Adagio 7 – The Planet of the White Spider
The planet Gaijin would prove to be the closest thing to home for Ged Aero since he and his brother left the planet Questor. It was a singularly beautiful world. A water world orbiting the star known as the Old Yellow Man. It had sixteen continents all roughly the size of India on old Earth. The ample oceans of the world teamed with sea life. Like many places where the Ancients left their imprint, there was a substantial population of Cetaceans; dolphins, porpoises, and whales that were genetically identical to those of Earth. The most common form, the Emerald Dolphins, had a language and a sort of non-tool-using culture based on the sharing of stories, songs, religion, and poetry. They interacted with the native humanoids very little. It is a shame that the dolphins didn’t care to be the dominant life form on the planet. Their way of life was far less disease-like and virulent than the that of the eventual dominators.
The Gaijinese were themselves an artificially melded race. They once had been purely a race called the Sylvani, inhabitants of the star lanes since before the memory of any living race. They had been willowy humanoids with long, silky white hair and lemon yellow skin. They were very intelligent and relatively long-lived, reaching ages of 500 Earth years and up. Such racial goodness is supposed to be a star marked on the celestial score-card of existence. They had, however, run afoul of another pre-Earther space-faring race called the Tellerons. The Tellerons of the planet Telleri were green-skinned amphibian humanoids, hairless, and possessing a single shark-like fin sprouting from the apex of their skulls. They would do their best to undo Sylvani goodness. The Tellerons had conquered and enslaved the gentle Sylvani before they met the first Earthers in space. It is probable that most of the Telleron technology that Earthers stole in turn in order to become a space-faring race was originally created by the noble Sylvani. The Tellerons, however, used the technology to colonize and conquer rather than study other worlds. It seemed only fair in the long run that they would be displaced from their dominance of the Orion Spur by the combination of the primate Earthers and the reptilian Galtorrians who were both worse and more violently ruthless.
When humans conquered the star lanes held by the Telleron Star Empire, the suddenly freed Sylvani disappeared from known space. On the idyllic world of Gaijin, Japanese Earthers and Sylvani met and fell in love with each other’s complex and poetic cultures developed separately. The dually settled world of Gaijin eventually evolved into one culture made of equal parts of both. Because the two races were entirely compatible, the people themselves changed from two races into only one. They became very Japanese-ritual-oriented and very yellow in color.
So it was when Ged Aero dropped out of interstellar space into the unspoiled star system of the Old Yellow Man, he found a complex and peaceful world that had long awaited his coming to reach outward for greatness.
Catch a Falling Star 