C. J. Cherryh - The Company wars

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The Company Wars

THE COMPANY WARS

C. J. Cherryh

THE ORIGIN OF STAIONERS AND MERCHANTERS

In the early twenty-first century, starprobes went out, launched by Sol Station, which diring the

interval of the starprobes' travel, became a great economic power in Earth's politics.

Sol Station, a self contained orbiting "multifactory," pulled in metals, minerals, and ice from

the asteroids, abandoning the practice of lofting anything up from Earth's gravity well. Since the

majority of industrial cost on Earth was either in fighting gravity (lifing and transporting heavy

objects) or heating things up and cooling them down (smelting and refrigeration), once a

spacestation achieved the machinery to separate and smelt metals by solar power (thus becoming a

"multifactory," a combination of industries all locked together in the production of goods for

export to Earth (medicines, electrical power, scientific data, and processes) and for its own

consumption (machinery, construction materials, oxygen from ice, and foodstuffs (from orbiting

fishtanks and farms operating at industrial pace thanks to total environment control possible in

such facilities.)

The result was a station capable of replicating itself endlessly at little expense; and a balance

of trade which made investment and experimentation possible.

Hence, the robot starprobes which reported several stars much like the Sun, lacking habitable

planets but potentially rich in metals and ice.

The theory of cryogenic suspension in sublight starflight was rejected. After all, Sol Station and

the one traveling scientific station which had already been in orbit about Venus and Mars and now

ventured the turbulent gravity well of Jupiter, proved that there was little difference between a

working solar station and a ship.

So the first startship was modular, and while it would take years under light speed to reach the

chosen star, there was no reason for the people aboard not to carry on life much as it was carried

on in huge Sol Station. When it reached its destination, its payload, containing manufacturing

units, would go into orbit in some rich and stable area of the designated starsystem, while the

engine module would break free after assisting in this process and return to Sol Station.

It proved hardly more expensive in effort to make the mission multistage, that is, to colonize

several starsystems in the same vector by using several engines and compartments and shedding each

into deceleration at the time appropriate for each star. So if one part of the mission failed,

another might succeed, and if anything went wrong with one engine, they had the capacity to

continue on the others, or to return should it become necessary.

As it happened, all three stages worked without a hitch, and Earth had three functioning

starstations. They had no ambition at all to land on a planet. Planets were too expensive at this

stage, too wasteful of energy in getting up and down; mankind had decided that starstations (of

which Sol Station was one) were more productive for small populations than planets were.

The voyaging starships never lost touch with Sol Station, and continually transmitted the data the

scientists and tehcnicians in the colony mission were developing enroute. Life aboard went on in a

mundane fashion, under the one gravity produced by acceleration; and when decelerated and parked

in orbit, each starstation began a continual dataflow to Sol Station, and to each other, and to

ships in passage. The result of this close community of scientists at work in new environments, as

well as the research and development necessary for the guidance systems and engines for the

mission, was a technological acceleration for Earth, a period of great prosperity and wild

speculation as new discoveries multiplied.

The engine modules had a small crew compartment: they were designed to move greater mass than

their own -- to push, in other words. Their crews had the harder life, since they were few in

number and had to give up their associations with the colonists, who would live normal Stationer-

style lives, hardly different than they would have lived on Sol Station. The engine-modules might

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have been robotized, but it was felt, first of all, that the chance of failure would be less with

crewed modules, in such long voyages; and secondly that the occasional contact of human beings who

had seen Earth would serve to keep the colonies from becoming too different in their isolation;

the chance for instance, that a colony would grow completely alienated from Earth and shut off its

contacts had occurred to Sol Station. So the primary reason for crewed ships was a psychological

one.

The small crews must pass years together, and must have as normal a life as possible. Families

happened, in spite of mild official discouragement, and when the first ship returned to Earth,

they were offered a chance to stay. They refused, having spent too long at this to give up what to

them had become a way of life. Crews grew larger (as did crew quarters) as second-generation crew

took husbands and wives. Children ran and played throughout the ships, did small maintenance, and

grew into crew work with the passing years, children whose lives were measured in calls at this

and that starstation.

This was the origin of the merchanters and the stationers, whose lives became vastly different one

from the other, but who were linked together in mutual necessity.

The arrivial of any ship in those early days was occasion for holiday.

Trade began, conducted without substance (of data by commmunications net) and with (of goods and

parts carried by the ships).

What did the merchanters get out of the exchange? The improvement and care of their ships, which

were their homes. Their food. Their whole lifestyle. And the freedom which began to be their whole

way of life. A merchanter "family" was tightknit, even developing an accent unique to a particular

ship: everyone aboard seemed to be a cousin or aunt or uncle.

Stationers got the same sort of thing -- but their populations were larger. They liked their

security, the benefits their trade brought in.

Starstations expanded, built new modules and boosted them by ship to stars as near to them as

Barnard's Star and Alpha Centauri are to Sol; and Sol had to get news of some of these stations

secondhand, because of their distances.

There were nine such starstations -- ten, counting Sol.

They were: Alpha Base and Beta Base, Bryant's Star, Glory, Venture, Galileo, Olympus, Thule, and

Eldorado.

The next starstation was sent to Pell's Star. And that star had a planet which had life, which had

a sapient species, which had agriculture and the kind of luxuries which Earth had been supplying.

PELL'S STAR AND DOWNBELOW

Scientists flocked to Pell. Everyone wanted to be in on the find. Meanwhile, word of the discovery

traveled at lightspeed back to Earth.

By the number of years it took that lightspeed message to get to Earth and for Earth to debate the

matter and send another message the same number of lightyears distance back, trying to adjust the

trade patterns to accommodate the new discovery, it was too late. Some starstations had shut down

and emigrated because goods were reaching their trading partners from Pell, not Earth, and they

were suddenly in a backwater area, out of the future line along which goods would flow.

Pell not only succeeded as a starstation, it was being overloaded by immigrants and sent out new

colonies to Viking and Mariner; and Mariner, having discovered by telescope a planeted star near

it, colonized Cyteen, which had another agricultural world.

THE BREAK WITH EARTH

Earth just did not cope with these changes fast enough. The value of its goods plummetted. It

suffered an economic crisis and there began to be an outcry that the starstations and the

merchanters ought to be taxed to support Earth, who after all, started the space program.

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C. J. Cherryh - The Company wars

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