Read Online Psion by Joan D. Vinge - Free Book Online
Authors: Joan D. Vinge
Tags: Science-Fiction
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the right track.”
“What’s a light-year?”
Siebeling sighed and dropped the folder he was carrying. “If you really want to know about this, you’ll have to have more background than you do. I suppose we can give it to you. . . .” So the three of them told me about the Crab Colonies and the FTA and Earth, and what all that had to do with us being here at the Institute.
The Crab Nebula, Cortelyou said, was a cloud of gas and debris-what was left of a supernova, a star that blew itself up before humans ever left home. To astronomers on Ardattee it looked like a smoke ring; and like a smoke ring it was expanding through space. A light-year was the distance light could travel in a year-moving at around three hundred thousand kilometers a second. But even at speeds like that it took thousands of years for the light to reach us here; the real Nebula was even larger than the nearly five-thousand-year-old image they saw from observatories. Several star systems with inhabited planets were located near the Nebula in space; those were the Crab Colonies.
The Federation Transport Authority controlled the Colonies directly, and the rest of the Federation indirectly, because it regulated shipping. The FTA had grown out of something that had been set up long ago back on Earth, before the days of stardrives and space exploration. Its original purpose had been to oversee trade for the confederation of multinational corporations that finally took over Earth’s old national governments. As the solar system was settled, making shipping and trade a thousand times more complicated, the FTA became more important. And it grew even more by taking over the distribution of resources during a handful of intrasystem wars. Finally it began to build its own ships and even weapons and hired more security forces than a lot of corporations did.
Then faster-than-light stardrive was invented, and suddenly humans could reach the nearest stars in weeks instead of years. Suddenly Earth’s multinational corporate empires had the chance to become multiworld empires, and they started sharpening their knives to carve up the stars. The old toothless Worldgov mutated and survived; it set up guidelines for interstellar law, even though it didn’t have the power to back them up. And the new Human Federation began expanding like a bubble outward from Earth. Finally the FTA set up an expedition to prospect in the Crab Nebula for telhassium. Cortelyou had told me about telhassium-an element so rare that it was almost impossible to find outside the heart of a star. The Federation needed it in large amounts to make its new faster-than-light stardrive cheap and simple.
The Transport Authority expedition found a piece of the exploded sun’s corpse there, still orbiting the tiny neutron star that was all that was left of its mass after the supernova explosion. They called the thing Cinder, and it was the nearest anyone had ever seen to a solid piece of telhassium ore. Once they began mining it, the citizens of the Human Federation were free to travel between its settled worlds as easily as they’d traveled between continents on just one world.
But they hadn’t counted on one thing: The FTA took the telhassium for itself. Controlling the telhassium supply meant that the FTA no longer just oversaw the Federation’s transportation, it controlled it. No matter how big any combine was-and especially if it wanted to get any bigger-it had to toe the FTA’s line or it didn’t get the telhassium it needed to move its ships and process its data. The original shipping empires suffered the most, because the FTA took just about all their independent control away and made them its tools. The FTA wasn’t all that unreasonable in what it wanted-power and money-but it cut into the power and profits of everybody else. It also built up a big enough Special Forces arm to actually start enforcing some of the Federation’s laws. It kept the combines from the kind of
“What’s a light-year?”
Siebeling sighed and dropped the folder he was carrying. “If you really want to know about this, you’ll have to have more background than you do. I suppose we can give it to you. . . .” So the three of them told me about the Crab Colonies and the FTA and Earth, and what all that had to do with us being here at the Institute.
The Crab Nebula, Cortelyou said, was a cloud of gas and debris-what was left of a supernova, a star that blew itself up before humans ever left home. To astronomers on Ardattee it looked like a smoke ring; and like a smoke ring it was expanding through space. A light-year was the distance light could travel in a year-moving at around three hundred thousand kilometers a second. But even at speeds like that it took thousands of years for the light to reach us here; the real Nebula was even larger than the nearly five-thousand-year-old image they saw from observatories. Several star systems with inhabited planets were located near the Nebula in space; those were the Crab Colonies.
The Federation Transport Authority controlled the Colonies directly, and the rest of the Federation indirectly, because it regulated shipping. The FTA had grown out of something that had been set up long ago back on Earth, before the days of stardrives and space exploration. Its original purpose had been to oversee trade for the confederation of multinational corporations that finally took over Earth’s old national governments. As the solar system was settled, making shipping and trade a thousand times more complicated, the FTA became more important. And it grew even more by taking over the distribution of resources during a handful of intrasystem wars. Finally it began to build its own ships and even weapons and hired more security forces than a lot of corporations did.
Then faster-than-light stardrive was invented, and suddenly humans could reach the nearest stars in weeks instead of years. Suddenly Earth’s multinational corporate empires had the chance to become multiworld empires, and they started sharpening their knives to carve up the stars. The old toothless Worldgov mutated and survived; it set up guidelines for interstellar law, even though it didn’t have the power to back them up. And the new Human Federation began expanding like a bubble outward from Earth. Finally the FTA set up an expedition to prospect in the Crab Nebula for telhassium. Cortelyou had told me about telhassium-an element so rare that it was almost impossible to find outside the heart of a star. The Federation needed it in large amounts to make its new faster-than-light stardrive cheap and simple.
The Transport Authority expedition found a piece of the exploded sun’s corpse there, still orbiting the tiny neutron star that was all that was left of its mass after the supernova explosion. They called the thing Cinder, and it was the nearest anyone had ever seen to a solid piece of telhassium ore. Once they began mining it, the citizens of the Human Federation were free to travel between its settled worlds as easily as they’d traveled between continents on just one world.
But they hadn’t counted on one thing: The FTA took the telhassium for itself. Controlling the telhassium supply meant that the FTA no longer just oversaw the Federation’s transportation, it controlled it. No matter how big any combine was-and especially if it wanted to get any bigger-it had to toe the FTA’s line or it didn’t get the telhassium it needed to move its ships and process its data. The original shipping empires suffered the most, because the FTA took just about all their independent control away and made them its tools. The FTA wasn’t all that unreasonable in what it wanted-power and money-but it cut into the power and profits of everybody else. It also built up a big enough Special Forces arm to actually start enforcing some of the Federation’s laws. It kept the combines from the kind of