The Parent taught us about biological creatures, strange units of liquid and membrane which were unknown in the sterile Eridanus system. She spoke to us of Makers, and of a hundred major categories of interstellar probes.

We tested our weaponry and explored our home system, poking through the wreckage of more ancient dispersals—shattered probes come to e Eridani in earlier waves, when the galaxy was younger.

The ruins were disquieting under the bitterly clear stars, reminding us better than our Parent’s teachings how dangerous the galaxy had become.

Each of us resolved that someday we would do our solemn Duty.

Then the time for launching came.

Would that I had turned back for one last look at the Parent. But I was filled with youth then, and antimatter. Engines threw me out into the black, sensors focused only forward, toward my destination. The tiny stellar speck, Sol, was the center of the universe, and I a bolt out of the night!

Later I think I came to understand the how the Parent must have felt when she sent us forth. But in interstellar space I was young. To pass time I divided my mind into a thousand subentities, and set against each other in a million little competitions. I practiced scenarios, read the archives of the Maker race, and learned poetry.

Finally, I arrived here at Sol… just in time for war.

Ever since Earth began emitting those extravagant, incautious broadcasts, we survivors have listened to Beethoven symphonies and acid rock. We have argued the merits of Keats and Lao-tze and Kobayashi Issa. There have been endless discussions of the strangeness of planet life.

I have followed the careers of many precocious Earthlings, but this explorer interests me in particular. Her ship/canoe nuzzles a shattered replication yard on a planetoid not far from this one, our final refuge. It is easy to tap her primitive computer and read her ideas as she enters them. Simple as she may be, this one thinks like a Maker.