Acts of Conscience (53 page)

As a publicity stunt, Torus X-1 was flown to a star a couple of hundred light-years away [I decided on Regulus as I wrote the story, mainly because I like the name], but returned damaged, having encountered and been fired upon by an unknown starship of apparently similar design. Humans have long known they weren’t alone in the galaxy, for there are intelligent beings on several of the colony worlds, as well as the old and advanced civilization of the Kapellmeisters, natives of the planet humans call Salieri, circling 82 Eridani.

This is the historical world of Gaetan du Cheyne.

Notes on The Interstellar Economy:

Solar System Currency:

1 livre = 10 dismes

1 disme = 10 centimes,

1 centime = 10 milles.

1 mille (2604-Solar) = $0.07 (1995-USA), thus 1 centime = $0.70; 1 disme = $7.00, 1 livre = $70.00. Abbreviations: livre = £, disme = $, centime = ¢, mille = ¥, placed before the number, thus £1 = $10 = ¢100 = ¥1000. Technically, the words are pronounced leev, deem, sonteem, and meeyuh. [But as I wrote the book, I pronouced the two main ones leever and dime in my head.]

Employment:
Gaetan’s job as a spatial machinery mechanic is a very secure and desirable one, paying about 1250 livres [1995-USA $87,500] a year. He lives about as well as a working man can in the early 27th century and has invested his money wisely, with a diversified stock portfolio. The population of the Solar System has long stabilized at around 200 billion. In this era, the Solar economy, with its steep separations of wealth, divides people into 5 distinctly separate classes:

1. The wealthy (1% = 2 billion) are people who live off the earnings of their money. These include owner/executives of large corporations.

2. Professionals (3% = 6 billion) include scientists, engineers, doctors, and the many classes of “information professionals” such as lawyers.

3. Skilled workers and technicians (9% = 18 billion) such as Gaetan.

4. The working poor (27% = 54 billion) who included semiskilled information workers such as computer programmers and subproficient mechanics.

5. The client classes (60% = 120 billion) who are at best day laborers, servants, etc. Most of these people live in “storage habitats” (often referred to as “poorhouses”) and do nothing. Most emigration to Green Heaven is from low-end technicians and high-end working poor who manage to save up the price of passage (see below).

As a high-end technician, Gaetan could afford passage to Green Heaven, and as a skilled technician could probably get sponsored (i.e., free) passage to Kent. However, he sees Kent as no more than a less interesting version of the Solar System (he would work there just as he does here) and Green Heaven, which has little heavy industry, as most likely a quick route to the poorhouse (since he doesn’t visualize himself as a rancher, he thinks of Green Heaven mostly in the context of his terrestrial vacations).

Emigration to the other colonies is strictly controlled and no new colonies have been planted in almost 300 years. One of the things that keeps this social order stable is the hope of high-enders that they can rise to the next social class, while low-enders always fear slipping into the next one down. The economy is a stable almost-closed system, controlled from above by the Board of Trade Regents, a cross between a legislature and a labor-union for senior business executives (something like a cartel).

Travel and Trade Economics
: Once he gets his starship, Gaetan is charging 1500 livres [$105,000] for a shared cabin berth, compared to £1200 [$84,000] for a private cabin on a commercial STL interstellar liner. (Note this means, for people of Gaetan’s economic class, that the price of one-way interstellar passage equals approximately one year’s salary.)

Assuming he can get 24 passengers to occupy the 6 cabins in which he’s had bunkbeds installed, he can gross £36,000 [$2,520,000] on this flight. Since the typical operating cost of this class starship comes to around £1750 [$122,500] per light-year flown [which includes the life-support costs for all aboard], it will cost Gaetan £26,250 to make the flight, plus a £3000 fee for the copilot required by Solar regulations, and a £1500 gating fee from Eratosthenes Cosmodrome on Luna, for a total overhead of £30,750, leaving him with a gross profit of £5,250 [$367,500]. His net profit will, of course, be somewhat smaller, and he realizes he will not be able to support himself and his starship indefinitely by hauling passengers alone, as market forces will soon come into play. These will, in the end, be far more severe than he imagines. Once a fast-paced interstellar economy evolves, something like a civilization-wide depression will ensue.

