Regenesis

by C. J. Cherryh

HISTORY OF UNION: The Past‑War Period

Novgorod Publications

2424

Union came out of the Company Wars with both territory and political integrity, not beholden to Earth or Alliance for either. The Treaty of Pell, which ended active hostilities between Union and Alliance, left Earth independent, though militarily reliant on Pell’s Star. The Company Fleet had defied Earth’s authority, rejected the Treaty of Pell, and continued acts of piracy, as apt to prey on Earth’s ships as on Union’s, and now lacking a safe port.

The Treaty incidentally left the merchanter Council of Captains with more power than Pell’s Star Station held in the affairs of the Alliance.

And the same Treaty ceded the greater expanse of human‑explored space to the authority of Union…but placed merchant trade exclusively in the hands of the Alliance Council of Captains.

It was an agreement equally unpopular on all sides–which spoke a great deal to its fairness–and it was immediately followed by a period in which all former combatants maneuvered for advantage, everyone dreading a resumption of hostilities, but most convinced that war would break out again, probably within a lifetime.

The Hinder Stars, that bridge of closely lying, generally barren stars between Earth and Pell, became a zone of renewed interest for the Alliance, which governed that region. The Council of Captains, whose livelihood was their ships and their trade, looked to revitalize the moth‑balled stations on that route–stations that had collapsed economically with the advent of faster‑than‑light engines. Alliance thus moved to set itself as middleman between Earth and Union, and to profit from that trade…if it could re‑establish viable populations to consume the goods it wanted to trade along the way.

Union enjoyed the manufacture, mining, and prosperity of Us own widely scattered stations, from Mariner and Viking to outlying Forgone, and it had the colonized world of Cyteen, with its major exports: the rejuv drug, embryos, genetically enhanced biologicals, azi workers, and concentrated foodstuffs.

In the viewpoint of the merchanter captains of the Alliance, that was a somewhat reasonable model for what the Alliance could create around Pell’s World–Downbelow–by repopulating the abandoned starstations of the Hinder Stars, and revivifying trade with, not one, but two living worlds within their reach–Downbelow and Earth itself.

It was a reasonable model in all save one respect: the Alliance plan for the Hinder Stars relied on recruitment of station citizens and the natural human birth rate to provide population. This meant luring the poorer of the residents of Pell and Earth to live in frontier conditions at outmoded, pre‑FTL stations.

The natural human birth rate is slow; that was one flaw in the plan; and, the second, the poorer residents of Pell Station, who had suffered most in the war years, were not generally optimists about government promises. Spacers would never give up their ships and family connections to settle permanently on stations. Earth residents were barred by laws restricting emigration of its educated and essential. So a consumer population, particularly of educated and prosperous classes, was very hard to obtain in the Hinder Stars. Subsidies began to drain Pell’s economy and raise taxes on Pell Station itself, a source of great discontent.

There was also a basic conflict between station interests and spacer interests: stationers were not anxious to see their power further diminished by spacer exploitation of the planet beneath their feet. On the one hand there was no great enthusiasm among stationers to visit their sole Earthlike planet–it had its hazards, and intelligent inhabitants. And secondly, there had begun to be a strong green party. That party, combined with those stationers fearing the Council of Captains would dominate the station itself, passed legislation making Pell’s World a protectorate unavailable for colonization. That cut one leg from under the merchanter captains’ plan.

Contrast this situation with Union, which exited the Company Wars with an abundance of thriving stations, two stations at Cyteen’s own home star, besides Mariner and Viking, which posed, a convenient bridge to the Alliance trade. The terms of the Treaty of Pell demanded Alliance merchanters serve those routes, as a condition of Union not building merchanters of their own. And this, of course, provided sorely needed markets for Alliance, but not as profitable markets, counting Union tariffs, as they would be if Alliance owned the cargos and the stations.

And, while Alliance merchanter ships plied Union space, serving chains of Union starstations down various strands of stars, it was universally Union industry which benefitted from the transport. From Pan‑Paris, on one route, to Fargone, on the other, with Cyteen itself at the center, Union had come out of the Company Wars with the kind of trade network and consumer base that the Alliance only dreamed of building.

Union stations numbered populations in the multiple hundreds of thousands, though Union was far younger than Pell. Cyteen itself which did allow humans onworld, counted, population in the millions…but the largest population center in Alliance space numbered, officially, counting both the remote and the near station at Pell, around half a million. Counting the merchanters on ships and miners at various outposts, the whole population of the Alliance numbered probably a quarter of a million more. So the bulk of human population in the universe might still be still centered at Sol, with its billions, but the population of Union now had to be counted as a major alternate center. The exponential increase challenged the economic power that Alliance had once considered unassailable: If that rate of growth continued, one day there would be more humans in Union than presently lived on Earth itself.

Union did not rely on natural birth rate, or on emigration. Union used, birthlabs. Union could create a station and, within twenty years, raise up thousands of highly motivated, trained inhabitants–inhabitants ready to meet the difficulties of station‑building, perfectly content with barracks conditions at the outset, and ready to teach their naturally born children their values of hard work, adequate leisure, participation in the group, and, in due proportion, independent analytical thinking.

More, Union had rejuv, a product of Cyteen’s biology, which doubled and tripled the productive years of its workers and thinkers. Natural reproduction might stop at forty, when a person went on rejuv, but work and economic production went on…and the birthlabs could enable individuals to reproduce into their next century.

Alliance efforts to revive the Hinder Stars, even starting with prebuilt residencies and mothballed businesses, were slow and subject to supply and personnel shortages. They failed to meet immigrant expectations of quick riches and reasonable living conditions. Only the smallest, marginal traders were willing to ply those routes, while the richer Alliance ships engaged in the far more lucrative trade within Union space. Factor in the occasional appearance of Mazianni pirates–former Earth Company Fleet–at these lonely, largely undefended stations of the Hinder Stars, and the reluctance of Alliance stationers to undertake the risk of living there was understandable.

Union, seeing that the Mazianni were deriving supply and new personnel from those stations, offered to assist the Alliance in patrols there, but old suspicions died hard. Alliance rebuffed Union offers, convinced that Union was seeking to control all these stations, which represented their route to Earth.