Riya Sair

Riya Sair is a massive, herbivorous creature of the old range, spurned by every male of her kind and willing to risk death among the resentful wild dams for one last chance to be a mother. Her telepathic instinct to nuzzle and enfold a child collides with Phildee's alien, recoiling mind, leaving her floundering between maternal certainty and total incomprehension. That mismatch — her soft mental caress meeting his cause-and-effect universe — is the hinge on which their strange bond, and the story's opening, turns.