“I am so happy,” she answered.
They went to the saloon and sat down on the couch together. Daiquiris were ready for them. They touched glasses. “Good voyage,” he made the old toast, “and merry landing.”
“For me, yes.” Her smile faded. “And I hope for the rest. How I hope.”
“Don’t you think they can get along in the outside worlds?”
“Yes, undoubtedly.” The incredible lashes fluttered. “But they will never be as fortunate as . . . as I think I may be.”
“You have good prospects yourself?” The blood roared in his temples.
“I am not quite sure,” she replied shyly.
He had intended to spin out his surprise at length, but suddenly he couldn’t let her stay troubled, not to any degree. He cleared his throat and said, “I have news.”
She tilted her head and waited with that relaxed alertness he liked to see. He wondered how foolish the grin was on his face. Attempting to recover dignity, he embarked on a roundabout introduction.
“You wondered why I insisted on exploring the cluster center, and in such detail. Probably I ought to have explained myself from the beginning. But I was afraid of raising false hopes. I’d no guarantee that things would turn out to be the way I’d guessed. Failure, I thought, would be too horrible for you, if you knew what success would mean. But I was working on your behalf, nothing else.
“You see, because my civilization is founded on individualism, it makes property rights quite basic. In particular, if there aren’t any inhabitants or something like that, discoverers can claim ownership within extremely broad limits.
“Well, we . . . you . . . our expedition has met the requirements of discovery as far as those planets are concerned. We’ve been there, we’ve proven what they’re like, we’ve located them as well as might be without beacons—”
He saw how she struggled not to be too sanguine. “That isn’t a true location,” she said. “I can’t imagine how we will ever lead anybody back to precisely those stars.”
“Nor can I,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter. Because, well, we took an adequate sample. We can be sure now that practically every star in the cluster heart has planets that are made of heavy elements. So it isn’t necessary, for their exploitation, to go to any particular system. In addition, we’ve learned about hazards and so forth, gotten information that’ll be essential to other people. And therefore”—he chuckled—“I guess we can’t file a claim on your entire Cloud Universe. But any court will award you . . . us . . . a fair share. Not specific planets, since they can’t be found right away. Instead, a share of everything. Your crew will draw royalties on the richest mines in the galaxy. On millions of them.”
She responded with thoughtfulness rather than enthusiasm. “Indeed? We did wonder, on Makt, if you might not be hoping to find abundant metals. But we decided that couldn’t be. For why would anyone come here for them? Can they not be had more easily, closer to home?”
Slightly dashed, he said, “No. Especially when most worlds in this frontier are comparatively metal-poor. They do have some veins of ore, yes. And the colonists can extract anything from the oceans, as on Serieve. But there’s a natural limit to such a process. In time, carried out on the scale that’d be required when population has grown . . . it’s be releasing so much heat that planetary temperature would be affected.”
“That sounds farfetched.”
“No. A simple calculation will prove it. According to historical records, Earth herself ran into the problem, and not terribly long after the industrial era began. However, quite aside from remote prospects, people will want to mine these cluster worlds immediately. True, it’s a long haul, and operations will have to be totally automated. But the heavy elements that are rare elsewhere are so abundant here as to more than make up for those extra costs.” He smiled. “I’m afraid you can’t escape your fate. You’re going to be . . . not wealthy. To call you ‘wealthy’ would be like calling a supernova ‘luminous.’ You’ll command more resources than many whole civilizations have done.”
Her look upon him remained grave. “You did this for us? You should not have. What use would riches be to us if we lost you?”
He remembered that he couldn’t have expected her to carol about this. In her culture, money was not unwelcome, but neither was it an important goal. So what she had just said meant less than if a girl of the Commonalty had spoken. Nevertheless, joy kindled in him. She sensed that, laid her hand across his, and murmured, “But your thought was noble.”
He couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He laughed aloud. “Noble?” he cried. “I’d call it clever. Fiendishly clever. Don’t you see? I’ve given you Kirkasant back!”
She gasped.
He jumped up and paced exuberant before her. “You could wait a few years till your cash reserves grow astronomical and buy as big a fleet as you want to search the cluster. But it isn’t needful. When word gets out, the miners will come swarming. They’ll plant beacons, they’ll have to. The grid will be functioning within one year, I’ll bet. As soon as you can navigate, identify where you are and where you’ve been, you can’t help finding your home—in weeks!”
She joined him, then, casting herself into his arms, laughing and weeping. He had known of emotional depth in her, beneath the schooled reserve. But never before now had he found as much warmth as was hers.
Long, long afterward, air locks linked and she bade him good night. “Until tomorrow,” she said.
“Many tomorrows, I hope.”
“And I hope. I promise.”
He watched the way she had gone until the locks closed again and the ships parted company. A little drunkenly, not with alcohol, he returned to the saloon for a nightcap.
“Turn off that color thing,” he said. “Give me an outside view.”
The ship obeyed. In the screen appeared stars, and the cloud from which stars were being born. “Her sky,” Laure said. He flopped on to the couch and admired.
“I might as well start getting used to it,” he said. “I expect I’ll spend a lot of vacation time, at least, on Kirkasant.”
“Daven,” said Jaccavrie.
She was not in the habit of addressing him thus, and so gently. He started. “Yes?”
“I have been—” Silence hummed for a second. “I have been wondering how to tell you. Any phrasing, any inflection, could strike you as something I computed to produce an effect. I am only a machine.”
Though unease prickled him, he leaned forward to touch a bulkhead. It trembled a little with her engine energy. “And I, old girl,” he said. “Or else you also are an organism. We’re both people.”
“Thank you,” said the ship, almost too low to be heard.
Laure braced himself. “What did you have to tell me?”
She forgot about keeping her voice humanized. The words clipped forth: “I finished the chromosome analysis some time ago. Thereafter I tried to discourage certain tendencies I noticed in you. But now I have no way to avoid giving you the plain truth. They are not human on that planet.”
“What?” he yelled. The glass slipped from his hand and splashed red wine across the deck. “You’re crazy! Records, traditions, artifacts, appearance, behavior—”
The ship’s voice came striding across his. “Yes, they are human descended. But their ancestors had to make an enormous adaptation. The loss of night vision is merely indicative. The fact that they can, for example, ingest heavy metals like arsenic unharmed might be interpreted as simple immunity. But you will recall that they find unarsenated food tasteless. Did that never suggest to you that they have developed a metabolic requirement for the element? And you should have drawn a conclusion from their high tolerance for ionizing radiation. It cannot be due to their having stronger proteins, can it? No, it must be because they have evolved a capacity for extremely rapid and error-free repair of chemical damage from that source. This in turn is another measure of how different their enzyme system is from yours.
“Stop,” Laure said. His speech was as flat as hers. “I see what you’re at. You are about to report that your chromosome study proved the matter. My kind of people and hers can’t reproduce with each other.”
“Correct,” Jaccavrie said.
Laure shook himself, as if he were cold. He continued to look at the glowing fog. “You can’t call them nonhuman on that account.”
“A question of semantics. Hardly an important one. Except for the fact that Kirkasanters apparently are under an instinctual compulsion to have children.”
“I know,” Laure said.
And after a time: “Good thing, really. They’re a high-class breed. We could use a lot of them.”
“Your own genes are above average,” Jaccavrie said.
“Maybe. What of it?”
Her voice turned alive again. “I’d like to have grandchildren,” she said wistfully.
Laure laughed. “All right,” he said. “No doubt one day you will.” The laughter was somewhat of a victory.
