So, with much wearisome delay, it came to be… now. Despite the groundlings’ confusions and resistance, we reached this small world. More tedious introductions. Much negotiation, some through translator machines that we then realized were artificial minds as well. Discoveries, some incredible.

Now we have gotten through the laborious lubrications of diplomacy.

Tedious but necessary, yes.

Better: we have flown in fragrant air, at last, again. The small moon world’s gravity made it pure play, as fits the olden song: Swoop and soar, giving roar.

But not merely so. My Flock learned from our flying as a greeting, for as we-one must begin. Protocol so demands. But these primates are awkward in their own bare air. I learned from the female’s breathless—such small lungs!—remarks, they may well have come to their small moon to learn to fly at all.

So, discouragement. A limp opening flight. Still, instructive. Even failure informs.

These grounders still have their blue-green world, but learn little from it. They sit in boxes and look at boxes, like moles. They ignore their wild world and seek out this gray moon.

Strange, for so recently evolved a species. Long-legged, arm-strong, prowlers of lands—much like our prey, the grass-grazers. Yet they have risen above that. Made a machined-smart world.

Yet-so… they misunderstand much. They are for much of their times out of body. In my judgment they mistreat themselves and waste lives by being brains in body-bottles. They elude the great truth—that nature never goes away.

Yet still. The primate female was refreshing in flight. She flew like a chick, tumbled often, yet made graceful fun in her way. Besides, on ground, compared with her stride we have a stubby-legged, rolling gait. She displays a similar awkward wing while in air. So we meet in awkward sameness, this way.

Yet… she knows of the wild self, always there for such as we. Or so I sense her.

She is easier to know and speak with than the other grounders. I and other of my Flock believe this may spring from her attentions to the many Messages—as these term the ancient lessons—that have opened her to other cultures.

The others here, the Prefect intellectuals and strange solemn nons called Noughts—all are prone to being brains in bodies. They know not that the health and accuracy of our thinking of the world depends upon immersion, true and sure.

These grounder kind do not know that the past has a past of its own. Or of the Mouths and their many mysteries.

I caught that eddy of thought from our first flight with the female. It is she of the profound hydrogen wall victory, well and true. I had at first refused to believe this tale. Yet it is so—our observations while climbing up to their two-world system showed this. The prickly radiations of their warring bow shock spill aplenty, out among their gas giant worlds. Her chirp-name is Rachel. It has a certain song and strut to the ear. In delicious light gravity, we were air-swimming with her. She struggled. But she learned from and of us. Not in their compact little words, stripped bare of song or strut. She fathomed the whirl of immersion in the world aloft. This is essential. Her kind have evolved in the trap of hard gravity. They yearn for skies they cannot command in person. So in their miserable upbringing, they have learned a fragment of the ferment we daily enjoy. As my and our entire Flock struggle to understand, we must work from their appearances—as they, like we, are highly visual creatures. So we have fathomed their culture, their embodied qualities that speak to their evolution.