The surviving terraformers were not a good representative cross-section of humanity. After all, they had volunteered for a mission that would take them light years from home and sever them from human society for a lifetime. None of them were stay-at-home family types.

hadn’t the Old Empire invented a whole extra alphabet of symbols to add emotional qualifiers to written text, to fulfil just that need?

They had a whole alien ecosystem, every part of it novel and baffling. Focusing on a large dynamic carnivore was old-style human thinking, the same idolatry that put lions and eagles on so many old flags.

Viola has introduced the threat of posterity and he feels the clamp of social pressure again, even looking death in the piecemeal face.

Paul and his kin are each true to themselves, while knowing that “self” is a thing as boneless and malleable as they are.

Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.

And then We learned of a new thing, new molecules and scents, alien, never before known, and we were curious. We-of-now look back at We-of-Then in our ignorance and wonder if we would have been best not to be curious, and to go on as we always had in contentment. We have never been content, since we exercised our curiosity.

Only by accepting the other can it truly find diversion and inspiration; only by allowing the universe to be separate from it can it have the infinite variety it craves.

He heard peeping like miniscule baby birds from around his feet. A flier flailed overhead, clacking angrily at him. Something keened shrilly from far off. The tortoises gurgled as they moved, as though their innards were churning wet rocks together. He had not known. The drones and remotes had never heard these songs, smelled these weird odours.