The Confederation Handbook

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Of the six inland plains, only four have so far been opened for settlement; at their current rate of population growth it will take another three to four centuries before anything like full capacity is reached. Settlement follows a standard pattern, with a market or mill town serving a surrounding county of ranch farms. The town itself will be based around a bhasri-processing plant, which dries and grinds the pods. Growing and harvesting the plant is a cooperative venture between the local farming association and the state government, enjoying a small start-up subsidy provided by the national government. The finished product is then sent out to the coastal port towns by freight rail. Railway tracks remain the main transport links across the plains, since very little of a road network has been built. The state itself both builds and operates the railways.

  The counties tend to be territories roughly square in shape, 150km from side to side, with the town in their geographical center. The farms radiate outwards from the town, linked only by dirt tracks, and they are separated from each other by large strips of public grazing land. All of the farms grow and harvest the bhasri crop in carefully cultivated fields, but they also keep herds of geneered cattle and goats which graze the tapweb grass that grows on the open areas of the plain. Herd numbers, and where and how often they are entitled to graze the public lands, are arranged on a voluntary basis between the farmers themselves, any disputes being arbitrated by the local farmers’ association.

  The eldest son will inherit the family farm, his younger brothers being obliged to start up their own farms. The government is still parceling out grants of free land, of 10km sq. each, to anyone willing to sign an agreement to keep farming his plot for a minimum of fifteen years.

  Farming the bhasri plant is a relatively simple process. The fields are first prepared by mechanoid tractors before planting, and the subsequent crop is cut by mechanoid harvesters. Afterwards the remaining stalks are left to dry out, then a mechanoid tractor chops them into tiny chips, sprays them with a geneered microbe—which will break them down in the soil, adding to its nutrient base—and then they’re plowed back in. Human labor tends to be mostly concerned with trouble-spotting and repairs of the machinery.

  Vegetation

  Manzung

  There are many varieties of this bush, but all of them are a reddish brown, and grow up to 1m high, with a spherical cluster of twigs sprouting fleshy petal-type leaves, almost like a fungus. There is a deep taproot (as with most plains plants) and a thick central stem, which protects it from animals and birds by means of its exceptionally sharp thorns.

  Vidor

  This bush grows in the foothills, along the side of streams. It produces a human-edible fruit which resembles a prune.

  Tapweb

  A grass growing right across the plains, except on the driest sections or in areas with underground stone shelves that prevent subsurface water from rising. Tapweb, as its name suggests, has an extensive root network which stores a considerable amount of water, with each taproot growing 4–5m down into the soil to find moisture, and with lateral roots branching out from the crown and throwing up blades of grass, and sinking yet more taps. Its blade is relatively thick, and slightly ovoid, with a tough outer surface preventing evaporation, and will grow up to 8cm high. Seed-carrying stalks are produced during the rainy season, growing about 1m high.

  Animals

  Kestor

  A rodent creature, longer and slimmer than a terrestrial rat, possessing black scales and a bullet-shaped head. These animals live in warrens which they dig in the soil, housing anything up to fifty of them at a time. They can prove extremely dangerous if enough of them attack at once.

  Rahal

  This vulture-analogue nests in rock cliffs and turrets.

  Nald

  A small rodent: a field mouse-analogue.

  Harvor

  This is a large predator and carnivore which feeds mainly off the quannier. Bigger than a dog, it is very territorial, with a red ochre-colored hide that blends in exceptionally well with the background in the plains.

  Quannier

  A herd animal, slightly larger than a terrestrial goat, with a dull grey hide; it is very swift. They tend to stick to the foothills in the dry season, but come out onto the plains during the rains in order to feed off the bhasri plants. This makes them a considerable nuisance to the farmers, who shoot them on sight; although the government officially disapproves of such ecocide, there is tacit acceptance of the massive extermination of them carried out in and around settled areas. Their meat is inedible to humans, however. With their numbers declining, their predators, the harvor, are also in decline, though not quite as swiftly since they can feed off other, terrestrial, animals introduced on to the plains.

  Geneered dogs

  Brought from Earth by shepherds, these dogs were part of an illegal genetic program to enhance intelligence levels so that they could accept a wider range of verbal orders. They were initially developed in the early part of the twenty-first century, when affinity-bonded servitor animals were becoming commonplace. The UN and most national governments moved swiftly to end neural modification of this type, a proscription which remains in place throughout the Confederation, endorsed by Adamists and Edenists alike. Even Tropicana doesn’t produce IQ-boosted animals.

  Believed to be extinct elsewhere, some of these dogs rebelled against—and abandoned—their owners and formed wild packs. The farmers of the plains now shoot these dogs on sight as a public menace, and there are even local rumors of “devil dogs” snatching human children.

  Valisk

  The independent habitat Valisk orbits Opuntia. Despite its deterioration since Rubra’s death, it remains an important economic asset to the system as a whole (see Valisk, below).

