4 ideas
In a prehistoric age, nomadic tribes meet the Xipéhuz, translucent cones, cylinders and flat strata that kill any person or animal they touch and steadily expand their territory. After direct assaults cost many lives, the sage Bakhoun spends long periods silently watching them and records that each carries a star-like spot, the vulnerable point.
The Xipéhuz are clearly intelligent: they organize, coordinate and signal to each other through shifting colors and geometric traces. When no common ground exists, even two intelligent parties cannot bargain, and contact reduces to a zero-sum contest for the same space.
Against an enemy whose rules are unknown, massed courage only multiplies losses. The effective sequence is to stop attacking, observe the adversary long enough to model its behavior and find its single structural weakness, and then concentrate all force on that point. Knowledge produced by the detached observer, not the warrior's valor, turns a losing war into a winnable one.
Bakhoun ends the war with melancholy rather than triumph. He asks whether exterminating a different but equally striving form of life was just, or merely necessary. Seen this way, winning an existential contest shows only which side prevailed, not which deserved to, and the victor inherits the moral weight of having erased a kind of mind.