The creature halted, crouched low against the ground, staring at the tiny points of light that lay ahead, burning softly through the darkness.

The creature whimpered, frightened and uneasy.

The world was much too hot and wet and the darkness was too thick, There was too much and too large vegetation. The atmosphere was in violent motion and the vegetation moaned in agony. Far off in the distance there were vague flarings and flashings of light, which did nothing to illuminate the night, and somewhere far away something was complaining in long, low rumblings. And there was life, far more life than any planet had a right to have — but low and stupid life, some of it scarcely more than biological stirring, tiny bundles of matter that could do no more than react feebly to certain stimuli.

Perhaps, the creature told itself, it should not have tried so hard to break away. Perhaps it should have been content to remain in that nameless place where there had been no being and no sense nor memory of being, but a knowledge, dredged from somewhere, that there was such a state as being. That, and occasional snatches of intelligence, disconnected bits of information, which whetted the struggles to escape, to be a separate agent, to see where it might be and learn why it was there and by what means it might have got there.

And now?

It crouched and whimpered.

How could there be so much water in any single place? And so much vegetation and such boisterous agitation of the elements? How could any world be so messy, so flamboyantly un-neat? It was sacrilegious for so much water to be in evidence, running in a stream below this slope of ground, standing in pools and puddles on the very ground, And not only that, but present in the atmosphere, the air filled with driven droplets of it.