The Amity Incident

The Amity Incident is a novel about First Contact on a colony world. You can purchase it here.

Plot
The story mainly follows life and culture from two perspectives: Susan Valentine, a young human girl who came to build a better world, and T'reka the Mad, a Numidid scientist with an unhealthy interest in the strange, dangerous and toxic.

Scientific interest and curiosity about dangerous things is a taboo subject for the Numidid, so T'reka is declared officially dead before she's dropped onto the misnamed Toxic Island [it's more like a continent, to be honest]. She has no idea that there a humans sharing this place with her.

Susan, on the other hand, becomes aware of her presence relatively quickly and tries to prove that she and her fellow colonists are sharing their planet with another kind of intelligent life. In the beginning, even her friends disbelieve her, but the evidence continues to mount.

T'reka, too, finds evidence of the humans. First in an artifact - a sock - and then through their impact on the environment. Her research on humans turns up some alarming facts that she eventually proves to be exaggerations. And in the process, she makes contact with Susan and her friends.

It's a long, slow and careful chain of encounters that finally results in the humans making welcome to T'reka and some other outcast scientists. They accommodate the Numidid faster and better than the Numidid accommodate humans.

Susan is an old woman before she is permitted into the Numidid city to sign the first official treaty between two cogniscent species.

Extra Info
Amity is the first recorded planet where Deathworlders and Havenworlders shared living space. The Amity Numidids are significantly tougher than their other colonist counterparts.

This in turn lead to the discovery that carefully orchestrated encounters with Deathworlders can improve a frailer life-form's DNA by encounter-osmosis, and significantly aided in the acceptance of humans into the Galactic Alliance.

T'reka and Susan are very common names on Amity, and are found in both species.

Numidid names are hard to pronounce for the first generation of colonists, as they did not grow up learning to chirp it like a native. Thus, Numidid names tend to get corrupted into their nearest English sound-alike. Hence you find humans using Trekker for T'reka, Cuckoo for Koku, Lilly for Lillip and Jenk for Zhenk. Similarly, some human names are hard to pronounce by the Numidid, and variations like Su'syn persist into the current time.

T'reka is very difficult to pronounce for a human. The T' is a finch-like chirp, the re is a brief, ascending note and the ka is more like a final cough. [We will include a sound file of C.M. Weller pronouncing it properly just as soon as we figure out how] It is no surprise that it quickly got adulterated to 'Trekker'.

Susan and her parents are named for the first three companions of Doctor Who. Susan, Ian and Barbera.