We are furious at them, and at the other predators as well. What they did was unethical, though their sins were compounded by humans who see fit to play politics with their fellows’ lives. That is a phrase I had never heard before, dear Benita. Playing politics. It is like playing war, a game for degenerates. Statesmen should not “play” politics.
We are at the moment, as I write, scudding along at many times light speed in a tube which is, to all intents and purposes, empty. Behind us, the fabric of space thrusts our material ship on before it, for it seeks always to exclude matter, or at least to clump it insofar as is possible. I could say that space bends behind us to push us. I could say that space ceases to exist in the direction of our movement, lining up on either side in strings of umquah. When we say such things, however, our scientists pish and tush at us, for neither is at all correct.
I confess, I understand neither the universe nor the spacedrive. Only a few of our most intelligent claim to understand the drive, and even they did not invent it. It was made by the Jabal, aeons ago, a people who left the galaxy before our own people existed. We have only the records they left behind on many planets together with plans for their devices: spacedrives, star milkers, fusion generators, morph-engines (tiny implanted ones to change ourselves, large ones to make cities like Jerusalem seem to disappear, though it never really went anywhere) all carefully preserved for whomever came along next. Luckily for us, we emerged originally in a thickly starred part of the galaxy and with even our rather primitive stardrives, we managed to be first in line for a lot of the devices. We moved, later on, to a less thickly settled sector, one quieter, more peaceful, less liable to predatory irruptions. Other races who arrived nearer the center of things profited from discovery, as well. Sometimes we meet during the knitting of the web of universal intelligence into a more durable fabric. This is our purpose and the purpose of all intelligent life. So we believe.
The human recording devices you brought with you are working well. They will keep track of your entire voyage, the interior of the ship, the fact that outside the ship there is nothing, not even light. We move in other dimensions of space and in the null dimension of time. When we draw near our destination, the ship will sense the complex curvature signature, one peculiar to that destination, and the emptiness in which we move will collapse to allow ordinary space-time to curve around us once more.
We intend to take you to several planets besides our own. It will be more convincing to the people of Earth if they see several different races. Your Earth devices will record our arrival on each, our departure from each. When we get to Pistach, the devices will probably note some confusion among the Pistach people, for they do not know we are coming. No message could get to our home sooner than we ourselves will arrive. You will not be the first non-Pistach visitors on Pistach-home, but you will be the first who have not yet been admitted to the Confederation. Vess and I have discussed this. We will have to do some of what you call “fast talking.” Still, given the well-known perfidy of the predators, your difficulty will be perfectly understandable, even to the most rigid among us.
I have no trepidation concerning your treatment. Hospitality is a virtue we have polished to a finer sheen than some other of our probities. Though we advocate toleration, we do not do it so well as we do some other things. We are not as unselfish as an advanced race should be. We struggle to burnish all our virtues, but every now and then a rock of reality catches our feet to make us stumble. Though we advocate equality of all intelligences, still we are like most races: happiest among peoples we know well and whose ways we understand.
If the Chapter will allow, you will be welcomed to a guest house of my family, on the Cavita home ground. It is near the House of the Fresco, and we know you will want to see that. Also, it would be pleasant to introduce you to my nootch. She will be most interested in you and in Chad and in the ways of your world. You are, functionally, more nootch than you are receptor, and she will be pleased to recognize someone of like mind and responsibility. I have provided festive red-and-yellow clothing for you, so you will, as you say, “fit in.” Chad could be introduced as an inceptor, of course, but since his “job” on Earth is to keep order and allocate responsibility, the tasks performed by our proffi caste—which also includes doctors and scholars, I intend introducing him as a proffe, dressed properly in formal brown. My evaluation of the two of you indicates you are unlikely to break out in a fit of breeding madness partway through the visit, for which I am very grateful.