For every thing that moved, whether slow or fast, across the face of any world, was not one thing, but two. It and its own individual destiny.
And sometimes destiny took a hold and caught…and sometimes it didn't. But where there was destiny there was hope forever. For destiny was hope. And destiny was everywhere.
No thing walks alone.
Nor crawls nor hops nor swims nor flies nor shambles.
One planet barred to every mind but one and, once that mind arrived, barred forevermore.
One mind to tell the galaxy when the galaxy was ready. One mind to tell of destiny and hope.
That mind, thought Sutton, is my own.
Lord help me now.
For if I had been the one to choose, if I had been asked, if I had had a thing to say about it, it would not have been I, but someone or something else. Some other mind in another million years. Some other thing in ten times another million years.
It is too much to ask, he thought…too much to ask a being with a mind as frail as Man's, to bear the weight of revelation, to bear the load of knowing.