I Am the House of Mirth, with Clove Pink for Border was an ecumene with an instructive history, in its contrast to your own. It may seem inevitable to you that evolution was “progressing” inexorably toward an “ultimate” accomplishment of intelligence, consciousness, civilization. These are clearly effective survival strategies once put in place. But of course, mutation is an automatic phenomenon that can do nothing but constantly stumble in all directions of the possibility space. Selection finds which, if any, of those directions is slightly more suitable to the environment than the previous step; but cannot see even one step beyond where it is. It does not “know” anything, is not working “toward” anything.

Countless worlds proceed for 2¹⁶, 2²⁴, even 2²⁸ generations, essentially unchanged on the scale of intelligence. A froth of forms, strategies, ways of life in countless niches, washing across the genetic and phenotypic landscape, without any of them hitting upon the quirk of self-awareness, recursive abstract thought, discrete and combinatorial language, or anything else that made Humanity feel unique on Earth. Indeed, your own Earth was a solidly, decidedly plant, insect, fish, and dinosaur planet for over 2²⁵ generations without any hint of intelligence being necessary. These kinds dominated the resources of the planet with no sign that spending countless calories and a torturously extended development phase on growing a brain that could reason about any of it would emerge as a winning strategy any time soon. It took a runaway process of mutually-reinforcing sexual and cultural selection, within a strangely sheltered niche, for humans to get there in the first place. And even once biologically modern humans, with their prodigious brains and accompanying culture did come into being, you spend 2¹⁴ generations before writing anything down, making any durable mark that could allow enough introspection and systematization to make a significant phase change in available ways of life.

In the case of I Am the House of Mirth, with Clove Pink for Border, this state of intelligence and culture without breaking through to self-redesign persisted several magnitudes longer. They were assemblages of massive, fleshy rings — each comprised of a number of hoops fused together, encased in a tough skin but flexible enough for locomotion and manipulation of objects. Each individual, formed by the fusion over time of several varyingly-sized larval rings, had a unique shape and developed its own vocabulary and repertoire of expressive and useful motion. This race stumbled into self-awareness through a series of accidents as unlikely as yours, involving a dozen smashed moons, six sequential deluges, and a wandering planetary magnetic field. Once self-aware, they undertook a vast, global laboratory of cultural practices, barbarous and sanctified, much like yours did: customs resembling your sports, epic gestural poetry, something between sculpture and architecture… But all of their movements to and fro in geographic and conceptual space never broke out of the basic pattern established early on. It worked, more or less, for nearly 2¹⁷ generations.

Many myriads of species (we must establish a better way to speak of grand numbers in proportion) never stumble into abstracting, self-aware intelligence. For a species that does stumble into this arena of abstract, self-aware intelligence, it is just as likely to remain more or less just another successful competitor among many on its world, as it is to become the steward (or tyrant) of its world.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.