"Okay."

He grins and waves and heads back to his portals to help direct people through them.

That afternoon she and the baby are waiting with luggage outside the house.

"Hi!" he says. "I can take you home through my Sphere now."

"Am I liable to suddenly sprout wings?"

"You might! Depends if you've accomplished anything you're especially proud of, more or less."

"Not really."

"Maybe later," he says cheerfully.

"Who knows." She adjusts her hold on baby and luggage.

"Over here," he says, leading her to his pair of portals and opening one so they can step through. "I can't help you with your luggage until we're in Aluvanna proper because of Commission regulations, but it seems like you've got it handled. My family will be delighted to meet you, they've been assuming I'll find a way to apply my sponsorship allowance to some kind of horribly thorny political problem and instead I'm bringing home this perfectly nice girl with a cute baby. You're not secretly a horribly thorny political problem, are you? Well, I guess I'll find out."

"I don't think I am."

"Good enough for me!"

The portal opens into a short purpose-built hallway in a very ruikni architectural style, metal and plastic and round corners and muted colours; he leads Peka and Katin and their luggage down the hall to the end, where another portal takes them through to Aluvanna.

The second portal opens onto a field of dark grass in front of a sprawling mansion built mostly from stone. Above, most of the sky is a flat black dome painted with constellations of dim city lights, encircled by a high and jagged horizon, with huge tangles of green vegetation floating up there like clouds. Between the teeth of the horizon coming up and the teeth of the dome coming down, some actual sky shows through; past that, on each side, a vertical bar of shining silver stands next to a diagonal line of glowing gold, each set exactly opposite its twin so that all together they look like two rings of an enormous gyroscope.

"- wow."

"Welcome to Aluvanna!"

"Thanks. It's - wow. Am I going to have a way to communicate back home, should I bother taking pictures - will I be able to charge things -"

"We've got electricity but it's ruikni-style - I'll bother someone for a converter. Long-term open portal setups to link the communications networks of different planets are an ongoing thing, but it might be a couple years before we fold in Kadrixi-4 since all your standards are different. In the meantime if you want to visit or send messages you can ask me, I'm going to be traipsing back and forth on a daily basis for the next month anyway and by the time I'm done I will have portals in every red district in Tapa."

"Okay. Thanks."

She takes some pictures of the... scape.

"Happy to help!" he says cheerfully. "That's my house," he nods to the huge stone mansion a short distance away, "we have a small village's worth of guest space and you're welcome to stay as long as you like."

"Not going to get you in trouble with the Commission if I stay in your house?"

"Nope! The Commission doesn't regulate inside human territory, so I have to do the annoying decontamination procedures whenever I leave on official business regardless of who I live with. As far as Aluvanna is concerned you're just another citizen."

"- does that mean I can just wander around wherever -"

"Yep! Not many people will speak your language, but I'll help you learn Aluvai if you like, and in the meantime my mother and I both speak pretty good Tapap. How's my accent?"

"It's kind of cute."

He beams.

Giggle.