This chirp-friend Rachel shares traits the primates greatly desire, as we learned from their copious visuals: shining hair, highly developed milk glands, delicate head features not meant for weaponry use, and long hind limbs, far more muscular than ours. They must have evolved for running. Their minds were shaped by the two-dimensional frame of reckoning ground-bound minds know.

Some records suggest they can even swim in liquids. If so, her two glands in her pectoral region jut forward from her body and so must inhibit laminar flow, which must surely slow her when swimming. Thus so, also in flying.

Such poor design I find it impossible to regard highly. Certainly it cannot be a feature of beauty. Evidently Rachel regrets this dual disfigurement, for she conceals them at all times with a narrow covering that nonetheless displays them, as if hiding a secret. Their males have rudimentary milk glands and so must be adapted to do their species’ swimming. In this way we of the Flock deduce the details of their society, of which they seldom speak plainly.

The human males seem less body-wise. Rachel’s graceful form seems both fragile and powerfully muscled, though all of the grounders’ bones are solid and heavy. The males’ exaggerated muscles and coarse body hair seem primitive, as if trapped in an ugly genetic heritage. Perhaps natural selection has more work to do upon them. This species is quite young, a few hundred thousands of their years. Our kind are far more evolved. I instructed my Flock, as we approached this complex home world, ruled by groundlings, that they should not judge creatures from such a massive, grasping gravity. It is a tribute to their kind that they emerged to intelligence despite such hindrances.

To never know the joy of flight!—How can their arts not suffer? Perhaps such is the lot of these creatures, not having the convenience of the egg and, in stress, of the budding.

Instead, such as Rachel must carry their developing young inside themselves, always. Such horror provokes my gorge. We have such lowly, stunted beings on Yth, true—but they are of no account.

They do know the delights of coupling—there is much video of that, though poor in drama, or even dance, much less actual flight. The dialect of their mating chase seems something like a dance, however. The male pretends to be predatory, while the female (“woman”—apparently a shortening, our machine-minds believe, of “woe to man”—another oddity) pretends (usually unsuccessfully) to be out of season.

They seem bound by an intricate web of taboo and prohibs. Of course, mated social intelligence must wed with tool intelligence, to make a species that can voyage in vacuum. Can those overlap with what we wish of them? Or contradict our goals? Impossible to know. Much depends upon that answer. So we must engage them—and so their grandest and well-accomplished member, this Rachel—in further feats. Such our Folk dynamics demand. They, and thus she, must be tested. In person, on her own world, so we may see her and her kind in their context.