"That doesn't make any sense," Jared said.

"Why not?" Boutin said. "What are the trappings of self-awareness? And do the Obin have it? The Obin have no art, Dirac. They have no music or literature or visual arts. They comprehend the concept of art intellectually but they have no way to appreciate it. The only time they communicate is to tell each other factual things: where they're going, or what's over that hill or how many people they need to kill. They can't lie. They have no moral inhibition against it—they don't actually have any real moral inhibitions against anything—but they can no more formulate a lie than you or I could levitate an object with our mind power. Our brains aren't wired that way; their brains aren't wired that way. Everybody lies. Everybody who is conscious, who has a self-image to maintain. But they don't. They're perfect."

"Being ignorant of your own existence is not what I'd call 'perfect,' " Jared said.

"They are perfect," Boutin insisted. "They don't lie. They cooperate perfectly with each other, within the structure of their society. Challenges or disagreements are dealt with in a prescribed manner. They don't backstab. They are perfectly moral because their morals are absolute—hardcoded. They have no vanity and no ambition. They don't even have sexual vanity. They're all hermaphrodites, and pass their genetic information to each other as casually as you or I would shake hands. And they have no fear."

"Every creature has fear," Jared said. "Even the non-conscious ones."

"No," Boutin said. "Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it's not the same thing. Fear isn't the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential. The Obin are not existential in the slightest. That's why they don't surrender. It's why they don't take prisoners. It's why the Colonial Union fears them, you know. Because they can't be made afraid. What an advantage that is! It's so much of an advantage that if I'm ever in charge of creating human soldiers again, I'm going to suggest stripping out their consciousness."

Jared shuddered. Boutin noted it. "Come now, Dirac," Boutin said. "You can't tell me that awareness has been a happything for you. Aware that you've been created for a purpose other than your own existence. Aware of memories of someone else's life. Aware that your purpose is nothing more than to kill the people and things the Colonial Union points you at. You're a gun with an ego. You'd be better off without the ego."

"Horseshit," Jared said.

Boutin smiled. "Well, fair enough," he said. "I can't say I'd want to be without self-awareness, either. And since you're supposed to be me I can't say that I'm surprised you feel the same way."

"If the Obin are perfect I don't see why they would need you," Jared said.

"Because they don't see themselves as perfect, of course," Boutin said. "They know they lack consciousness, and while individually it might not matter much to them, as a species, it matters a great deal. They saw my work on consciousness—mostly on consciousness transference but also my early notes on recording and storing consciousness entirely. They desired what they thought I could give them. Greatly."

"Have you given them consciousness?" Jared asked.

"Not yet," Boutin said. "But I'm getting close. Close enough to make them desire it even more."

"'Desire,'" Jared repeated. "A strong emotion for a species who lacks sentience."

"Do you know what Obin means?" Boutin asked. "What the actual word means in the Obin language, when it's not being used to refer to the Obin as a species."

"No," Jared said.

"It means lacking," Boutin said, and cocked his head, bemusedly. "Isn't that interesting? With most intelligent species, if you look back far enough for the etymological roots of what they call themselves, you'll come up with some variation or another of the people. Because every species starts off on their own little home world, convinced they are the absolute center of the universe. Not the Obin. They knew right from the beginning what they were, and the word they used to describe themselves showed they knew that they were missing something every other intelligent species had. They lacked consciousness. It's just about the only truly descriptive noun they have. Well, that and Obinur, which means home of those who lack. Everything else is just dry as dust. Arist means third moon. But Obin is remarkable. Imagine if every species named itself after its greatest flaw. We could name our species arrogance."

"Why would knowing they lack consciousness matter to them?" Jared asked.

"Why did knowing that she couldn't eat from the tree of knowledge matter to Eve?" Boutin said. "It shouldn't have mattered but it did. She was temptable—which, if you believe in an all-powerful God, means God intentionally put temptation into Eve. Which seems like a dirty trick, if you ask me. There's no reason the Obin should desire sentience. It'll do them no good. But they want it anyway. I think it's possible that the Consu, rather than screwing up and creating an intelligence without ego, intentionally created the Obin that way, and then programmed them with the desire for the one thing they could not have."

"But why?"

"Why do the Consu do anything?" Boutin said. "When you're the most advanced species around, you don't have to explain yourselves to the rock bangers, which would be us. For our purposes, they might as well be gods. And the Obin are the poor, insensate Adams and Eves."

"So this makes you the snake," Jared said.

Boutin smiled at the backhanded reference. "Maybe so," he said. "And maybe by giving the Obin what they want, I'll force them out of their egoless paradise. They can deal with that. In the meantime, I'll get what I want from this. I'll get my war, and I'll get the end of the Colonial Union."

The "tree" the three of them looked at stood about ten meters high and was about a meter in diameter. The trunk was covered with ridges; in a rainfall these could funnel water into the inner part of the tree. Every three meters, larger ridges sprouted a circular array of vines and delicate branches, decreasing in circumference as they increased in altitude. Sagan, Seaborg and Harvey watched as the tree swayed in the breeze.

"It's a pretty light breeze to make the tree sway this much," Sagan said.

"The wind's probably faster up there," Harvey said.

"Not by that much," Sagan said. "If at all. It's only ten meters up."

"Maybe it's hollow," Seaborg said. "Like the trees on Phoenix. When Dirac and I were doing our thing, we had to be careful which of the Phoenix trees we walked across. Some of the smaller ones wouldn't have supported our weight."

Sagan nodded. She approached the tree and put weight on one of the smaller ridges. It held for a reasonable amount of time before she could snap it off. She looked up at the tree again, thinking.

"Going for a climb, Lieutenant?" Harvey asked. Sagan didn't answer; she gripped the ridges on the tree and hoisted herself up, taking care to distribute her weight as evenly as possible so as not to put too much strain on any one ridge. About two-thirds of the way up, with the trunk beginning to taper, she felt the tree begin to bend. Her weight was pulling down the trunk. Three-quarters of the way up, and the tree was significantly bent. Sagan listened for the sounds of the tree snapping or cracking, but heard nothing except the rustle of the tree ridges scraping against each other. These trees were immensely flexible; Sagan suspected that they saw a lot of wind as Arist's global ocean generated immense hurricanes that lashed over the planet's relatively tiny island continents.