“Brandedfool, what the hell have you been doing for the last two weeks?”
Aside from eating too much Christmas dinner and suffering through a cold, I’ve been editing like a madwoman. So far, I have cut an additional 4,000 words.
As part of the process, I’ve made several adjustments to the overall story. The biggest change is that “Dron” has now become “Dro’shl.” I won’t be making this edit to any of the postings online, but you will see this update in any future parts of the world.
I think this weird change is part of the reason most authors edit behind closed doors. I expect a lot of people to be confused or concerned by the change.
Ultimately, the change is because I didn’t think the old word was doing the job as well as the new one will. And maybe I’m wrong and I’ll change it back. And maybe I’m right, and I’ll force myself to go through all the AO3 postings and the blog and change it everywhere. Only time will tell.
In the meantime, I am proud to present the new prologue to Notes from the Deathworld Earth. It’s very different from the previous version, and I think it does the job much better.
Prologue
From the exploration logs of Dro’shl Acharya, Planetary Surveyor, archived in Galactic Library 76, The History of Peoples Section 17: Carbon based space-faring section, Species Self-Name: Human
The first recorded contact with humans was by complete coincidence. Their homeworld is a far-flung planet, way out on the outer arm of the Galaxy, and their communications were not able to reach the nearest star, let alone the nearest habitable planet. The scouts that detected their weak signals weren’t looking for any undiscovered civilizations. No: they were zipping towards the edge of the galaxy with the intention to keep right on going until they couldn’t anymore.
But instead of careening past the edge of the galaxy into the unimaginably vast void from which no ships have ever emerged, they found a little blue world, screaming as loud as it could, which wasn’t very loud. So they stopped, just close enough to have a chat over the airwaves. They scraped up just enough information to give the rest of the galaxy directions to the planet, and then they went on their way. And they have never been seen again.
The Galactic Library received the directions, naturally, and every planetary surveyor, researcher, archivist, and scholar received the news.
I was on a library planet when I got the news, working on a comprehensive report of my most-recent planet exploration. Humans were the second sapient species discovered in my lifetime, and the first one I was in the same quadrant as. From the first moment I saw their planet, through the telescope in the library’s observatory, I decided I would keep an eye on them. Someone had to.
Over the next decade, humans left Earth in a slow trickle. They didn’t leap to fund a space mission or buy one or even send out a team of scientists on a mission on another starship. Instead they trickled out into the stars, a few at a time. This made keeping track of the exact number of humans off of their homeworld near-impossible, but the estimate was somewhere between ten- and fifty-thousand.
The reports started coming on around the seventh or eighth year. Humans who were kidnapped by pirates killing or grievously wounding their captors. Humans who were hired as mercenaries turning on their own teammates. Humans fighting back against robberies and leaving their attackers fighting for their lives. Humans biting through skin and scales and infecting other species with terrible diseases that killed them in a matter of days.
A few species made laws banning humans from working on their spaceships and stations. Even more banned them from ever setting foot on their planets. Not long after that, the Librarian itself requested the human homeworld be studied and properly examined by a planetary surveyor.
I volunteered for the project because I was already in the quadrant. Humans also fascinated me from afar, though I hadn’t met one yet.
The only other planetary surveyor who applied for the position, Schandri, was across the galaxy, and was very near retirement, so, by default, I received the assignment.
The Librarian told me that it was going to assign me anyway, because it believed I would be able to adapt well to the planet. I am convinced this is flattery.
I can’t honestly say I remember the original prologue the story had, but I like this one a lot. The showcase of what the rest of the galaxy is like compared to Earth (both in similarities with muggings and trafficking and so forth, and differences biologically), even small example that it is, is a great little compliment to the story, and I love the ‘ships travelling out of the galaxy on an endless journey’ thing; it’s honestly a very human thing to do.