The Guild could have applied force to stop them, hauled the capsules back after launch—of course, the Guild could still do that, and the division was potentially that bitter.
But so had the station its own force to use, if the Guild wanted to play by those rules—and the Guild evidently didn’t. The Guild hadn’t reached consensus, maybe, or hadn’t expected the first cargo lander to make it, or had a crisis of, God help them, conscience—no station-dweller knew what passed in Guild councils, but the almighty Guild hadn’t made a move yet. And the Guild couldn’t starve them out once they were down here without bringing about a confrontation with the station that they’d already and repeatedly declined. The food and equipment drops, so far, kept coming.
Food and equipment drops that might not be absolutely critical by this time next year. And then let the Guild order what they liked. If they could eat what grew here—they could live here. The first close look Phoenix had had at the planet, had seen cities and dams and the clear evidence of agriculture and mining and every other attribute of a reasonably advanced civilization… natives, with rights, to be sure. But not rights that outweighed their own rights.
The sun sank in reds and yellows and golds. A planet shone above the hills. That was Mirage, second from the sun they called just… the sun, having no better name for it, the way they called the third planet the world, or sometimes… Down, in the way the Guild-born didn’t use the word.
Stupid way to name the planet, Ian thought; he personally wished the first generation had come up with some definite name they could use for the world… Earth, some of them had wanted to call it, arguing that was what anyone called their home planet, and this was, in all senses that mattered, home. The Guild had immediately rejected that reasoning.
And others, notably the hydroponics biologist, Renaud Lenoir, had argued passionately and eloquently that, no, it wasn’t Earth. It mustn’t be. It wasn’t the Sun. And it wasn’t the star they’d been targeting—when whatever had happened in hyperspace, had happened, and Taylor had saved the ship.
Taylor might be the Guild’s saint—Taylor and McDonough and the miner-pilots that, God save them, every one alive owed their lives to—but Lenoir, who’d argued so convincingly not to confound the names of Earth with this place, was due a sainthood, too, no matter that what would soon become the Guild had voted with him for reasons totally opposed to what Lenoir believed in; and that the construction workers and the station technicians, whose sons and daughters would carry out Lenoir’s vision and go down to the surface, had mostly voted against him in that meeting.
Not Earth, Lenoir had argued, and not their target star. The planet had undergone its own evolution, all the way to high intelligence, and by that process made up its own biological rules, through its own initially successful experiment at life, and its own unique demands of environment on those ancestral organisms.
The biochemistry, the taxonomies and the relationships of species down to microbes and up to Earth’s major ecosystems—whole branches of human science sat in Phoenix’ library: the systematic knowledge of the one life-affected, human-impacted biosphere humans had thoroughly understood, thousands of years of accumulated understanding about Earth’s natural systems and their evolution and interrelationships.
Pinning Earthly names on mere surface resemblances, Lenoir had argued, would confuse subsequent generations about where they were and who they were. It could create a mindset that thought of the world in a way connected with their own evolutionary history, a proprietary mindset, which Lenoir argued was not good; and more, a mindset that would repeatedly lead to mistaken connections throughout the life sciences and, by those mistaken connections, to expensively wrong decisions. Corrupting the language to identify what they didn’t wholly understand could on the one hand prove fatal to their own culture and their humanity, and on the other, prove damaging to the very ecosystems they looked to for survival.
So, Earth it was not. The council had deadlocked on the other choices; and what could Lenoir’s great-great-grandson find now to call it but the world, this blue, cloud-swirled home they had, that Taylor had found for them?