The meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. - Iain Banks

Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?

This version felt like the truth, she thought; close enough to the myths and legends of her own people, but less self-serving, less dramatically glorious, more equivocal in its moral implications.

What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?