Background
Finisterre ("End of the Earth") is an Earth-like planet targeted for colonisation, but the colonists soon discover that what they thought was a hospitable world is not suitable for humans at all because the local fauna is telepathic. These creatures send and receive images to and from the ambient, which the unwary humans intercepted, resulting in a mind-clouding "noise" that distressed many of the settlers and even drove some of them mad. To make matters worse, the mothership that delivered the colonists to the planet never returned. Underscoring the colonists' difficult situation, Cherryh has described Anne McCaffrey's Pern and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover worlds as having the same underlying characteristic as Finisterre in terms of being "a bad real estate deal."
With nowhere to go, Finisterre's colonists therefore built and retreated into encampments surrounded by wooden palisade walls, and hid behind religious dogma based on fear and ignorance. The "beasts" on the planet and the "noise" they made terrified the humans. The preachers referred to these beasts as the work of the Devil and condemned any contact with them. Typical refrains from the church were:
- Harken not to the beasts.
- Death and damnation to the followers of the beasts!
- Pray for your children, that they follow not the beasts.
But a group of men and women known as riders turned their back on the church and partnered up with some of the planet's nighthorses, alien horse-like animals. The riders became a necessary evil to keep the fragile human settlements alive: they supplied and protected the villages and towns. The preachers continued their rhetoric and conveniently forgot that while a rider can survive without a village, a village cannot survive without riders.
Read more about this topic: Finisterre Universe
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