CHRONOLOGY OF
TECHNIC CIVILIZATION
COMPILED BY SANDRA MIESEL
The Technic Civilization series sweeps across five millennia and hundreds of light-years of space to chronicle three cycles of history shaping both human and non-human life in our corner of the universe. It begins in the twenty-first century, with recovery from a violent period of global unrest known as the Chaos. New space technologies ease Earth’s demand for resources and energy permitting exploration of the Solar system.
Although Technic Civilization is extinct, another—and perhaps better—turn on the Wheel of Time has begun for our galaxy. The Commonalty must inevitably decline just as the League and Empire did before it. But the Wheel will go on turning as long as there are thinking minds to wonder at the stars.
* * *
Poul Anderson was consulted about this chart
but any errors are my own.
The Price of Buying Time
by Sandra Miesel
We have watched Dominic Flandry selling his soul piece by piece to earn a reprieve for the doomed Terran Empire. Why were these sacrifices necessary? What did they accomplish? Answering these questions requires an historical survey of Technic civilization.
A thousand years before Flandry's time, the woeful twentieth century faded into the hopeful twenty-first. Widespread social upheaval triggered by war, famine, and other disasters had obliterated entire societies but the ultimate effect was to produce a freer international order. Rational solutions were found to old problems like energy and population. The emerging global society was firmly wedded to technology and largely—but by no means exclusively—Western in outlook. Although local tongues persisted, the universal language was Anglic, a simplified version of English enriched with many foreign loan words. The new cultural synthesis became known as Technic civilization, successor of Western as Western had been of Classical.
The prosperity of this new era provided the resources to explore and develop the Solar System. Colonies were placed in orbit and permanent bases were established on the Moon and planets. A less-than-successful attempt was made to terraform Venus. By 2100, these settlements were large enough to join Earth in establishing the Solar Commonwealth, an institution that was to endure for the next five centuries. At the same time, faster-than-light interstellar travel became possible. Exploration and then emigration proceeded with explosive vigor. ("Wings of Victory" and "The Problem of Pain" occur in this period.)
Colonies continued to be founded all during the Commonwealth age. Just like New World pioneers before them, colonists were drawn by the chance for adventure, profit, advancement, social and political experimentation, or the desire to preserve a unique cultural heritage. (The ethnic motive was paramount for the settlers of Russo-Mongol Altai, African Nyanza, and Slavic Dennitza, to name only a few examples.) This outflow of humanity to widely scattered independent worlds is known as the Breakup.
Furthermore, humans encountered numerous other intelligent races among the stars. Contact was generally peaceful and mutually beneficial. Mars was ceded to aliens suited to its environment, a precedent for the later cession of Jupiter to the Ymirites in Imperial times.) Many alien peoples could assimilate high technology and interact with men as equals. All had contributions to offer: arts, beliefs, information, goods, services, and so forth. These exotic stimuli sparked the creative energies of Technic civilization to new peaks of excellence because they broadened the range of options available to each individual.
Thus interstellar conditions in Commonwealth times approximated those of the European Age of Exploration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Likewise, they bred the same boldness. Independent traders ranged across vast reaches of space discovering and exploiting new worlds. Daring merchant-adventurers amassed huge fortunes and enormous political power. Their resources surpassed those of whole planetary governments, enabling them to live as grandly and arrogantly as Renaissance princes.
In the twenty-third century, the merchants and other groups involved in trade formed the Polesotechnic League to foster their own interests. This "League of Selling Skill" was a voluntary, self-regulating mutual protection organization that sought to curb the worst excesses of unbridled capitalism and defend its members against outside foes such as governments. The League issued its own currency, conducted its own diplomacy, and, on occasion, raised its own armies. Overall, it resembled the Hanseatic League of mercantile cities which totally dominated northern European commerce and politics between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.
But the League made fateful decisions at a meeting called the Council of Hiawatha in 2400 which turned it into a set of feuding cartels and left it open to Commonwealth interference. The inability of the League to discipline itself and maintain its independence doomed it in the same way as the Conciliarist Movement's failure to reform the Church had doomed medieval Catholicism a thousand years before.
