Uvarov smiled, eerily. “I don’t deny that, of course. Why should you be surprised at such a monumental misapprehension? My friends, even the comparatively few millennia of human history before our departure from the time streams in the Northern were a litany of ghastly errors: the tragi-comic working out of flaws hard-wired deep into our psyches, a succession of ludicrous, doomed enterprises fueled by illusions and delusions. I refer you to the history of religious conflict and economic ideology, for a start. And I see no reason to suppose that people got any wiser after we left.” He turned his head to Mark. “You were a socio-engineer, before you dropped dead,” he said bluntly. “You’ll confirm what I say. It seems to me that the Xeelee war—or wars—were no more than still another ghastly, epochal error of mankind. We know that the Xeelee inhabited a higher plane, intellectually, than humans ever could: you only have to consider that remarkable craft, the nightfighter, to see that. But humans being humans—could never accept that. Humans believed they must challenge the Xeelee: overthrow them, become petty kings of the baryonic cosmos.
“This absurd rivalry led, in the end, to the virtual destruction of the human species. And—worse—it blinded us to the true nature of the Xeelee, and their goals: and to the threat of the dark matter realm.
“It is clear to me now that there is a fundamental conflict in this Universe, between the dark and light forms of matter—a conflict which has, at last, driven the stars to their extinction. Differences among baryonic species—the Xeelee and ourselves, for instance—are as nothing compared to that great schism.”
-Ring, Ch. 22