Cherryh, CJ - Union-Alliance 7 - Cyteen

492 Pages·2016·2.69 MB·English

by  Cherryh C J

ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
CYTEEN
C.J. Cherryh
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
Contents
CHAPTER 1
i
ii
iii
CHAPTER 2
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
CHAPTER 3
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
CHAPTER 4
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
CHAPTER 5
i
ii
iii
iv
v
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
CHAPTER 6
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
CHAPTER 7
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
CHAPTER 8
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
CHAPTER 9
i
ii
iii
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
CHAPTER 10
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
CHAPTER 11
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
CHAPTER 12
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
CHAPTER 13
i
ii
iii
iv
v
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
CHAPTER 14
i
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
Verbal Text from:
THE HUMANE REVOLUTION
"The Company Wars": #1
Reseune Educational Publications: 4668-1368-1 approved for 80+
Imagine all the variety of the human species confined to a single world, a world sown with the
petrified bones of human ancestors, a planet dotted with the ruins of ten thousand years of forgotten
human civilizations—a planet on which at the time human beings first flew in space, humans still
hunted a surplus of animals, gathered wild plants, farmed with ancient methods, spun natural yarns
by hand and cooked over wood fires.
Earth owed allegiance to a multitude of chairmen, councillors, kings, ministers and presidents;
to parliaments and congresses and committees, to republics, democracies, oligarchies, theocracies,
monarchies, hegemonies and political parties which had evolved in profusion for thousands of
years.
This was the world which first sent out the starprobes.
Sol Station existed, a much more primitive Sol Station, but altogether self-sustaining; and
favored with a system of tax remission in return for scientific benefit, it launched a number of
ambitious projects, including the first large-engine star-probe, and ultimately the first crewed
pusher-ship cluster toward the near stars.
The first of the pusher-modules was of course the venerableGaia,which was to deliver the
Alpha station-component at the star known at that time as Barnard's, and leave thirty volunteer
scientists and technicians in what in those days meant inconceivable isolation. They would build
their station out of the star's expected system-clutter of rock and ice, perform scientific research and
maintain long-distance communication with Earth.
The first concept had been disposable pushers, hardly more than robotic starprobes; but human
passengers mandated an abort-and-return capacity which, considering all the possibilities for
disaster, was negotiated finally to mean a full-return capacity. That led to the notion of a crewed
pusher-module to stay at Barnard's should the star prove impossibly deficient in raw materials
necessary for self-sufficiency of the Alpha module, in which event Gaiamight remain for a number
of years, then strip the station to the essential core and return the mission to Earth. If the star
proved a viable home for the station,Gaiawould remain only a year or so until the Alpha Station
module was fully functioning and stable in its orbit. Then it would return to Sol with its tiny
complement of crew and surrender theGaiamodule to a second mission, which would, after
refitting, go out again with such supplies as trace minerals and materials which the infant station
might not have available. Equally important with the supplies, those early pioneers theorized, was
the human link, the reassurance of face-to-face contact with other human beings across what in
those days was an inconceivably lonely expanse of space.
Earth, with years' advance warning via the constant data-flow fromGaiaand Alpha Station that
the mission was abundantly successful and thatGaia wasreturning, trained a replacement crew and
dutifully prepared the return mission.
But the crewof Gaia,subject to relativistic effects, running into an information stream
indicating greater and greater changes in the Earth they had left, had become more at home in the
ship than in the mainstream of a Terran culture gone very alien to them. Their sojourn on Sol
Station was intensely unhappy, and they re-occupiedGaia by a surprise move which immensely
disconcerted station authorities, but which finally won them their ship and relegated the
replacement crew to waiting on the next pusher-craft.
Other crews of further missions reached the same decision, regarding themselves as permanent
voyagers. They considered their small ships as home, had children aboard, and as star stations and
attendant pushers multiplied, asked of Earth and the stations only fuel, provisions, and the
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
improvement of their ships with larger compartments, more advanced propulsion—whatever had
become available since their last docking.
Star-stations at half a dozen stars linked themselves by the regular passage of such ships. But in
the isolation of those days in which messages traveled at mere light-speed and ships traveled slower
still, every station was at least four or five years time-lagged from every other human habitation, be
it ship or station, and learned to exist in these strangely fluxing time-referents which were
impossibly alien to the general population of Earth.
