The stars, like all man's other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man into Earth's great oceans, or into the air, or into space. Earth One had existed profitably for some years; there were the beginnings of mines, the factories, the power installations in space which were beginning to reap dividends. Earth took them for granted as quickly as it did all its other creature comforts. Missions from the station explored the system, a program far from public understanding, but it met no strong opposition, as it did not disturb the comfort of Earth.
So quietly, very matter of factly, that first unmanned probe went out to the two nearest stars to gather data and return, a task in itself of considerable complexity. The launch from station drew some public interest, but years was a long time to wait for a result, and it passed out of media interest as fast as it did out of the solar system. It drew a great deal more attention upon its return, nostalgia on the part of those who recalled its launch more than a decade earlier, curiosity on the part of the young who'd known little of its start and wondered what it was all about. Scientifically, it was a success, bringing back enough data to whet the appetite of data analysts for years....but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman's terms. In public relations the mission was a failure: the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.
What the probe had found was a star with reasonable possibilities for encouraging life; a belt of debris, including particles, planetoids, irregular chunks somewhat under planet size with interesting implications for systematic information, and a planetary companion with its own system of debris and moons.....a planet desolate, baked, forbidding. It was no Eden, no Earth-twin, no better than what existed in the sun's own system, and it was a far journey to have gone to find that out. The press grappled with questions it could not easily grasp itself, sought after something to give the viewers, lost interest quickly. If anything, there were questions raised about cost, vague and desperate comparisons offered to Columbus, and the press hared off quickly onto a political crisis in the South China Sea, much more comprehensible and far bloodier.
The scientific establishment on Earth One breathed a sigh of relief and with equal quiet caution invested a portion of its budget in a modest manned expedition, to voyage in what amounted to a traveling miniature of Earth One itself, and to stay a time making observations in orbit about that world.
And very quietly, to further imitate Earth One, to test manufacturing techniques which had built Earth's great second satellite----in stranger conditions. Earth Corporation supplied a generous grant, having a certain curiosity, a certain understanding of stations and what profits could be looked for from their development.
That was the beginning.
The same principles which had made Earth Station practical made the first star-station viable. It needed a bare minimum of supply in biostuffs from Earth---mostly luxuries to make life pleasanter for the increasing number of techs and scientists and families stationed there. It mined, and as its own needs diminished, would send back the surplus of its ores....so the first link in the chain was made. No need, no need at all, that first colony had proven, that a star have a human-friendly world, no need even for a moderate Sol-class star.....just the solar wind and the usual accompanying debris of metals, rock and ice. One station built, a station module could be hauled to the next star, whatever it was. Scientific bases, manufacture: bases from which the next hopeful star could be reached; and the next and the next and the next. Earth's outward exploration developed in one narrow vector, one little fan which great at its broader end.
Earth Corporation, swollen beyond its original purpose and holding more stations than Earth itself, became what the star-stationers called it: Terradyne. It wielded power----certainly over the stations which it directed long-distance, years removed in space; and power on Earth too, where its increasing supply of ores, medical items, and its possession of several patents were enormously profitable. Slow as the system was in starting, the steady arrival of goods and new ideas, however long ago launched, was profit for Terradyne and consequent power on Earth. Terradyne sent merchant carriers in increasingly greater numbers: that was all it needed to do now. The crews that manned those ships on the long flights grew into an inward-turned and unique way of life, demanding nothing but improvement of equipment which they had come to think of as theirs; station in turn supported station, each shifting Earth's goods a step further on to its nearest neighbor, and the whole circular exchange ending up back on Earth One where the bulk of it was drained off in high rates charged for biostuffs and such goods as only Earth produced.
Those were the great good old days for those who sold this wealth: fortunes rose and fell; governments did; corporations took on more and more power, and Terradyne in its many guises reaped immense profits and moved the affairs of nations. It was an age of restlessness. Newly industrialized populations and the discontents of every nation set out on that long, long track in search of jobs, wealth, private dreams of freedom, the old lure of the New World, human patterns recapitulated across a new and wider ocean, to stranger lands.
Earth One became a stepping-off place, no longer exotic, but safe and known. Terradyne flourished, drinking in the wealth of the star-stations, another comfort which those who received it began to take for granted.
