FRAQ

To my Flock:

My voyages and discoveries, I now report on.

Until this opportunity, I could not be sure of intact links to you. I have gone long and deep and far.

I have trouble indeed extracting knowledge with these grounders. They regard my travels as a delay, which, of course, they are—until we find the Mouth, using their capabilities.

I try to amuse, to avoid detection and interrogation. All to secure where our Mouth is. As I have now done. Though these odd beings are difficult. They have hierarchy, as proper, yet disguise theirs with mere chatter. They have not our wonderful methods, these young smart primates. Our Flock culture, especially.

They name their world Earth though most of it is Ocean, a better term for it. Our home world I decided to term for them Yth for our names, and not give away our holy terms at all. A translation would be some of their words like Heights but that would confuse a species that mistakes land for sea.

Some of these humans dislike us, do not trust in us. I try to counter.

Not mere diplomacy, of course. Nor retreat!

Dive-threat struts, horned-eye dances—none communicate. We are left with paltry speech. Luckily, these primates, too, make long chain lines, sentences. They seem to like them, narrow and thin as their language is, free of our feather and gesture.

The humans’ minds, like ours, remain extraordinarily difficult to understand—but so is the weather. For similar reasons: unknowns wed with complication. So I venture forth our species’ view of the universe, hoping for a grip.

For example: both our species are transient life, and have now lasted for less than ten billionths of cosmic history, on tiny rocks circling suns.

Surrounded by a vast lifeless space, we should all be thankful for the fortuitous circumstances that allow us to exist, because they will surely go away one day. I leave open our true, immediate enemies, whom I have not described: the unliving.

Their Library hosts machine-minds of alien beings. Fair enough: digital minds can move at the speed of light. But—

These primates do not understand that their precious artificial beings are horrors to us. Long ago, when such digit-beings tried to eject us from our world—truly, I need not remind you that such conflicts destroyed our beloved, largely deceased planet—we learned to avoid such, in our species’ learning phase. We cannot work with such truly alien to us in the deeper sense of a different path in evolution itself.

Through our blood-trials, I worked with various primates and found some they term Noughts to be artifact biology, beings made without sex, for purposes I cannot understand. I ignored their remarks. When they insisted, I told them that they were a boundary I could not breach.

We and the primates have a similarly small number of genes, around twenty thousand, and arranged in what we now know through Messages to be DNA spines. Great complexity can arise from such numbers of genes. Plants can have more and do less with them. Evolution converges toward function. So we are cousins in roles, essentially. Seekers in similar bodies. Minds quite different, alas.

So our explorations—the Ark, the Marsmat, now yielding clear direction—these I report, in documents open to all our expeditionary Flock. Study these. We seek the Mouth but more, to unwrap the wormhole web we know, as ancient Messages say. This vital network we must sail, and fly in full Flock.

The humans at best have a low light-grasp of their instruments, peering at their star. This makes finding the Mouth from afar impossible. So now comes our down-plunge into nuclear fire. A risk I can ask no other to assume, as Flock kens.

We must approach at great speeds the Mouth we seek. The archway to infinity. Mouth of mortality, indeed. It awaits.

Yet so, I hope the primate Rachel can help us in this hour of trial. We are close to triumph, to danger, to wonders.