Haln claimed a small, yellow sun and two moons for itself. The fourth of eleven planets, it traced a serene, elliptical orbit around its parent star. It bore oceans and lakes, rivers, ponds, and puddles. It held ice-caps at each of its poles. Three massive continents spread themselves across the surface, breaking the oceans with deserts and jungles, tundras, prairies, and tall, jagged mountains. Volcanoes spewed ash and magma on sporadic occasion, making new islands or depositing new soils, even as oceanic erosion claimed other little dots of land. Haln was an active planet: young, as some might judge terrestrial-type worlds. It was a temperate world, well within the range of human comfort. There were cities on Haln. There were people. Human. Halners. Many of them went—as humans might—to other worlds and for the most expected, predictable reasons: for work, for education in schools with prestige attached to their names: schools like Harvard, Crissium, Oxford or Charles. They were, in comparison to other humans, quiet in their pursuits and shy in their interactions with anyone but themselves. It seemed, Drucilla often thought, that their presence on any human world was simply to observe, to test, to witness and to hear. They were, as she’d come to judge them, adamant in their common refusal to interfere. They spoke, when spoken to; they were kind, gentle, polite, and when necessary, helpful to an earnest, scrupulous degree. They were not overtly gregarious. * * There is more to the story, of course. The fragment shown above (the fragment you’ve presumably just read) is actually snatched from within a piece of fiction soon to find its way into the Writer’s gallery. I have to finish it. I have to figure out how to render the ending with maximum emotional significance. The ending, you see, deals with a startling revelation: the kind you find—most often—in science fictional tales that undermine our common assumptions of what it is to be human. I’ll finish the story soon. Quite soon, if I have my way and if my muse cooperates. The world depicted here isn’t actually Haln…or maybe it is. I can’t really say. The world depicted here was little more than an attempt to test some of the features of a new and snazzy version of The Gimp (new and snazzy for me, that is…) I wanted to see if clickable buttons and other thingies were in the same places. I wanted to see if there were program idiosyncrasies to grow accustomed to. And so, I took a photograph of mottled, weathered concrete and turned it into a suspiciously cloudless planet. Haln, as far as I’ve written, has clouds. It has an ecology, and so it looks like an ecologically-active planet. The orb depicted in this image has no apparent clouds. If there is biological activity within the planetary gravity well depicted here, it’s somewhat different than that stuff we have here on Earth, no atmosphere to scatter light in that wonderful Photoshop way, and I haven’t yet discovered the Gimp equivalent. I will, in time. As with other images in my gallery, the “spaceship” element is derived from the macro photograph of a rocket pack yanked from the back of a Star Wars action figure. It snaps back on, but as it makes a decent spaceship, I’ve placed it in my growing collection of photographic odds and ends. It’ll likely appear in other pieces of art as well…eventually, and—maybe—the combination of a toy rocket pack and color-tweaked shot of concrete will inspire a new story. Until such a thing happens, here’s an image, at least…a test. I like the result. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week/end.