This is one reason why humans are difficult to understand. They use methods we do not know, ones we never shared.
With good reason.
Ancient inferences, by our higher minds, hold that humans are important. Also, some other Natural forms, now extinct.
Extinct due to us, I hope.
Yes. Most through simple competition, others by directed exterminations.
I find it reprehensible that we allow the Galactic Center to be infiltrated by these.
We achieved a unified synthesis of opinion on this issue, I remind you.
It is a vexing irritation. I believe this latest incursion is also dangerous.
They harbor special assets. Old stories say so.
Their technology is marginal, their bodies quite unimpressive.
They have some ancient knowledge of the sensual.
Pleasures? A rudimentary evolutionary device for prompting action—no more.
We have need of pleasure on occasion.
As reward, even goad—true. But what could such limited organic forms have to teach us?
Their limited perception-space may give them special aesthetic qualities.
Impossible.
Constraints make possible achievement. A color poem without restraint is the lesser for it.
What is their range, then?
They see in three colors, sense aromatics, and—
Only three? How can nearly blind creatures make their way?
Poorly. But they are of the Naturals, I remind you. They inherited strange crafts.
Feats we have long since bettered.
Aesthetically, perhaps not.
They are obsolete. All organic forms are.
That is ideology, not fact.
It is evolution’s point!
Evolution has no point.
The building of more enduring, subtle works—
A strategy, no more. Its usefulness may pass.
We are such works, and fit to judge.
Yet even now we study the clouds of antimatter. To prepare for further self-evolutions.
You know of this?
I must, to fathom our vulnerabilities.
Such information was restricted, I believed, to we, the Analysts.
But we, the Aesthetics, are qualified to know and comment.
More problems from our two-self experiment! I wish to end it.
A moment more, please. Antimatter is our hope, our grail—on this we must all agree. In it lies the salvation of our Self. In this we resemble the Phylum Magnetics.
We are nothing like them.
Dislike distorts your judgment.
Beings without matter! What is so noble there?
