Foreshadowing

I had a lot of fun writing Rome's Revolution. A lot of times I would stick stuff in there just to amuse myself. Take this next little scene from the original long-form version. It was just before Rome and Rei arrived at Deucado. Rome is thinking back to her former life as a member of the Vuduri and she notices something odd:

     “You’ve been telling me that there is a large mandasurte community on Deucado. Do you think they live together with the Vuduri or separate like on the Earth?” Rei asked.
     “As far as I know, they mostly live apart,” Rome replied. “At least that is what I would expect. Perhaps they even live on different continents. There is not much interaction as far as I can tell. It is curious, though.”
     “Curious why?” Rei asked.
     “During our trip here, many times I have examined the records concerning Deucado,” Rome replied. “Other than a brief textual description of the geography, climate and indigenous life, there is not very much to go on, compared to the normal fastidiousness that the Vuduri apply to such things.”
     “So why is that curious?” Rei asked.
     “You will recall that before I understood the concept of beauty, I only had impressions from my connection with the Overmind, never integrated or examined,” answered Rome. “After I became Cesdiud, I recollected those impressions. I came to believe that the consensus was that it is quite beautiful there on Deucado. Once we got aboard this ship, I began to reexamine those assumptions and tried to correlate those impressions with the actual data. And therein lies the problem.”
     “What problem,” Rei asked. “What’d you find out?”
     “As it turns out, there are no factual records, no images whatsoever,” Rome said, pointedly. “In fact, if you only go by the formal records we carry, there is essentially no information to be had at all. That I can recall facts and images is entirely puzzling. There is no correspondence to this in the archives.”
     “I assume that your people have been back and forth, right?” Rei asked. “I mean Tau Ceti is not even 12 light years from Earth.”
     “This is correct. That is what I would have expected and yet there is no basis for this assumption. It is very strange,” Rome said. “I had not noticed this before and when I was part of the Overmind, it would never have occurred to me to ask about it.”
     “Well, I’m sure that there is nothing sinister going on,” Rei remarked. “It’s far away. So, one thing we’ll do…we’ll be sure to take lots of pictures and find a way to get them to Earth, OK?”

The phrase in bold was put in there just to amuse myself. It was a little bit of foreshadowing because of course there was something sinister going on. MASAL was hard at work isolating the mandasurte on Deucado so that when the asteroid hit, the whole sub-species would be wiped out.