  12. Valisk

  Valisk is an independent (non-Edenist) habitat orbiting 470,000km above the gas giant Opuntia, in the Srinagar star system.

  History

  Valisk was germinated in 2306 by Rubra, an Edenist Serpent born in Machaon, a habitat orbiting Kohistan. It is 30km long and 12km in diameter. As with Edenist habitats, there is a starscraper band around its center. The climate is different from the usual sub-tropical environment favored by Edenists: scrub desert predominates one half, blending into a savannah plain before reaching the standard circumfluous saltwater reservoir at the end.

  Rubra was nothing like as antagonistic and hostile as Laton proved to be almost three centuries later. He simply wanted somewhere which provided a benign environment without the stifling constraints of Edenism (a common Serpent rationale). Rubra became a Serpent at forty-four, selling his (considerable) share in his family engineering concern, and set up his own as a trader in one of the asteroid settlements in Kohistan’s trailing Trojan point, owning and leasing a fleet of six interplanetary cargo ships. As this was a time of commercial growth in the Trojan point he made a considerable fortune.

  After twelve years his company, Magellanic Itg, had expanded into manufacturing and mining, owning industrial stations in twenty-three industrial asteroids. Its trading arm moved into interstellar travel, with fifteen starships as well as fifty interplanetary ships. At this point he germinated Valisk, gambling his entire company by mortgaging most of it to raise the collateral he needed for cloning a habitat seed. He turned to Tropicana’s biotechnology companies to produce this seed, which taxed even their considerable resources. However, they eventually succeeded, though there was a rumor at the time that somehow or other Rubra had actually acquired the DNA code for a habitat before he left Machaon (it is unlikely that he would possess enough money to fund DNA design himself—or that Tropicana had the facilities and specialists to perform such a monumental task).

  After successful germination, Valisk grew at the same rate as any standard Edenist habitat. Rubra loaded the neural strata with a modified version of the standard initializing thought routines (again rumored to be a pirate copy of Edenist routines). From its maturation onwards, the habitat served as a base for his starship fleet
, and for various industrial stations. Curiously, no attempt was ever made to mine He3 from the gas giant. Again it is speculated that Rubra was distancing himself deliberately from the activities of his earlier culture.

  Valisk became a corporate state, existing primarily to endorse and support Magellanic Itg. Rubra wrote a very loose constitution giving himself and his heirs the position of executive committee, with elected local councils and commerce association groups set up to advise the committee. This element of democracy was intended to comply with basic Confederation membership rules, thus qualifying as an independent state, and therefore ensuring a seat in the Confederation Assembly (Valisk only ever applied for observer status, which it still retains).

  In practice the executive committee takes advice from no one, but runs the habitat in conjunction with the personality (see Rubra’s Family, page 214) purely in order to benefit Magellanic Itg.

  Although this newly grown Valisk was a financially advantageous location from which to run his ever-expanding fleet of starships, the habitat still needed to attract a base population in order to provide it with a viable civilization. Industrial companies establishing locally registered stations were therefore granted weapons and research licenses, which were extremely liberal. Valisk thus started to attract companies specializing in military hardware.

  Rubra also opened the habitat to immigration by “people who seek cultural and religious freedom,” once more thumbing his nose at his own formal Edenist upbringing. This invitation attracted several fringe religious groups and alternative-lifestyle tribes, who believed that a bitek environment would provide them with free food from the starscraper glands and so enable them to avoid work. Over 9,000 of these people arrived over the course of the habitat’s first twenty-five years, many of them drug- or stimulant-program addicts.

  After tolerating their excesses throughout this period, Rubra’s patience with them finally ran out. Fed up with their basically parasitical nature, he banned any more of them from entering. Those that remained on Valisk chose an “earthbound” experience, and lived in the park rather than in the starscrapers. They amalgamated over the next fifty years into the Starbridge community, adopting an extremely primitive lifestyle and religious beliefs extrinsic to all of the main creeds, but involving tarot, the psychic, astrology, numerology, etc.

  Today there are approximately 25,000 residents living in various nomad caravans throughout the interior, rejecting technology entirely (though not averse to using medical nanonic packages, especially for childbirth). They continue to eat the food provided by the habitat glands, and work at their handicrafts to provide fundamental essentials, many being proficient carpenters and potters, and even jewelers. They salvage scrap metal and tend animal herds, as well as growing their own opium. Some of their handicrafts, especially woven rugs, are sold to tourists or even to visiting starship crews for sale across the Confederation.

  Even within the Starbridge community there is considerable division. Some actively embrace their existence and contribute a great deal to their community, while a minority are little more than wasted stimulant junkies.

  By 2330, Valisk’s population had risen to 350,000. Industrial output was high, with nineteen stations, a large spaceport, and many interstellar companies opening offices there; so the habitat became a financially viable proposition. Magellanic Itg by now had over 200 civil-cargo starships and 100 interplanetary craft.

