text: &#x200B; # Three good years During my travels amongst the stars, I came across an idyllic planet called Lyos. It was a bountiful world orbiting a yellow star occupied by intelligent human-like creatures who seemed to live lives of plenty and luxury. This entire ecosystem existed without any predation, the various populations of vegan animals always had just enough to balance their populations and not spiral out of control. The human-like people, these Lyosians, due to their advanced tools and intellect would get by on a mere hour of foraging a day, and spend the rest of their time engrossed in leisure and academic pursuits. These Lyosians would learn extremely fast. They would skim through a massive text book and have all of its contents absorbed within an hour, without fault. As I learnt their language, I would test them on this knowledge, it did not matter if I asked for page 100, third sentence, or the whole of page 567, they would know it by heart, and also understand it. It made all my years of agonisingly slow study seem infuriating to me, and left me to wonder how these people hadn’t conquered the stars already. Whenever I raised questions of the stars, the only one at the time who took any interest at all was a beautiful young lady called Resada. She would listen to stories of my travels for hours upon end, and not just that, she would question aspects of how and why things happened as they did in a way that would reshape my entire perspective of events. Tales where I thought myself the perfect, valiant hero, I now know where I could have done better. Agonising failures of mine with added perspective could be re-shaped as small victories, that perhaps even benefitted some. I recall one story, I spoke of losing a crew-mate to a venom on a distant forest world. I searched high and low for the cure, but to my despair he was too delirious to help me identify the cause. I had to fall to trial and error with anti-venoms, but none worked. From her sly smile, Resada just quipped “well it’s party time for the worms at least”. I chucked, I could call that callous, but I knew it was a joke, and honestly it was just what I needed, and she always knew what I needed. I often felt quite one sided in all this as I wasn’t sure I helped her nearly as much as she helped me. I listened to her stories of this place as well, and we were inseparable, doing everything together, and soon it progressed into a romantic relationship. However one pivotal fact slipped my attention for the first few months of this. This society I was starting to learn resided upon one unfathomable, and - to me - tragic fact. Each Lysonian only lived three good years. It was this reason why they had not reached the stars. It was this reason that felt a thorn in what seemed otherwise a perfect people, dedicated to learning, astute and intelligent to the extreme. I lived out the rest of Resada’s life with her, as she grew old and grey, wrinkled, desperate for some last time with this strong, insightful woman, knowing that each precious day we treasured together was worth ten of mine to her. She passed away peacefully, with no heir of her own. Having chosen me for a partner, we biologically could not have had children, yet she was never bitter about this fact. Her sisters had children of their own, at least some of her genes would pass on, and she had the first window into other worlds, a window no other Lyosian had ever had before. On Resada’s deathbed she left me with one perplexing statement, I chalked it down as a fever dream at the time: “Power is a heavy burden, do not mistake authority for altruism”. I didn’t know how that referred to anything at the time, but it was to become prophetic. I spent the next few decades on this planet, acting as a bridge between generations, composing the stories of the people of this world, including my dear Resada, and passing them on both in song, prose and spoken stories. I became quite the novelty, I could speak clearly of someone’s great-great grandmother, while these people were wizards to me in their ability to learn from a book, I was a wizard to them for magically re-telling stories of their families generations ago. I was the “endless one”, the “window to our ancestors” and soon looked up to by all. Whenever anyone had a problem with their lives, I always had some anecdote or story to make things better. I knew these people better than they’d ever have the chance to know themselves. I never again took a mate amongst them, not only was I still mourning for Resada, but truth be told, while these people were both physically and mentally adult in a mere year, a part of my mind still found their relative age too disturbing to contemplate getting too close to one again. Besides, I loved attention, that much was becoming apparent. I was getting that in spades being this elder-teacher and I loved it. I drank of it and devoured it, whenever I had a mere hours alone I would get the craving and find myself trekking to a public area to tell another story, desperate for more adulation. Generations passed, and my stories had taken hold enough to shape their society. No longer were their eyes only on their eden, but the myth of me had them seeking to lengthen their lives, and look to the stars. But their birth rate per year did not change - even a mere doubling of lifespan to six years led to rampant growth. Where one Lyosian would have previously only had time to sire one, maybe three children, it became common-place for families to reach six or more. Soon this Lyosian Eden was no longer plentiful enough. Foraging took longer and longer. Some turned to destructive ways to farm, others sought a way off this planet, and when their efforts took too long, and the environment around them faltered, some even took my ship and fled. So here I am, stuck amongst my folly. Power is a heavy burden indeed. I thought I was helping these people, using my position to spread stories of wonder, linking the generations like never before and helping these people reach new heights. After all, isn’t humanity shaped by its culture? Culture that is passed down, they may have been wizards of the written word, but when a people only live three years, so much is still lost. I thought I could be that link. Their very extended lives was also something I craved, I had it and thought they needed it too. Resada was right though, it wasn’t altruism, it was me, selfishly disrupting an ecosystem for my own gratification, trying to make them more like me, when her dissections of my stories always told me how I am not the perfect article either. Their culture was different but in its own way it was perfect, I just couldn’t see that I was leading them to repeat the failures of early Earth. I sit here now, elderly, but with still a few more generations to go of them before I pass. Can I reverse what I did? Can I restore their balance? Would I be better off to just link away with my books and hope they forget? Either option is grim. ((Just want to clarify that Resada was always a full-grown adult in this story, she may have technically been like 1 year 3 months old when they met, but..