Aton, Aton—did you search for evil?
Did you desert your father in his hour of need, to pursue a fond illusion?
Did you forsake honest love for incestuous passion?
Did you betray your fellows into decimation?
Did you finally bargain with hell itself, which you symbolized as Chthon?
You have been condemned:
Not by your father
Not by your first or second love
Not by your fellows
Not by Chthon.
Where is the evil for which you search?
How can you condemn yourself
For being what you are?
We had thought to salvage the good of your culture’s philosophy
And destroy the evil of its being;
But we find them near of kin.
We had thought to recruit an envoy of extermination
To cleanse our galaxy of life.
But that envoy brings us LOE
And mocks our intellect with ethical conception.
(All we had seen before was your insane element.)
How can we know life’s destiny from ours?
Are we not near of kin in our quest for completion?
How can we condemn you
For sharing our ideal
in your inverted terms?

And thus we must accept you with your woman;
We must banish the chill from the shell,
And learn that in our mercy
Is our own nova.
For as we study the chill we discover a thing of wonder:
Not natural.
Not inimical.
Not accidental.
But an agitation planted within our galaxy,
Whose side effects on life are unintentional:
A signal.
A message to every intellect with strength to comprehend:
We are not alone in the universe.
The god-intellects are waiting for our reply.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel has a long history. In college, after six years of art classes, assorted drama classes, and a strong side interest in psychology, I concluded that I would never be a good enough painter to make a living at it, but I still wanted to be in the arts. I had an unfailing imagination, and an aversion to mundane pursuits. I decided to make words my paints, my drama, and my psychology, and be a writer. From that moment in 1954 my path was set. I wrote a science fiction novel as my thesis for my BA in Writing, and graduated from Goddard College, in Plainfield Vermont, in 1956. I also got married. In retrospect, both writing and marriage seem to have been good decisions, and like the aspects of the novel, they interacted.