Kath Two walked with only minor unsteadiness toward the top of a moving stairway that would take her down to the mass transit level. The ceiling above was high and arched, like a grand Old Earth train station, and its nickel-iron fretworks were atwitter with birds, a whole society of them going about its internecine trends and controversies while keeping an eye on the human traffic below. Specialized siwis, wrapped around the struts and girders like pythons around tree branches, moved along at a rate too gradual for the birds to notice, cleaning off their shit. The birds were all the same species, called the grizzled crow: a small corvid, half of whose feathers were devoid of pigment, giving it a salt-and-pepper appearance. This feature had been added by its designers simply as a visual flag so that they could be easily distinguished from rootstock crows. They moved in wheeling gray cyclones through the vaulted space overhead, but they were also comfortable shooting up and down the angled shafts that connected it to the transit level below. As Kath Two walked along the platform, a single one of those birds peeled away from a spiraling and squawking murder and dove toward her. As it hied in closer she became more and more certain that it was homing in on her face. It pulled up just short of colliding with her and, lacking a place to perch, hovered before her in ungainly style, treading air and slipping backward to match her pace. "The grove in the temperate rain forest," it said, or as near as a crow could come to pronouncing those words, and then beat air and took off, rising toward the rafters but then banking hard down the slanted tube that would take it back into the transit. Nor was it the only grizzled crow that was completing such an errand; similar encounters were happening all around her. Perhaps a score of the birds were perched on the safety railing that surrounded the entrance to the moving stair, muttering things that they had heard from humans. One of them, who perhaps had listened to a couple making love, was producing a crow’s approximation of an orgasmic moan. Three of them were singing a popular song in unison. One was barking like a dog. A few were trying to cadge food from people who were carrying snacks. One of them just kept repeating "meet me at the train station at dot sixteen," another "I’ll be wearing a red scarf."