From: jaymin@maths.tcd.ie (Jo Jaquinta)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: C.J.Cherryh: The Company Wars
Date: 6 Nov 92 09:14:06 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.


	The following is the first of several extracts from an article
by C.J.Cherryh included with the board game "The Company War" put out
by Mayfair Games many years ago. If you are interested in the rest of
the article as well as discussions on C.J.Cherryh's writing in general
you can suscribe to the C.J.Cherryh mailing list by sending mail to
jaymin@maths.tcd.ie requesting to be subscribed...


			THE COMPANY WARS

			C. J. Cherryh

THE ORIGIN OF STAIONERS AND MERCHANTERS
	In the early twenty-first century, starprobes went out,
launghed by Sol Station, which diring the interval of the
starprobes' travel, became a great economic power in Earth's
politics.
	Sol Station, a self contained orbiting "multifactory,"
pulled in metals, minerals, and ice from the asteroids, abandoning 
the practice of lofting anything up from Earth's
gravity well. Since the majority of industrial cost on Earth
was either in fighting gravity (lifing and transporting heavy
objects) or heating things up and cooling them down (smelting
and refrideration), once a spacestation achieved the
machinery to separate and smelt metals by solar power (thus
becoming a "multifactory," a combination of industries all
locked together in the production of goods for export to
Earth (medicines, electrical power, scientific data, and
processes) and for its own consumption (machinery, construction 
materials, obygen from ice, and foodstuffs (from orbiting
fishtanks and farms operating at industrial pace thanks
to total environment control possible in such facilities.)
	The result was a sataion capable of replicating itself
endlessly at little expense; and a balance of trade which made
investment and experimentation possible.
	Hence, the robot starprobes which reported several stars
much like the Sun, lacking habitable planets but potentially
rich in metals and ice.
	The theory of cryogenic suspension in sublight starflight
was rejected. After all, Sol Station and the one travelling
scientific station which had already been in orbit about
Venus and Mars and now ventured the turbulent gravity well
of Jupiter, proved that there was little difference between a
working solar station and a ship.
	So the first startship was modular, and while it would take
years under light speed to reach the chosen star, there was no
reason for the people aboard not to carry on life much as it
was carried on in huge Sol Station. When it reached its
destination, its payload, containing manufacturing units,
would go into orbit in some rich and stable area of the 
designated starsystem, while the engine module would break
free after assisting in this process and return to Sol Station.
	It proved hardly more expensive in effort to make the
mission multistage, that is, to colonize several starsystems in
the same vector by using several engines and compartments
and shedding each into deceleration at the time appropriate
for each star. So if one part of the mission failed, another
might succeed, and if anything went wrong with one engine,
they had the capacity to continue on the others, or to return
should it become necessary.
	As it happened, all three stages worked without a hitch,
and Earth had _three_ functioning starstations. They had no
ambition at all to land on a planet. Planets were too expensive
at this stage, too wasteful of energy in getting up and
down; mankind had decided that starstations (of which Sol 
Station was one) were more productive for small populations 
than planets were.

	The voyaging starships never lost touch with Sol Station,
and continually transmitted the data the scientists and tehcnicians
in the colony mission were developing enroute. Life
aboard went on in a mundane fashion, under the one gravity
produced by acceleration; and when decelerated and parked
in orbit, each starstation began a continueal dataflow to Sol
Station, and to each other, and to ships in passage. The
result of this close community of scientists at work in new
environments, as well as the research and development
necessary for the guidance systems and engines for the mission,
was a technological acceleration for Earth, a period of
great prosperity and wild speculation as new discoveries
multiplied.
	The engine modules had a small crew compartment: they
were designed to move greater mass than their own -- to
push, in other words. Their crews had the harder life, since
they were few in number and had to give uyp their associations
with the colonists, who would live normal Stationer-style
lives, hardly different than they would have lived on Sol
Station. The engine-modules might have been robotized, but
it was felt, first of all, that the chance of failure would be less
with crewed modules, in such long voyages; and secondly
that the occasional contact of human beings who had seen
Earth would serve to keep the colonies from becoming too
different in their isolation; the chance for instance, that a
colony would grow completely alienated from Earth and
shut off its contacts had occurred to Sol Station. So the
primary reason for crewed ships was a psychological one.
	The small crews must pass years together, and must have
as normal a life as possible. Families happened, in spite
of mild official discouragement, and when the first ship 
returned to Earth, they were offered a chance to stay. They
refused, having spent too long at this to give up what to them
had become a way of life. Crews grew larger (as did crew
quarters) as second-generation crew took husbands and
wives. Children ran and played throughout the ships, did
small maintenance, and grew into crew work with the passing
years, children whose lives were measured in calls at this
and that starstation.
	This was the origin of the merchanters and the stationers,
whose lives became vastly different one from the other, but
who were linked together in mutual necessity.
	The arrivial of any ship in those early days was occasion for
holiday.
	Trade began, conducted without substance (of data by
commmunications net) and with (of goods and parts carried
by the ships).
	What did the merchanters get out of the exchange? The
improvement and care of their ships, which were their 
homes. Their food. Their whole lifestyle. And the freedom
which began to be their whole way of life. A merchanter
"family" was tightknit, even developing an accent unique to
a particular ship: everyone aboard seemed to be a cousin or
aunt or uncle.
	Stationers got the same sort of thing -- but their populations
were larger. They liked their security, the benefits their
trade brought in.
	Starstations expanded, bnuilt new modules and boosted
them by ship to stars as near to them as Barnard's Star and
Alpha Centauri are to SOl; and Sol had to get news of some
of _these_ stations secondhand, because of thier distances.
	There were nine such starstations -- ten, counting Sol.
	They were: Alpha Base and Beta Base, Bryant's Star,
Glory, Venture, Galileo, Olympus, Thule, and Eldorado.
	The next starstation was sent to Pell's Star. And that
star had a planet which had life, which had a sapient species,
which had agriculture and the kind of luxuries which Earth
had been supplying.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Jo Grant		| Benson, Arizona, the warm wind through your hair
jaymin@maths.tcd.ie	| My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there 
44 Bancroft Ave., 	| Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky
Tallaght, Dublin 24,	| But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, 
IRELAND			|	you and I.		-- Dark Star
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