Downbelow Station

For Earth, as word rode in with arriving freighters… a frantic haste to ignore Pell. Alien life. It sent shock waves through the Company, touched off moral debates and policy debates in spite of the fact that the news was almost two decades old — as if they could set hand now to whatever decisions were being made out there in the Beyond. It was all out of control. Other life. It disrupted man’s dearly held ideas of cosmic reality. It raised philosophical and religious questions, presented realities some committed suicide rather than face. Cults sprang up. But, other arriving ships reported, the aliens of Pell’s World were not outstandingly intelligent, nor violent, built nothing, and looked more like lower primates than not, brown-furred and naked and with large, bewildered eyes.

Ah, earthbound man sighed. The human-centered, Earth-centered universe in which Earth had always believed had been shaken, but quickly righted itself. The isolationists who opposed the Company gathered influence and numbers in reaction to the scare — and to a sudden and marked drop in trade.

The Company was in chaos. It took long to send instructions, and Pell grew, out of the Company’s control. New stations unauthorized by the Earth Company sprang into existence at farther stars, stations called Mariner and Viking; and they spawned Russell’s and Esperance. By the time Company instructions arrived down the line, bidding now-stripped nearer stations take this and that action to stabilize trade, the orders were patent nonsense.

In fact, a new pattern of trade had already developed. Pell had the necessary biostuffs. It was closer to most of the star-stations; and star-station companies which had once seen Earth as beloved Mother now saw new opportunities, and seized them. Still other stations formed. The Great Circle was broken. Some Earth Company ships kited off to trade with the New Beyond, and there was no way to stop them. Trade continued, never what it had been. The value of Earth’s goods fell, and consequently it cost Earth more and more to obtain the one-time bounty of the colonies.

A second shock struck. Another world lay Beyond, discovered by an enterprising merchanter… Cyteen. Further stations developed — Fargone and Paradise and Wyatt’s, and the Great Circle stretched farther still.

The Earth Company took a new decision: a payback program, a tax of goods, which would make up recent losses. They argued to the stations of the Community of Man, the Moral Debt, and the burden of gratitude.

Some stations and merchanters paid the tax. Some refused it, particularly those stations beyond Pell, and Cyteen. The Company, they maintained, had had no part in their development and had no claim on them. There was a system of papers and visas instituted, and inspections called for, bitterly resented by the merchants, who viewed their ships as their own.

More, the probes were pulled back, tacit statement that the Company was putting an official damper on further growth of the Beyond. They were armed, the swift exploration ships, which they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.

Merchanters armed in retaliation, freighters never built for combat, incapable of tight turns. But there were skirmishes between the converted probe ships and rebel merchanters, although most merchanters declared their reluctant consent to the tax. The rebels retreated to the outermost colonies, least convenient for enforcement.

It became war without anyone calling it war… armed Company probes against the rebel merchanters, who served the farther stars, a circumstance possible because there was Cyteen, and even Pell was not indispensible.

So the line was drawn. The Great Circle resumed, exclusive of the stars beyond Fargone, but never so profitable as it had been. Trade continued across the line after strange fashion, for tax-paying merchanters could go where they would, and rebel merchanters could not, but stamps could be faked, and were. The war was leisurely, a matter of shots fired when a rebel was clearly available as a target. The Company ships could not resurrect the stations immediately Earthward of Pell; they were no longer viable. The populations drifted to Pell and Russell’s and Mariner and Viking, and to Fargone and farther still.

Ships were built, as stations had been, in the Beyond. The technology was there, and merchanters proliferated. Then jump arrived — a theory originated in the New Beyond, at Cyteen, quickly seized upon by shipbuilders at Mariner on the Company side of the line.

And that was the third great blow to Earth. The old lightbound way of figuring was obsolete. Jump freighters skipped along in short transits into the between; but the time it took from star to star went from years to periods of months and days. Technology improved. Trade became a new kind of game and strategy in the long war changed… stations knit closer together.

Suddenly, out of this, there was an organization among the rebels farthest Beyond. It started as a coalition of Fargone and its mines; it swept to Cyteen, gathered to itself Paradise and Wyatt’s, and reached for other stars and the merchanters who served them. There were rumors… of vast population increases going on for years unreported, technology once suggested on the Company side of the line, when the need was for men, for human lives to fill up the vast dark nothingness, to work and to build. Cyteen had been doing it. This organization, this Union , as it called itself, bred and multiplied geometrically, using installations already in operation, birth-labs. Union grew. It had, in the course of two decades, increased enormously in territory and in population density, it offered a single, unswerving ideology of growth and colonization, a focused direction to what had been a disorganized rebellion. It silenced dissent, mobilized, organized, pushed hard at the Company.

And in final, outraged public demand for results in the deteriorating situation, the Earth Company back on Sol Station gave up the tax, diverted that fund to the building of a great Fleet, all jumpships, engines of destruction, Europe and America and all their deadly kindred.

So was Union building, developing specialized warships, changing style as it changed technology. Rebel captains who had fought long years for their own reasons were charged with softness at the first excuse; ships were put into the hands of commanders with the right ideology, with more ruthlessness.

Company successes grew harder. The great Fleet, outnumbered and with an immense territory to cover, did not bring an end to the war in a year or in five years. And Earth grew vexed with what had become an inglorious, exasperating conflict. Cut all the starships, the cry was now in the financing corporations. Pull back our ships and let the bastards starve.

It was of course the Company Fleet which starved; Union did not, but Earth seemed incapable of understanding that, that it was no longer a question of fragile colonies in rebellion but of a forming power, well-fed, well-armed. The same myopic policies, the same tug-of-war between isolationists and Company which had alienated the colonies in the first place drew harder and harder lines as trade diminished; they lost the war not in the Beyond, but in the senate chambers and the boardrooms on Earth and Sol Station, going for mining within Earth’s own system, which was profitable, and devil take the exploratory missions in any direction at all, which were not.

No matter that they had jump now and that the stars were near. Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics. Earth ba