Martin Setterholm was a xenobiologist born on Diadem, having traveled from the Sol system as a frozen, fertilized egg. Something of a loner, he became obsessed with the idea of emergent intelligence, of small simple elements combining to produce a sentient creature. He began to view the worms on Diadem as a part of a planet-wide consciousness, and believed that the harvesting of ice by the colonists was -- in a sense -- causing brain damaging.