The discovery of intelligent life on the planet at Pell's Star, the star Earth once called Tau Ceti,
was more than ten years old by the time the word of it reached Earth. The dealing of human beings
with the Downers was more than two decades advanced by the time Earth's elaborate instructions
could arrive at Pell; and it was much longer before Terran scientists could reach Pell, up the long
route that led them station by station into a human culture almost as foreign to them as were the
Downers.
As it is difficult from our viewpoint to imagine Earth of that time, it was virtually impossible for
Earth to comprehend the reasoning of spacers who refused to leave their ships and who, in their
turn, found the (to them) teeming corridors of Sol Station chaotic and terrifying. It was virtually
impossible even for Sol Station to understand the life of their contemporaries in the deep Beyond—
contemporaries whose culture was built on history and experiences and legendry that had much
more to do with the hardships of life in remote stations and famous ships, than with events in a
green and chaotic world they saw only in pictures.
Earth, beset with overpopulation and political crises largely attributable to its ancient rivalries,
had nevertheless flourished while it was the focus of human development. The unexpected rush of
stationers to new construction at Pell, following the prospect of abundant biostuffs, a native
population primitive and friendly, and exploitable free-orbiting resources, became a panic flood.
Stations between Earth and Pell shut down, disrupting the trade of the Great Circle, and creating
economic chaos on Earth and Sol Station.
Earth reacted by attempting to regulate—across a ten-year time lag: Terran politicians could
not readily conceive of the economic strength the remaining stations might achieve, given the
unification of population that rush to Pell had created. The concentration of population and the
discovery of vast resources combined with the psychological impetus to exploration . . . meant that
Earth's now twenty-year-old instructions arrived in a situation in such rapid flux even a month's lag
would have been significant.
Earth found itself increasingly isolate, subject to internal pressures from a faltering trade
system, and in a desperate and ill-advised action imposed a punitive tariff which led to smuggling
and an active black market; which in turn led to a sudden fall-off of trade. Earth's response was the
declaration of most-favored-status for certain ships; which led in turn to armed hostilities between
ships from Earth and ships which had not been built by Earth and which did not hold any allegiance
to its convolute and wildly varying politics.
Further, Earth, convinced that emigration of scientists and engineers from Sol System was
feeding the spacer cultures with the best and brightest and robbing Earth of its best talent, slammed
down an emigration ban not only on travel from Earth and Sol Station, but on further moves of
citizens in certain professions from station to station.
Gaia made her last trip to Earth in 2125, and left, vowing never to return.
A general wave of rebellion and mutiny swept through the stars; stations were mothballed and
deserted; probes and missions sought further stars not only with economic motive now—but
because there were more and more people anxious to move outward, seeking political freedom
before restrictions came down.
Viking Station and Mariner sprang into existence as stationers found even Pelltoovulnerable to
Earth's influence and as Pell's now established economy afforded less opportunity for highly
profitable initial-phase investment.
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
By 2201 a group of dissident scientists and engineers sponsored by financial interests on
Manner founded a station at Cyteen, about a world vastly different from Pell. The brilliant work of
one of those scientists combined with the economic power of Cyteen's new industries sent the first
faster-than-light probe out from Cyteen in 2234, an event which altered the time-scale of spaceflight
and forever changed the nature of trade and politics.
Cyteen's early years were characterized not only by a burst of growth and invention
unparalleled in human history, but, ironically, by the resurrection of long disused technologies out
of ship archives: combustion engines, gravity-dependent processing, all to save soft-landing the
enormous mass-requirements of a full-scale terrestrial development. In addition, there were new on-
planet technologies specific to Cyteen, to create pockets of breathable atmosphere in the otherwise
deadly environment—all this effort because Cyteen represented a major biological opportunity for
the human species. It had no intelligent indigenes. It did have a varied and entirely alien
ecosystem—virtually two ecosystems, in fact, because of the extreme isolation of its two continents,
differing significantly from each other but vastly different from Earth and Pell.
It was a biologist's paradise. And it offered, by its absence of intelligent life, the first new cradle
of terrestrial human civilization since Earth itself.
It was not politics alone which led to the Company Wars. It was the sudden acceleration of
trade and population mobility, it was the stubborn application of outmoded policies by Terran
agencies out of touch with the governed, and finally it was the loyalty of a handful of specially
favored Terran merchanter captains attempting to maintain a fading trade empire for a
motherworld which had become only peripheral to human space.
