In the decades following its discovery by xenoparapsychologists, the Greenling art of Reconciliation was variously misidentified as telepathy, telemancy, pneumakinesis, exprioception, psychophagia and soulswallowing, but of course Reconciliation bears little true resemblance to any of these. As Spellkin and Essen-Hrane demonstrate in their Psychophenomena of the Segundan Sphere—and as B’shin confirms in the third volume of his memoir We Sing the Song of the Thing of the All—Reconciliation is nothing more and nothing less than hypostatic unity: the complete subsumption, temporary or permanent, of two or more minds into a single consciousness.

For the Greenling people, at least, this meant the establishment of periodic identity-bonds not only with each other, but with themselves—or more precisely, with past and future instances of themselves. As those future instances inevitably included the White Flower Dreaming, which itself had effected hypostatic union with the entire Segundan biosphere, Greenling culture as a whole tended to deemphasize issues of personal, species, and temporal identity.

A handful of other species have shown the ability to Reconcile. The mercurial You, for instance, instinctively Reconcile with any approaching outsider, a defense mechanism which has effectively protected their region of the Ascacian Wastes for millennia. The Nova Entity appears to have attempted, on several occasions, to Reconcile with its homo sapien forebears in the past, albeit with fairly limited success, and rather more successfully with the White Flower Dreaming and their shared offspring, the Zone of Many Thousands.

—Recorder 3000-21