Colony Planets and

Other Major Extrasolar Worlds
:

Kent
: (4.35 light-years from Earth) Alpha Centauri A4. A habitable terrestrial world in early senescence. Although the star system and planet are considerably older than Earth, life evolved later and slower here. Land life consisted of things like stromatolites at the time of the arrival of human colonists. Sea life resembling primitive arthropods had developed and was making some attempt to colonize the land in tidal regions. Human colonization has led to the emergence of a terragenic ecology spreading from major settlement sites (the human population in 2604 exceeds 150 million). The terminal geochemical cycle has led to some interesting effects, including the rise of Doar Scarp (the East Pole), a 90,000 meter, heavily-glaciated plateau lying across the equator, and the reduction of ocean cover to about 40% of the surface. The Hinrad Desert of the western hemisphere now occupies about 20% of the surface area. In another 50 to 100 million years, the planet will be completely uninhabitable. Daytime temperatures in the deep desert approach the boiling point of water. Though the planet once had extensive glaciation, the polar caps persist today only because the axial tilt is less than one degree and the polar regions are mountainous highlands. Kent is slightly smaller and denser than Earth, with a somewhat higher surface gravity.

Shayol
: (10.67 light-years from Earth) Epsilon Eridani 3. This is a world whose physical type is halfway between Mars and Venus, situated far enough from Epsilon Eridani that it has Mars-level illumination. Geochemical processes have produced large, active shield volcanoes, giving rise to a two bar carbon dioxide and nitrogen atmosphere. Greenhouse effects have raised the temperature to tropical Earth levels. Though there are no oceans, about 20% of the planet’s surface is covered with shallow lakes and small seas. There is an active biology of things like sulfur-, iron- and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, but photosynthesis never evolved. The planet was colonized on the same principle that put a colony on every likely planet, with the thought that terraforming would be relatively simple. This never took place, and Shayol is a sort of abandoned corporate colony with a population of around 20 million, mostly in sealed cities at the tops of dormant shield volcanoes. You can go outside on this planet in something like scuba gear.

Sundown
: (11.28 light-years from Earth) Epsilon Indi 1. An ice giant that is the only large planet circling this star, which is otherwise dominated by an extensive asteroid belt. Though it resembles a planetary Antarctica, with carbon dioxide poles and water-ice covered “tropics,” this planet has a dry nitrogen atmosphere with about 4% oxygen produced by infrared-photosynthetic flora (“black moss”) which extract minerals dissolved in the ice. Though there is no animal life, there are primitive motile plants (“ice worms”) that are fairly interesting. A plan to warm the planet by the introduction of greenhouse gases was not executed and the 6 million colonists live in domed towns and industrial farms.

Crater
: (11.29 light-years from Earth) 61 Cygni A4xi. This is one of many large rock and ice “moons” orbiting 61 Cygni C, the unseen astrometric companion of A. It was started as a research base on this unusual Mars-sized body, a university group project to investigate the many interesting worlds of the 61 Cygni multiple system. The colony itself is a large artificial habitat built into a shallow caldera, where the nucleus of the Terran Pantechnological Institute has formed. Though they did their most important work in the Solar System, where they could access a large industrial base, Roald Berens and Ntane Vataro were alumni of TPI.

Green Heaven
: (11.4 light-years from Earth) Tau Ceti 2. This is the most Earthlike world discovered in the early colonization period, with active plate tectonics, 80% ocean surface, and a single Pangaea-like continent. It has an advanced, active native biosphere, with earthlike life forms (though based on a somewhat different chemistry, including a novel alternative to DNA genetics). There are three notably intelligent species, the wolfen (handless hexapods with a complex language and nomadic culture, bearing a superficial resemblance to the Paleolithic amphibian carnivore eryops), the dollies (humanlike bipeds, perhaps as intelligent as monkeys, certainly smarter than dogs), the womfrogs (things sort of like elephantine crickets with a very primitive wood-tool technology, that build bower-like nests in the jungle), and the boomers (giant sea creatures, resembling of a cross between whales, ichthyosaurs, and squids, which swim by syphonjet, have a toothy ichthyosaur beak at their head, and two clusters of tentacles on either side of the head — like squids, they swim backwards under jet propulsion, and forward flapping their mantle fins — the four eyes are mounted on tentacles as well, letting them watch where they’re going). There are about 80 million people on Green Heaven now, most of them in the Seven Cities, large, independent urban centers, with their own government, language and culture. There are also English-speaking nomads in the Adrianis Desert, and a pastoral farming culture inhabiting the Iles des Français. There is no planetary government.

