Yatima felt an overpowering sense of hope. It was as if the Konishi mind seed still encoded the instinctive knowledge that, in time, the darkest stormclouds would always clear, the longest night would always yield to dawn, the harshest winter would always be tempered by spring. Every hardship the Earth forced upon its inhabitants was bounded, cyclic, survivable. Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this world could inflict.
