Dommen

Author's blurb: The face looks normal; the hair as full as ever; perhaps the eyes are somewhat dull. "Not so strange," you think as you step away from the mirror. "After twelve years of sleep you should be allowed a slow morning." It's still not the right day, but you decided to call this one the morning anyway. The sun is strange, too. Not the beautiful white-yellow one you're used to, but another one - a little yellow star, ten light years from home. You study the sky for a minute, before turning to the sensors that probe the little blue-green planet that's your destination. You reflect on how strange it is that the inhabitants down there are physiologically so similar to you - but even so, they've barely been off-planet, having briefly visited only their own moon a handful of times. Why are they so under-developed? So backward? And they side so young... so needlessly young...