  It is at this time that the first blackhawks appeared, which were Rubra’s second successful venture in covertly acquiring and subverting Edenist technology. The first ones to gestate in Opuntia’s rings were registered with Magellanic Itg, and were captained by Rubra’s children (see Rubra’s Family, page 214). They swiftly replaced the Magellanic line’s ZTT starships, and to this day they form Magellanic Itg’s entire fleet, although not all its captains are descendants of Rubra himself.

  Rubra died in 2390, by which time he had become one of the wealthiest men in the Confederation. Magellanic Itg had industrial concerns in fifty star systems, and a fleet of 500-plus blackhawks, as well as financial interests in stock markets on several hundred worlds. However, while it would be unfair to say the company and habitat have declined since then, they have certainly never again emulated that initial period of dynamic growth. This is mostly part due to the inheritance problems Rubra left behind him (see Rubra’s Family, page 214).

  Today the habitat’s reputation is in almost complete disrepute. Magellanic Itg has increasingly contracted around its core businesses of interstellar transport and operating manufacturing stations in nearby star systems. The habitat’s attendant stations are now almost totally given over to the production of armaments. The executive committee, composed of Rubra’s descendants, is prone to power struggles, exasperated by the habitat personality, which invariably weaken the company’s commercial edge.

  In the last century there have been two notable attempts by the executive committee to regain the company’s earlier prestige. First was the Von Neumann machine (started in 2508, main section completed in 2521), a combination of bitek and nanocybernetics, which is positioned 50km from Valisk. This machine was only partially successful. Its main problem was its inability to reproduce itself without subsystems supplied by an outside manufacturing capability. It is too complicated in its present form, although much information regarding self-replication technology has been learned from its construction. It remains operational, and is still capable of producing a considerable amount of finished products, notably heavy structures such as spaceport and industrial station sections.

  As part of an ongoing research and development project, company scientists are continuing to refine and upgrade its cybernetics and software. Unfortunately, the executive committee now allocates few funds to this once-prestigious project, and further development is slow. Should a positive leader gain control of the executive committee, a second-generation machine may be constructed.

  The second attempt is the Portal project. This has absorbed a great deal of the company’s financial resources over the last seventy years. The idea is to open wormholes on a permanent basis, providing interstellar transit to relatively unsophisticated (cheap) ships, thus reducing travel costs considerably. It may even be possible to have ordinary spaceplanes use planet-orbiting portals, eliminating the need for both starships and interplanetary craft. Although most industrial star systems (and the Edenists) have projects running on similar lines, none has put quite so much effort into the concept as Magellanic Itg. If it proves successful it will be as revolutionary as the first FTL ship, and give the company enormous status and financial rewards.

  Rubra’s Family

  When he died Rubra was known to have fathered over 150 children, of whom eighty-five were gestated in exowombs from ova he had bought. All the exowomb born had modifications made to their affinity gene, as well as general physiological improvements. The thirty which Rubra considered the most promising were appointed to Valisk’s executive committee, while the remainder—and also several of the next generation—became blackhawk pilots. His naturally conceived children were virtually disinherited from the company, and many of them returned to the Edenist fold.

  Under normal circumstances this executive committee arrangement should have been capable of furthering the company growth in spectacular terms, providing a Edenist type of consensus governing body. However, Rubra had his exowomb children’s affinity gene modified in such a way that they were affinity-bonded only with Valisk, and with the first family of blackhawks. They did not share the Edenist unity, and were controlled to an extensive degree by the habitat personality.

  Rubra, when he died, transferred his personality pattern to the habitat, and extended its template into every existing thought routine. From this position he still attempts to run Valisk and Magellanic Itg as if he were a living human. Certainly his children are dominated to a large extent by his wishes and his influence, because the habitat personality has access to their thoughts virtually from the moment o
f conception, and makes considerable use of this link in shaping their thought processes. This is a gross breach of Edenist ethics, and remains the mainstay of Edenist opposition to both Valisk and Magellanic Itg.

  In effect, Rubra’s descendants are therefore little more than stunted puppets under the influence of his personality pattern. Very few have ever managed to break free from Valisk, not through any physical restraints but because the psychological prohibition is too great.

  The habitat will not accept personality patterns from any other people that die, so it remains entirely Rubra’s domain. Edenists claim that he/it is not sane, and few of them ever visit Valisk. Edenists will not even purchase any goods produced in Magellanic Itg industrial stations, nor is there a branch office of the Jovian Bank on Valisk (making it one of the very few exceptions in the Confederation).

  It is estimated that there are well over 1,000 of Rubra’s descendants who now contain this restrictive affinity gene, and thus fall under the personality’s domination. The executive committee accounts for thirty of them; blackhawk captains make up another 300; and a further 250-plus hold managerial posts throughout Magellanic Itg. The rest continue to live in Valisk, but some have dropped out and joined the Starbridge community, while others are employed by the Magellanic Itg company in minor roles.