Lea gasped at the three-dimensional representation on the screen. Not at the physical aspects of the man; as a biologist trained in the specialty of alien life she had seen a lot stranger sights. It was the man’s pose, the expression on his face—tensed to leap, his lips drawn back to show all of this teeth.
“He looks as if he wanted to kill the photographer,” she said.
“He almost did—just after the picture was taken. Like all Disans, he has an overwhelming hatred and loathing of off-worlders. Not without good reason, though. His planet was settled completely by chance during the Breakdown. I’m not sure of the details, but the overall picture is clear, since the story of their desertion forms the basis of all the myths and animistic religions on Dis.
“Apparently there were large-scale mining operations carried on there once; the world is rich enough in minerals and mining them is very simple. But water came only from expensive extraction processes and I imagine most of the food came from offworld. Which was good enough until the settlement was forgotten, the way a lot of other planets were during the Breakdown. All the records were destroyed in the fighting, and the ore carriers were pressed into military service. Dis was on its own. What happened to the people there is a tribute to the adaptation possibilities of homo sapiens. Individuals died, usually in enormous pain, but the race lived. Changed a good deal, but still human. As the water and food ran out and the extraction machinery broke down, they must have made heroic efforts to survive. They couldn’t do it mechanically, but by the time the last machine collapsed, enough people were adjusted to the environment to keep the race going.”