The Invincible

A good passage

If Horpach had been standing in front of him, Rohan would have told him everything. How ridiculous and at the same time how insane it was, this ‘conquest at any cost’, this ‘heroic survival of humanity’, this desire for retribution for the death of comrades who had perished because they were sent to that death . . . We were quite simply rash, we placed too much trust in our cannons and sensors, we made mistakes and now we were paying the price. It was our fault, ours alone. As he was thinking these things, in the dim light he had closed his eyes, which stung as if he had sand under his eyelids. He now understood something without words: that humankind had not elevated itself sufficiently, had not yet earned the right to that so splendidly termed stance of galactocentrism, which had long been glorified, yet which did not mean searching only for beings that resemble oneself and understanding only such beings, it meant not interfering in matters that did not concern human beings. Occupy an empty place, by all means, why not; but don’t attack something that exists, that over millions of years has established its own equilibrium of survival – an active survival that is not dependent on anything except radiation forces and material forces, and that is no better and no worse than the survival of the proteinaceous compounds we call animals or human beings.