Nevertheless, the League's sunset years were filled with glorious accomplishments as exemplified in the careers of flamboyant Nicholas van Rijn and his soberer protégé, David Falkayn. Stories featuring these men (see “Chronology of Technic Civilization,” included in this and other volumes of the Technic Civilization Saga) illustrate the positive effects of the League on human colonists and primitive aliens. The traders imparted useful knowledge, reconciled warring factions, thwarted outside aggressors, loosened internal repression, suppressed piracy, and brought new groups into interstellar society—earning profits all the while. With van Rijn's consent, Falkayn helped underdeveloped planets acquire essential capital which proved to be their margin of survival later on. Together they exposed schemes of subversion and conquest that threatened Earth herself (Satan's World and Mirkheim).
But the League had irreparably decayed by the end of van Rijn's lifetime because of its members' greed and ruthlessness—not to mention the overwhelming complexity of its operations. By then, the Commonwealth had become a weak but meddlesome bureaucracy whose fortunes were intertwined with the League's. Falkayn, who had married van Rijn's granddaughter, foresaw the end and eventually emigrated from Technic civilization's sphere. He founded the new colony of Avalon which was jointly populated by humans and the winged Ythrians and ruled by the Domain of Ythri. ("Wingless on Avalon" and "Rescue on Avalon" relate the early years of this important settlement.)
Falkayn retreated; others built barricades against the coming storms. The next two centuries were the Time of Troubles. Technic civilization was swept by continual waves of war, revolution, economic collapse, and all their attendant evils. Violent convulsions shook every society—some fatally. The nadir was the sack of Earth by the Baldic League, a pack of spacegoing barbarians who had acquired advanced weapons from irresponsible traders. Shortly afterwards, the alien Gorzuni began raiding Earth periodically for slaves to stock their budding empire. One of
their captives, Manuel Argos, organized a successful slave revolt that began the liberation of Earth ("The Star Plunderer"). Argos was a charismatic—and pragmatic—leader of enormous energy. Ounce he had stabilized the ravaged Solar System, he proclaimed himself First Emperor of the Terran Empire. This was a symbolic title shrewdly calculated to appeal to exhausted beings' longing for order.
Stability was what the Empire promised; stability was what it delivered. Other systems and regions willingly united with Terra in order to enjoy her protection. The Empire's rule was mild and the benefits of security from attack, safe transportation, and easy communication were immense. Collecting only modest taxes for the support of her excellent Navy and Civil Service, Terra generally let member planets manage their internal affairs undisturbed.
This was the ideal which attracted the allegiance of sturdy old colonies like Dennitza. Although some worlds, such as Aeneas and Ansa, had to be annexed forcibly, their inhabitants soon recognized the value of provincial status. "Sargasso of Lost Starships" is an account filled with discrepancies, nevertheless it shows the early Empire defeudalizing stagnant Ansa to good effect.
The turning point in Terra's expansion was the costly war of aggression that she fought against the Domain of Ythri. "Rectification of borders" was the official excuse; the true motive was sheer territorial aggrandizement. Although some Ythrian planets were won, bicultural Avalon successfully resisted Terran conquest as related in The People of the Wind. Eventually the Empire grew to encompass a sphere 400 light years in diameter, englobing four million stars and 100,000 inhabited planets. Now its only desire was to preserve that dominion unmolested.
Although both the Commonwealth and the Empire were created after periods of universal chaos, note that a century of redevelopment had preceded the formation of the Commonwealth whereas the Empire sprang directly from the ruins of previous institutions. This difference in origins produced considerable divergence in operation and attitudes. The Commonwealth as a political entity never extended beyond the Solar System, yet its era was a time of new accomplishments, broad horizons, and healthy cross-cultural influences. Man's attention was focused outward on other worlds, other races. Colonies were scattered broadcast and the Polesotechnic League harvested trade across incredible distances.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 65
