With a few exceptions, it doesn't seem like you've formed many meaningful connections with people from other species since opening up relations with the rest of the galaxy. Is that just due to fear of the rachni, or are there reasons for this on your part as well?
Anonymous askedThose among you seem to find it easy to forget that the rhythms of your spaces are wholly alien to us. Sometimes it appears irreconcilably so. Much which you assume is natural and fundamental to all life has never been known among any symphony. Our dissimilarities are not the scant, superficial colours that set your species apart from the others we have encountered in your society. Your very composition renders you unlike us. We sing this not with any shred of unkindness. This is simply an irrefutable truth.
Why, beyond those few exceptional cases, we have not formed what you recognise as friendships is clear to us and requires no explanation, yet it puzzles you. You do not recognise that the interpersonal relationships which populate every aspect of your society do not exist among the symphony; even the faintest facsimile is absent. In truth, it is often difficult for us to distinguish those among you from one another in any meaningful regard. As with many elements of your musics, it is not a concept to which we are accustomed, for our kind have never had need of it.
To understand us, you must comprehend that our existence is inextricably bound to our symphonies, where one is all. Many of our mothers never sang with more than a scant few individuals - other queens, in rare exchanges and never more than necessary - in all their lifetime, and we are the first in all the long ages that linger in our echoes to have resonated with any species beyond our own. The musics of fifty thousand years cannot in one instant begin to march to the beat of a different drum without falter.
We cannot be other than we are.
Our musics fill the hidden spaces. We compose anew. Our songs have arisen from the oily discordance that shrouded our notes in sour shadow. Our lonesome melody has flourished once more into beautiful harmony.