Tau Ceti is a somewhat aged G8Vp-type star, less than half as luminous as the Sun overall, but more than 1.5 times larger in radius. If it were put in place of the Sun, it would seem half again as big but give less than half as much light (My very rough calculation indicates Tau Ceti’s disk would have to show about 18 times as much area to give equivalent light, for an apparent diameter in the sky of almost 2.3). Green Heaven is somewhat closer to Tau Ceti than Earth is to the Sun, so that the star appears a little more than twice as big, giving slightly less light overall. Given the somewhat IR shifted spectrum of Tau Ceti, Green Heaven is somewhat warmer and with a low axial tilt has no real seasons (there is a small antarctic tundra, with mountain glaciers, in the middle of the Continent, which caps the south pole). The overall effect is of a big, sunsetty-looking sun in a deeper, somewhat greener blue sky, the landscape blanketed at noon by a warm golden light, while sunrises are oranger and sunsets redder. The colors of the Greenie landscape seem richer than those of Earth, and, on a very clear day, the sky can assume an incredible turquoise hue. The desertification of pangaean-type continents has done away with the dense jungles except in some northern peninsulas, and produced a rather Triassic ecology of extended savannas.

Snow
: (15.29 light-years from Earth) Groombridge 1618 6iv. A large, Titan-like body orbiting a gas giant of this low-K star. The colony of a few thousand is essentially a large research base planted to investigate ancient nonhuman ruins found here, in a star system which has never had habitable planets. The ruins, about 400 million years old, indicate a very strange, very advanced civilization which may have had FTL starships. In fact, these are ancient StruldBug ruins dating back to the Shock War. The Kapellmeisters know this, but are keeping it secret from humans.

Prometheus
and
Epimetheus
: (15.74 light-years from Earth) 40 Eridani A2 and 40 Eridani A2i. A double planet in this mineral rich system, composed of a bright KO, a white dwarf, and a dim M4e. Prometheus was a habitable planet whose biosphere was devastated when 40 Eridani B went through its terminal evolutions, long ago. There is a re-evolved native biosphere on Prometheus, and, oddly, a similar related biosphere on the large moon Epimetheus. There are some traces (mainly on the icemoon-like planets of 40 Eridani C) that indicate there was a technological civilization here, but apparently much earlier than the ruins on Snow, and with a far more primitive technology, as if Prometheus may have had a space-faring civilization that colonized Epimetheus but failed to survive this ancient cosmic disaster. The star system was settled as an industrial colony to mine the mineral-rich, surface-stripped worlds of B, but it proved nonviable economically to ship raw materials across interstellar space, even with the relatively cheap CESD starships. Currently, wealthy landowners inhabit luxurious estates on Epimetheus, overseeing the industrial-serf society of Prometheus and the mining worlds. There are about 30 million people living here.

Arous
: (18.29 light-years from Earth) Sigma Draconis 3. This is the other really earthlike colony world. It became the private domain of Mace Electrodynamics, with restricted human access. It is inhabited by nonhumanoid chalcolithic natives (velvetty brown walking-stick sort of creatures about the size of humans, but considerably frailer and lighter), who are being protected from unfettered human intervention, but also “nurtured” by Mace executives. MEI’s industrial operations were entirely relocated to Sigma Draconis 300 years ago. The 75 million human colonists live mainly on Arous’s large, airless moon, and in the system’s asteroid belt.

God
: (18.61 light-years from Earth) Delta Pavonis 2. This is a sort of super-earth, circling a large, bright, somewhat aged sunlike star. It is slightly larger than Earth, considerably denser, with a much higher gravity, and very active tectonic cycle, producing high young mountains, lots of volcanoes, and copious earthquake activity. It has an active biosphere of its own, evolved in the context of a violently active terrestrial-like atmosphere (i.e., really bad thunderstorms, etc.).