And the star-stations clung to the memory of that lively, diverse world which had sent them. Mother Earth in a new and emotion-fraught connotation, she who sent out precious stuffs to comfort them; comforts which in a desert universe reminded them there was at least one living mote. Terradyne ships were the lifeline----and Terradyne probes were the romance of their existence, the light, swift exploration ships which let them grow more selective about next steps. It was the 5th Circle of Man, no age at all, but the course which Terradyne freighters ran in constant travel, the beginning and end of which was Mother Earth.
Star after star after star.....nine of them----until Babylon, which proved to have a livable world---and life!
That was the thing which cancelled all bets, upset the balance, forever.
Babylon 4 and Babylon 5, named for a probe ship that had located it---finding not alone a world, but intelligences, natives.
It took a long time for word to travel the 5th Circle back to Earth; less for word of the find to get to the nearer star-stations----and more than scientists came flocking to Babylon 5. Local station companies who knew the economics of the matter came rushing to the star, not to be left behind; population came, and two of the stations orbiting less interesting stars nearby were dangerously depleted, ultimately to collapse altogether. In the burst of growth and the upheaval of building a station at Babylon 5, ambitious people were already casting eyes toward two farther stars, beyond Babylon 4 calculating with cold foresight, for Babylon 4 was itself a source of Earthlike goods, luxuries---a potential disturbance in the directions of trade and supply.
For Earth, as word rose in with arriving freighters----a frantic haste to ignore Babylon 5. Alien life. It sent shockwaves through Terradyne, touched off moral debates and policy debates despite the fact the news was almost twenty years old---as if they could set hand now to whatever decisions were being made out there in the Further. 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 Babylon 5 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 Terradyne gathered influence and numbers in reaction to the scare---and to a sudden and marked drop in trade.
Terradyne was in chaos. It took long to send instructions, and Babylon 5 grew, out of Terradyne's control. New stations unauthorized by Terradyne sprang into existence at father stars, stations called Aeon Terminal and Prism ; and they spawned Athena and Baldur. By the time Terradyne 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. Babylon had the necessary biostuffs. It was closer to most of the star-stations; and star-station companies which had once seen Earth as a beloved Mother now saw new opportunities and took them. Still other stations formed. The 5th Circle was broken. Some Terradyne ships kited off to trade with the New Further, 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 in the Further, discovered by an enterprising merchanter.......Centauri Prime. More stations developed---Olympia and Asgard and Arcadis, and the 5th Circle stretched farther still.
Terradyne took a new decision: a payback program, a tax of goods, which would make up recent losses. They argued to the stations of the Brotherhood of Man, the Moral Debt, and the burden of gratitude.
Some stations and merchant kings paid the tax. Some refused it, particularly those stations beyond Babylon 5 and Centauri Prime. Terradyne, 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.
Moreover, the probes were pulled back, tacit statement that Terradyne was putting an official damper on further growth of the Further. They were armed, the swift exploration ships, as they had always been, venturing ass they did into the unknown.; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and to pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the "superheroes" of the Further, became Terradyne enforcers.
Merchant kings armed in retaliation, freighters never built for combat, incapable of right turns. But there were skirmishes between the converted probe ships and rebel merchant kings, although most merchant kings 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 Terradyne probes against the rebel merchant kings, who served the farther stars, a circumstance possible because there was Centauri Prime, and even Babylon 4 was not indispensable.
Thus was the line drawn. The 5th Circle resumed, exclusive of the stars beyond Aeon Terminal, but never so profitable as it had been. Trade continued across the line after strange fashion, for taxpaying merchant kings could go where they would, and rebel merchant kings 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. Terradyne ships could not resurrect the stations immediately Earthward of Babylon 4; they were no longer viable. The populations drifted to Babylon 5 and Olympia and Asgard and Arcadis, and to Aeon Terminal and farther still.
Ships were built, just as stations had been, in the Further. The technology was there, and merchant kings proliferated. Then jump arrived---a theory originated in the New Further at Centauri Prime, quickly seized upon by shipbuilders at Athena on the Terradyne side of the line.
