"You mean you've been slaves for five million years?" Griffin was incredulous.
"Servitude has ever been a refuge for the scholar and the philosopher."
"But what point is there in such a life? Why do you continue living this way?"
"What is the point in any way of life? Continued existence. Personal immortality is neither desirable nor possible. We settled for perpetuation of the race."
"But what about self-determination? You know enough astronomy to understand novae. Surely you realize it could happen again. What would you do without a technology to build spaceships?"
"Many stars have gone nova during our history. Usually the barbarians came in time. When they didn't—"
"You mean you don't really care?"
"All barbarians ask that sooner or later," Joe smiled. "Sometimes toward the end they even accuse us of destroying them. We don't. Every technology bears the seeds of its own destruction. The stars are older than the machinery that explores them."
"You used technology to get from one system to another."
"We used it, but we were never part of it. When machines fail, their people die. We have no machines."