Foreword...

The planet was old, covered by warm, sluggish, shallow seas broken by the occasional low island, on which ancient twisted tree-like plants struggled to survive. It was a wet, cloudy world, with no agriculture, no science, no industry. It wove an increasingly unstable orbit between its three suns...
      The Plarithdi, who had first discovered it, called it Vl'ag - "worthless" - gazed around with a mixture of fear and disgust, and left with considerable speed. The natives, bemused, waited for someone with more... vision to arrive.
     They were not disappointed. Their next visitors were the Rusc who, enchanted by a world so unlike their own, named it Fohmatraa - "dreaming" - and opened their hearts and their minds to their new friends. And the Fohmatraans, who had always *called* each other by their unique telepathic mentity (their mental identity) since they had no spoken language of their own, proceeded with great delight to take Rusciin words and images to create vocal names for themselves.
     But this is ancient history. It's well-known that the Fohmatraans, being the most skilled telepaths in the Known Worlds, became perhaps the Collective's most highly valued species, greatly in demand wherever sentients gathered - and not just for their telepathic and communicative skills. They were, lean and powerful, with huge dark-adapted hunter's eyes, an intense desire for communication in all forms, and an insatiable curiosity about the minds – and mores – of others. They emanated an addictive, almost-irrestistible 'pathic sensuality. And their reputation for delivering the ultimate in erotic fulfilment soon became legendary
     The entire race numbered only about two million. There simply weren't enough of them to go round!

On the other side of the galaxy, diametrically opposite Fohmatraa and very isolated and alone amongst what the rest of Haadri called the Burned Worlds, was a small, fertile, primitive world of two moons. It was too close to the area claimed as homespace by the Othxero-Sarond Alliance for the rest of the civilised galaxy to have noticed its existence, and in any case its bipedal, big-brained dominant order was not yet sufficiently evolved even to be aware that they shared their homeworld with another, similar species, let alone consider that there might be other sentient beings in existence. Mostly, they believed themselves to be quite alone in a dangerous, often unpredictable universe. Quite what their response would be when they discovered otherwise is anyone's guess...