There was some good snow coming down in Chicago today. Nice big flakes. Made the air thick, cold, and cozy.

I read this extremely long and interesting article about the last pre-neolithic civilization left on Earth. And then I decided to write this:

The Last Planet of the Savages

How do you get to the last isolated settlement in the Galaxy?

You jump a Spreader at the Ixnoic Station. In Behix, you transfer to a Lightshot across the meteor flats of Rutheron. You step a few jumps– Polutrul, Awivn, and the desolate outpost at Marui II, where the red light of the the Four Suns burns your face and the icy ground soothes your feet. You take a small Lightcraft a few jumps into the Black Desert of Space to Vixon. And then you charter an old Discship out into a little void near a star the locals call Sol. All the way to a place called Earth.

When my editor first thought me about this assignment, I almost couldn’t believe him. I couldn’t believe that in our day and age, a civilization existed like the one he described on Earth.

“They’re backwards,” he said. “Haven’t had any contact with anyone. Anytime anyone goes near the place, they get shot at. It’s in the middle of nowhere, but you’ll love it.”

The idea did kind of fascinate me. I consider myself a bit of a galaxy traveler. I’ve been to the Edge many times. I’ve seen the giant energy rings built ages ago around Safron. I’ve eaten in the best resturants in Yxei, thought shop with the geek millionaires churning out the latest technology from Qqet Valley. And, having seen all this stuff, I couldn’t believe a place yet existed without a single energector. A place that had never considered the concept of hardskin.

Frankly, that’s exactly what it was: unbelievable.

So I set out to find it. The guide of my Discship was a bulky Zoen oldster named Vorn. I could tell that he’s answered all the questions I asked him before, but he didn’t hesitate to answer me anyway. On the way to Sol’s orbit, I tried to wrap my head, with Vorn’s help, around the possibility of a planet that was still completely isolated.

“Surely someone has been there before,” I said incredulously to Vorn.

“Sure, a few people have been there.” he told me. “Someone buzzes it every once in a while, but they usually rebuke or ignore any form of contact.”

“They think, don’t they?”

“Well, no,” he said. “Not in the sense that you or I do. We’ve tried to recieve thoughts from off the planet, but it’s all just a big gob of nonsense. We suspect it’s all still private to them.”

“Private!? How do they communicate?”

“They don’t think like we do. It’s all physical, you see. They still speak in sounds, move muscles. I once read a report from many years ago whose writer was astounded they still spoke and lived in meat.” He laughed. “But we’ve researched it, and it’s all true.”

“They speak with sound! But that would mean they don’t communicate thoughts at all!”

“As near as we can tell, that’s exactly what happens there,” he said before turning to check our trajectory. I tried to fathom the concept of being alone in my head, of being trapped inside my thoughts without a connection to the outside world.

I couldn’t do it. They must be miserable.

“And my editor said they haven’t heard of hardskin yet,” I told Vorn when he was done.

“Hardskin, my friend, is the least of their worries,” he said. “But yes, it’s true. From what we’ve seen, their skin is still underevolved. They often go outside with parts of it uncovered. We can’t imagine how they deal with the germa but they must get along somehow. Some of them do have covering, but it’s all makeshift rags they’ve scrounged up from somewhere on their planet.”

“What do you mean hardskin is the least of their worries?”

“You haven’t heard?” he asked darkly. I hadn’t. “The people on Earth,” he told me, “are savages. A few units back, one of our expeditions landed there to offer gifts and try to convert them. The last we heard of them, they’d been captured by one of the tribes down there.” He paused a moment. “We’re not sure, but there were reports that they had flayed our man alive. Some say they did it on their air-based communications network.”

I was stunned. I said nothing.

“But that’s not the worst,” he said, and sighed. “We’ve reason to believe that some of them still… well, they still kill each other.”

I tried to register what he said, but couldn’t. A place like that just couldn’t exist in the universe anymore. “Haven’t they heard of The Good? Can they really have never experienced a place like the Edge?”

He shook his head and half-laughed. “These people have no concept of what a place like the Edge even means. None of them could have even imagined what we’ve found and done at the Edge in their wildest dreams.”

“No concept of The Good,” I said out loud to myself, as if to make it real. “But they must believe something!”

“They believe something,” he said. “Pale imitations of The Good. They must have some concept of the empathy that comes with it, or else they’d already have made themselves extinct. But with no way into each other’s heads, and no proof of The Good, who knows what they believe? They probably think each other insane for any number of various reasons.”

I agreed it was quite incredible.

By this time, we had reached the system of Sol. Looking out into the inky blackness, I wondered what it would be like to look out into the pinpoints of light and not realize they led to Yexi, to Koni IIX, to the Edge. I wondered what it would be like to look out on this starscape and not realize how teeming it was with life, how much universe there was out there to find. I shuddered.

The planet itself was minute, round, and blue. We fired in from about .01 microunits out, and skimmed the surface from megaorbit. Lots of the place was covered in watra, which I saw from the monitors was almost as filled with life as the black starsea I’d looked at moments earlier.

But the land was the really interesting part. Our savages were bipedal, half-sized, and pink. I saw a few settlements, but noticed something strange about their structures.

“Where are the sources?” I asked Vorn. “Don’t they have machina?”

He laughed again. I could tell he enjoyed skimming the surface of Earth. “They do have machina, albeit extremely primitive. Most of it is as clunky as you’ll find. They’ve haven’t discovered etherpower yet. They have no idea how sources work.”

“But how do they power the machina?”

“They use things from ground, mostly. We’re not sure if they’ve figured out how limited it is or not. Surely you can’t do the types of things they’re doing and not know they’re using a limited supply, but for some reason they never made the jump to using the Star, or corralling the etherpower around them. What they’ve done would be pretty impressive, actually, if it wasn’t so primitive. Impressive, but fairly stupid.”

No etherpower. No Starpower! I tried, again, to imagine living in a world and knowing the resources were finite. It was implausible to me to put faith in such a supply when you knew very well it would be gone in a short amount of time.

Then again, these were savages we were dealing with.

I noticed something else in the monitor. We would fly over sectors on the planet and find large numbers of lifesign in gigantic blobs, and then fly over others and find them spread out. There seemed to be whole areas of the place with beings clumped together, and then others spread out comfortably. Again, I turned to my guide with questions.

“I told you they didn’t know The Good,” he said solemnly. “On Earth, there are still those who take more space than is necessary. There are those who spread and waste, forcing others to squeeze and save. They have no empathy, remember. Or as good as none, anyway. They’re quite savage bastards.”

“Don’t they realize that they take at the cost of others? Don’t they understand that for every unnecessary luxury, there is unnecessary suffering?”

“Again,” he said, “almost no one has been there. They’ve shunned all outside contact. But as near as we can estimate, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

I stared at the little blue drop on the edges of the Black Sea. I wondered what life was like there, and how long it would take before they made the first steps off of their island. What was the first thing they’d experience in the real world? What would they think of our sources, our gigantic energectors, our modern machina?

My Good. What would they think when they saw the Edge?

I told Vorn that I’d seen enough. He nodded, and changed trajectory, back to Vixon and Marui II and home. I watched the blue planet shrink and then disappear into the inky blackness of space. All my thoughts on the way back were filled with what life must be like there. Life, if you could call it that, on the last planet of the savages.