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