Such 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 Further. It started as a coalition of Olympia and its mines; it swept to Centauri Prime, gathered to itself Agsgard and Prism, and reached for other stars and the merchant kings who served them. There were rumors---of vast population increases going on for years unreported, technology once suggested on the Terradyne 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. Centauri Prime had been doing it. This organization, this Alliance, as it called itself, bred and multiplied geometrically, using installations already in operation, birth-labs. Alliance grew. It had, over the span of twenty years, 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 Terradyne.
And in final, outraged public demand for results in the deteriorating situation, Terradyne back on Earth One gave up the tax, diverted that fund to the building of a great Fleet, all jumpships, engines of destruction, Watcher and Peacebringer and all their deadly kindred.
So was Alliance 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 who'd 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.
Terradyne successes grew harder. The great Fleet, outnumbered and with an immense territory to cover, didn't bring an end to the war in a year or in five years. And Earth grew annoyed 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 Terradyne Fleet which starved. Alliance didn't, but Earth seemed incapable of understanding that, that it was no longer a question of fragile colonies in revolt but of a forming power, well-fed, well armed. The same myopic policies, the same tug-of-war between isolationists and Terradyne which had alienated the colonies in the first place drew harder and harder lines as trade diminished; they lost the war not in the Further, but in the senate chambers and boardrooms of Earth and Earth One, going for mining within Earth's own system, which was profitable, and devil take the exploratory missions in any direction at all, which weren't.
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 banned further emigration, seeing the flight of its best minds. It weltered in economic chaos, and the drain of Earth's banned further emigration, seeing the flight of its best minds. It weltered in economic chaos, and the drain of Earth's natural resources by the stations was an easy focus of discontent. No more war, they said; peace suddenly became good politics. The Terradyne Fleet, deprived of funds in a war in which it was engaged on a wide front, obtained supplies where and when it could.
At the end, they were patchwork, fifteen carriers out of the once proud fifty, cobbled together at the stations still open to them. Clark's fleet, they called it, in the tradition of the Further, where ships were so few at first that enemies knew each other by name and reputation....a recognition less common now, but some names were known. Morgan Clark of Terradyne One was a name Alliance knew to its regret; and Luis Santiago of Mars was another; and Susanna Luchenko of Neptune, and Gerald Henry of Proxima; and all the rest of the Terradyne captains, down to those of the rider-ships. They still served Earth and Terradyne, with less and less love of either. None of this generation was Earth-born; they received few replacements, none from Earth, none from the stations in their territory either, for the stations feared obsessively for their neutrality in the war. Merchant kings were their source of skilled crew and of troops, most of them unwilling.
The Further had once again begun with the stars nearest Earth; and now it started with Babylon 5, for the oldest stations were all shut down as Earthward trade fizzled out and the pre-jump style of trade passed forever. The Barrier Stars were all but forgotten and unvisited.
There were worlds beyond Babylon 5, beyond Centauri Prime, and Alliance had them all now, real worlds, of the far-between stars which jump could reach; where Alliance used the birth labs still to expand populations, giving them workers and soldiers. Alliance wanted all the Beyond, to direct what would be the course of the future of man. Alliance had the Beyond, all but the thin arc of stations which Clark's Fleet still thanklessly held for Earth and Terradyne, because they had once been set to do that, because they saw nothing they could do but that. At their backs was only Babylon 5----and the mothballed stations of the Barrier Stars. Remoter still, isolate----sat Earth, locked in its inner contemplations and its complex, fragmented politics.
No trade of substance came out of Earth now, or to it. In the insanity which was the War, free merchant-kings plied Alliance-side and Terradyne Stars alike, crossed the battle lines at will, although Alliance discouraged that traffic by subtle harassments, seeking to cut Company supply.
Alliance expanded and the Terradyne Fleet just held on, worldless but for Babylon 5 which fed them, and Earth which ignored them. On Allianceside, stations were no longer built on the old scale. They were mere depots for worlds now, and probes sought still further stars. They were generations which had never seen Earth---humans to whom Terradyne One and Mars were creatures of metal and terror, generations whose way of life was stars, infinities, unlimited growth, and time which looked to forever. Earth didn't understand them.
But neither did the stations which remained with Terradyne or the free merchanters who carried on that strange crosslines trade.
