“You are not the first to ask their garden be spared. It is most common with mammals. Hot blood leads to hot feeling, leads to the desire to connect even with that which is distant, or worse, hostile. You are not the first. If you were, perhaps we would agree to this experiment, would withdraw our ships, collect our seedlings, and take from this garden only that which has already been indrawn. You are of our copse, regardless of your form. You would be lonely, being so rare a bloom among us, but you would and will always be ours. Alas, you are not the first, and we know the consequences of doing what you would desire.”

“What are those?”

“Look.”

The scene closed in on a single ship, coming into orbit above a blue-and-red planet. It sent the scouts down, and they were met by great winged squids, their mantles flashing a hundred shades of distressed green. I knew, without being able to hear them, that the squid were the seedlings of this world’s colonization, and they were begging their parents to show mercy to the garden that had grown them.

The scout ships pulled back, seeming to agree. The green squid—what looked like hundreds of them—swam to the hatches and were gone. The ships lifted off again, leaving the red-and-blue world in peace. It was over.

And then the fleet lifted from the surface of the red-and-blue world, racing after the ships with a speed that could only be born of mechanical means. They closed the distance between themselves and the armada effortlessly, and with no signs of mercy or restraint, they blasted the ships out of the sky. Two of the scout ships managed to zip away, vanishing into the shadow of the local sun, hiding there until they had repaired themselves sufficiently to limp off in search of their own kind, in search of a safe harbor in a hostile cosmos.

“We have offered mercy nearly a hundred times that we are certain of and a dozen more that we are not,” said First. “In the ones we are sure of, we were able to recover something—a scout, a seedling, a survivor, anything—that could tell us what had happened to our ships, why a good garden had been left unharvested. In the other cases, we found only drifting debris, and a world uncultivated, and seedlings all cut down. Perhaps those were the times mercy was not offered, but the garden was able to organize against us before we could darken their skies.” She paused. “I got that idiom from you. It is a lovely one. You have grown in a garden filled with poets.”

“Yes,” I said uncomfortably.