We’d contacted the Pav on the way in. The kindest description I could give for their attitude would be curt . I guess Jacques was right about them. The thought made me sad; overall, we hadn’t been having a lot of luck with alien species. Between the Others, the Pav, and the Deltans, I was starting to wonder if it was outright impossible for mutually alien intelligences to get along. And if the local area was at all representative, there must be a lot of intelligences out there. Eventually, we’d run into another starfaring species with a technological advantage. That made war—and possibly the extermination of humanity—statistically inevitable.