, big enough to feed entire villages. Our deep-water leviathans. We are small, and everything else is big, and we had to be the best at catching big things.” She plays with Angela’s curls for a moment, trying and failing to work up the courage to tug on them, to convey the message, to remind her of being [i]caught[/i] by two clever kittens. “But. It’s not? Not for me. It’s our [i]biodiversity.[/i] There are still species of insect and sub-genuses of plant on our world that remain undiscovered simply because there’s so much to catalogue. To discover. From the tallest trees, like your skyscrapers, to the smallest fungi caps hiding in cave systems, and we still don’t know everything about them, either, no wonder that early religious practice focused on caves as places where it was possible to commune with the world herself, and once our ancestors were down there far enough, tucked into a niche in the rock, covered from above and behind, they would cover their heads with a blanket and fast in order to understand the powers that are older than the world, in darkness and hunger, and all around them, not even perceptible through their cheeks, rich veins of crystal and moss and— actually, did you know that there’s been a breakthrough in growing moss for mass consumption based on Yellow Bean’s research in the X’mot Complex? She’s been able to hybridize strains that should be able to thrive in orbital gardens, looking for both nutritional value and production output, and we’re talking vacuum-sealed, bottled, dried and seasoned, and as viable in a personal garden as on prefab satellite gardens orbiting new colonies! And that’s just scratching the surface! I’m really excited about Doctor Gentleness’s work in synthetic proteins that might be able to replace the need for meat in the diet, which is, as you know,” she says with complete sincerity and faith, “a major logistical issue, because it limits our ability to be self-sufficient on planets with completely alien biospheres if we have to import prey species or rely entirely on the flash-dried stuff you get on stations. I’d bet that one of the Red Band might go an entire year without eating something that hasn’t been cured, dried, frozen, or otherwise prepared for long-term travel, which means they also need iron supplements on a semi-regular basis because they’re just not getting the full nutritional spectrum without having it fresh, and that’s why that soup they gave me was so unbearably spicy, they have to add strong flavors to compensate for the fact that we’re not getting any of the blood, and…”

Moss, blooming in the dark where nobody sees it, brought up into space. Made crucial, made more, hybridized with other strains, thriving, glowing. Beautiful if you understand it. Capable of growing anywhere.

This might be the most that Angela has heard from Dolly in a while. So often she wants to be stopped from being like this, breathless, lost in her own thoughts— but it’s not hard to imagine what that looks like when the topic isn’t so wonderful. When she’s worried, thinking just as fast as this, or when she’s flustered, trying to navigate what’s expected of her, or when she’s feeling small in the shadows of titans. Small wonder, too, that she dreamed of being made interesting, of being put on a pedestal, of being obsessed over, of someone putting her on display just as she might cup a handful of moss and explain why it should be loved.

And then she met her own gardener.