It was a doomed effort. Cyteen, no longer alone in the Beyond, but mother-world itself to
Esperance, Pan-pans, and Fargone Stations, declared its independence from the Earth Company in
2300, an action which, reported now with the speed of the Faster-Than-Lights, prompted Earth to
build and dispatch armed FTLs to bring the dissident stations back into line.
Merchanters quickly fled the routes nearer Pell, thus reducing the availability of supplies, while
Earth itself, even with FTL technology, was by no means able to supply the mass requirement of its
fleet over such distances. Over a span of years the Earth Company fleet degenerated to acts of
piracy and coercion which completely alienated the merchanters, always the Earth Company's
mistake.
The formation of the merchanters' Alliance at Pell established the second mercantile power in
the Beyond and put an end to Earth's attempt to dictate to its scattered colonies.
Surely one of the more ironical outcomes of the War, the Treaty of Pell and the resulting
economic linkages of three human societies, drawing on three vastly different ecosystems, now exist
as the driving forces in a new economic structure which transcends all politics and systems.
Trade and common interests have proven, in the end, more powerful in human affairs than all
the warships ever launched.
ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0
www.ABBYY.com www.ABBYY.com
CHAPTER 1
i
It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts where humanity had as
yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored
except by orbiting radar. Ariane Emory gazed down at it from the window. She kept to the
passenger compartment now. Her eyesight, she had had to admit it, was no longer sharp enough, her
reflexes no longer fast enough for the jet. She could go up front, bump the pilot out of the chair and
take the controls: it was her plane, her pilot, and a wide sky. Sometimes she did. But it was not the
same.
Only the land was, still most of the land was. And when she looked out the window, it might
have been a century ago, when humankind had been established on Cyteen less than a hundred
years, when Union was unthought of, the War only a rumbling discontent, and the land looked
exactly like this everywhere.
Two hundred years ago the first colonists had come to this unlikely star, made the beginnings of
the Station, and come down to the world.
Forty-odd years later the sublight ships were coming in, few and forlorn, to try to convert their
structure and their operations to faster-than-light; and time sped up, time hurtled at translight speeds,
change came so fast that sublight ships met ships they took for alien—but they were not: it was
worse news for them. They were human. And the game was all changed.
The starships went out like seeds from a pod. The genetics labs upriver at Reseune bred
humanity as fast as it could turn them out from the womb-tanks, and every generation bred others
and worked in labs breeding more and more, till there were people enough, her uncle had said, to fill
the empty places, colonize the world, build more star-stations: Esperance. Fargone. Every place
with its own labs and its own means to breed and grow.
Earth had tried to call her ships back. It was all too late. Earth had tried to tax and rule its
colonies with a hard hand. That was very much too late.
Ariane Emory remembered the Secession, the day that Cyteen declared itself and its own
colonies independent; the day the Union began and they were all suddenly rebels against the distant
motherworld. She had been seventeen when the word came down from Station: We are at war.
Reseune bred soldiers, then, grim and single-minded and intelligent, oh, yes: bred and refined
and honed, knowing by touch and reflex what they had never seen in their lives, knowing above all
what their purpose was. Living weapons, thinking and calculating down one track. She had helped
design those patterns.
Forty-five years after the Secession the war was still going on, sometimes clandestine,
sometimes so remote in space it seemed a fact of history—except at Reseune. Other facilities could
breed the soldiers and the workers once Reseune had set the patterns, but only Reseune had the
research facilities, and it had fought the war in its own dark ways, under Ariane Emory's directorate.
Fifty-four years of her life. . . had seen the Company Wars over, humanity divided, borders
drawn. The Earth Company Fleet had held Pell's Star, but the merchanters of the newly formed
Alliance had taken Pell and declared it their base. Sol had tried to ignore its humiliating defeat and
go off in another direction; the remnant of the old Company Fleet had turned to piracy and still
raided merchanters, no different than they had ever done, while Alliance and Union alike hunted
them. It was only hiatus. The war was cold again. It went on at conference tables where negotiators
tried to draw lines biology did not, and make borders in boundless, three-dimensional space—to
keep a peace that had never, in all Ariane Emory's life, existed.
All of that might not have been yet. It might have been a hundred years ago, except that the
plane was sleek and fine, not the patch-together that had run cargo between Novgorod and Reseune:
in those days everyone had sat on bales of plastics and containers of seed and whatever else was
making the trip.
Then she had begged to sit by the dusty windows and her mother had said to put her sunscreen
on, even so.