We two species are complicated creatures, with complex emotions, similar societies, and opposable thumbs—which means we both can hold our fears and dread in one hand, and our hopes in the other.

Dealing with them, alas, is a forever trial. The fervor surrounding the Worm-scape is a noisy gabble. I have learned to keep quiet when engineers throw their chests out and launch into their songs. Normally calm and cool, they trill and soar when singing of their dreams. Worm-scape dreams.

It is exciting, true. In what they term the Big Bang, and we call the Great Emergence, the fiery fizz was more a storm. In that howling, the spinning flex-bars of what humans term negative energy density came forth. Those strands provided the expanding scaffolding in spacetime. Galaxies collided and left swirling masses, cosmic wrecks threaded by the spidery wormhole webs. Those got trapped in a gravitational well of mass that became galaxies. And self-tune to this day, steadying it all.

You will recall that our own Skytorians—those who studied the Messages that implied wormhole network—had a similar notion. Their Maze was a working name for the transport system that perhaps threaded the galaxy. Many Messages had scraps referring to it. Physicists inferred that the Maze might be an interlocking system of wormholes, and thus a way to move nearer to the civilizations that had sent the Messages. And to help us search out the dark intelligences that the groundling Rachel had found, indirectly, by her explorations of exoplanets and their correlation with Messages. From her findings we can now carry forward the hunt and attack of those shadowy beings. Deep work!

These had pillaged worlds in the far past. This malignant unknown may be a machine intelligence. This explains the horror we hold of them—it is a nearly forgotten legacy of our own ancient times—yet still powerful.

Their scientists also study the Message we received on our way out of the spinning, donut wormhole Mouth. Had we sent it to ourselves? Or did some other entity smuggle that transmission into our spacetime? It conjures the paradox of who made up the Message. Primates love such puzzles; I do not. I treasure the moment.

Some see this as a nice puzzle, a hint. Perhaps a warning? The grounders long to resolve this. I, content now with these creatures of land alone, am not concerned. I have close relations with the Rachel one. This is in part politic, in part romantic. A touch of the sublime, between creatures born under distant suns.

Such sensual reverie recalls our harp vines, which the breeze brings ever so faintly, sweetly, to sing. The primate puzzles that preoccupy them speak of our differences. They are a young species, scarcely out of their land called Afrik. Like unto us, in time they will learn. To fathom that no matter how long the human species might live, their end will have come some night. That this does not matter is a lesson they have yet to plumb.