Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox . . . and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become . . . maybe that’s the source of its knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding.
