“The dream was, by and large, ordinary for many intelligent people: to explore the distant depths of the Universe, fight their dangers and reveal their secrets, and if you’re lucky, then die there, on the frontier, die heroically and beautifully, and not die an ordinary boring death, without experiencing another metamorphosis. Rnaa dreamed of deep space, probably, from the second larval stage of his development, from the third certainly, and by the fourth both his numerous brothers in the pool and the staff of the Great Northern Hatchery knew about it; knew and did not believe in such a possibility. The statistics themselves spoke against Rnaa: only one of the approximately three thousand intelligent inhabitants of Akraa that were born successfully overcame all the metamorphoses that separate the fertilized egg and the adult individual. And of the many billions of Akraani who inhabited the planet, the number of those who visited deep space, on the frontier, was in the hundreds...”