He nodded slowly.
It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights—a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours has passed through them all—perhaps into a fourth and final."
"And yours, Meikl?"
"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of the culture—conquest, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."
"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"
He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."
"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"
He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?—a final perpetual youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?