The Others had observed humans evolving into tool-using creatures, then fire-using, and thought it was only a matter of time before they had starships and would present a danger.

Often this is not a problem, the Others say, because when a race discovers nuclear energy, it usually destroys itself before it develops starflight.

I take it we Martians were a mistake, overall. We did fulfill our major function, which was to notify the Others that humans had developed the ability to go to a nearby planet. Then we, the yellow family, did as we had been programmed and delivered a coded message to the humans, which gave them the basic facts about the Others.

One individual Other had been waiting in the solar system for twenty-seven thousand years. His main function was to watch how the humans responded to this new knowledge and decide whether to let them live. He decided they should not live, but the automatic device that should have destroyed them didn’t work. Humans moved it to the farside of their Moon, and when it exploded, it hurt no one but the one Martian who was carrying it.

Then the humans studied us Martians. Among other things, they figured out how we tap free energy from another universe. No Martian understands how that works, and I don’t think any human actually does, either. But they can use it, and it gave them starflight, which I don’t think was in the Others’ plans.

The Others say they have either destroyed or spared hundreds of intelligent races in this part of the Galaxy, and have no record of having failed before. But I don’t know about that.

We of the yellow family specialize in memory, not original thinking, but I do have a theory about the Others: I think they’re lying. We do have evidence that they are capable of marvelous things, like inventing us and modifying a part of Mars so that we had a place to live before we inherited the Earth. We know they can make a small bomb powerful enough to eliminate life on Earth. But that doesn’t mean that everything they say is true.

We have three sources of information about the Others. The primary thing was the coded message, which was like an ancestral memory in the yellow family. But it was not a regular memory; we had no access to it until we looked at a triggering light that came from the Other who was watching us from Triton, the satellite of Neptune. I saw that light and fell down and started babbling, and so did every other yellow Martian who saw it. We all said the same thing; three separate recordings give exactly the same nonsense sounds.

A human researcher discovered that there were two simultaneous messages in our stream of nonsense. One was amplitude modulation, and it was like a pattern of ones and zeros, modeled after a method that humans had used, attempting to communicate with other stars, what they call a Drake diagram. It told the humans something about the Others—how long they had been in the solar system, the fact that they had a body chemistry based on silicon and nitrogen, and the fact that we were made by them.