For three years the Foreign Star poured humans down to the Earth, sometimes whole clouds of them. Their small size and fragile bones and especially their manner of reaching the Earth excited curiosity, and won a certain admiration for their bravery. Poets immortalized the petal sails.
These humans brought very little with them. Their dress was plain and scant. They seemed poor. Wherever they landed, they took apart the containers that had sheltered them, and used the pieces and spread the petal sails and tied them to trees for shelter from the elements. They tried our food, but they sometimes died of it, and it was soon clear they could eat only the plainest, simplest things. They were a great curiosity, and one district and another was anxious to find these curious people and see them for themselves. Some believed that they had fallen from the moon, but the humans insisted they had come from inside the Foreign Star, and that they were glad to be on the Earth because of the poverty where they had been.
There was no fear of them by then. They spoke, and we learned a few words. We spoke, and we first fed them and helped them build better shelter. We helped them find each other across the land, and gather their scattered associates. We were amazed, even shocked, at their manners with each other. But they seemed equally distressed by ours.
—Lord Paseni of Tor Musa in Dur
The Foreign Star, as the man from Dur wrote, had for years been a fixture in the heavens. The Astronomers had long ago proclaimed that it had ceased growing, and that, whatever it was, it did not seem to threaten anything.
Then humans rode their petal sails down to the west coast of the continent and the island of Mospheira. They were small and fragile people and threatened no one. With childlike directness they offered trade—not of goods, but of technological knowledge, even mechanical designs.
The unease of the man from Dur might have warned us all. But some humans learned the children’s language, which allowed them mistakes in numbers without offense.
The petal sails kept falling down, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, until there were human villages. They brought their knowledge. They built in concrete. They built dams and generators: they built radios and other such things which we adopted . . .
And finally they stopped coming down.
The last come were not as peaceful as the first.
We had no idea why.
But the ship that had brought the humans and built the Foreign Star had left. It was of course the space station they had built in orbit above our Earth.
And the last to come down were the station aijiin and their bodyguards, armed, and dropping pods of weapons onto the world.
ii
<<Bren>> The origin of the Foreign Star was a human starship, Phoenix, which had as its original purpose the establishment of a station at a star far removed from this world. They held all the knowledge, all the machines, and all the seeds and plans that would let the ship orbit some moon or planet as a temporary base for four thousand colonists to live aboard. The colonists would build a station core and outer structure and set it in full operation.
Another ship would follow Phoenix, with more colonists. That second ship would bring equipment which would let the orbiting station eventually set down people and build a habitat on a world far less hospitable than the Earth of the atevi.
But something happened. The ship-folk believe that the ship met some accident and was shifted somewhere far off its intended course. The ship tried to find some navigational reference that would tell it where it was. The fact that reference stars were not visible where they should be indicated to them that something very drastic had happened.
Phoenix gathered resources such as it could and aimed toward the closest promising star. It saw, among its several choices, a blue world much like humans’ own ancestral Earth. The world had the signature of life—which meant they would indeed find resources there. The world had no artificial satellites. They picked up no transmissions. This informed them there was no space-faring civilization there.
They ended up in orbit about the Earth of the atevi.
They saw, below them, towns and villages. They saw technology of a certain level—but not high enough to come up to them, and their law, remote as they were then from any law but their own conscience, ruled against disturbing the world, even if they had had an easy means to land and ask help . . . which they did not.
The colonists had come prepared and trained to build an orbiting station. They gathered resources from asteroids, manufactured panels and parts and framework, enclosing themselves from the inside out and housing more and more workers. This became the core of the station. They built tethers, and began the construction of the station ring, to gain a place to stand. Barracks moved into the beginnings of the ring. The first children were born. Spirits rose. They were going to survive.
Phoenix crew was supposed to have supported the colonists this far and then move on. The ship-folk were spacefarers by trade and nature and had no desire to live on a colonial station. But now that the colonists were safe, and now that the ship was resupplied and able to leave—it troubled the ship-aijiin that the ship now had no use and nowhere to go next. They had only one port, and clearly the station was not where they wanted their port to be. The blue planet had exactly the right conditions and everything they needed . . . but it was owned, and the ship-folk’s law said they should not disturb it.
The ship had long argued against the building of any elaborate station in orbit about the planet. They wanted the colonists to leave off any further development of the station they had, use it as an observation point and a refuge should anything go wrong, and build another, larger station out at Maudit. They should, the ship-aijiin said, leave the inhabited world alone until, perhaps, they might make contact in space some time in the future.
The colonists, born aboard this station, and with all the hardship of the prior generations, had no desire to give up their safety and build again—least of all to build a station above a desolate, airless world. They wanted the world they saw under their feet. They wanted it desperately.
The station aijiin also argued against building at Maudit. They needed their population. They needed their workers—and they wanted no rival station. They absolutely refused the ship’s solution.
The argument between station authorities and ship-aijiin grew bitter. Phoenix, now hearing these same officials claiming authority over the mission and the ship itself—decided to pull out of the colonial dispute altogether. They considered going to Maudit with a handful of willing souls and building there, then trying to draw colonists out to join them in defiance of the station aijiin—but that idea was voted down, since the colonists even at Maudit would still be in reach of that living planet, and the crew was vastly outnumbered if it came to a confrontation on the matter. By now the ship-folk did not entirely trust even the colonists they considered allies, with the green planet at issue.
The ship’s crew voted to take aboard those colonists who wanted to leave, and go. They went a year out into deep space, to a star with resources of metal and ice. There they set up a station they called, optimistically, Reunion.
From Reunion, the ship continued its exploration, through optics, and by closer inspection. The crew no longer hoped to find their own Earth, but they did hope that by increasing the human population at Reunion, then, from Reunion, establishing other colonies at planets or moons of some attraction—they could then revisit the population they’d left at the Earth of the atevi and convince them there was an alternative to landing.
Alternatives, however, did not immediately present themselves. The station at Reunion grew. But there was no suitable world. More troubling still, in one direction, they found the signature of another technological presence.
Back at the first station, from the week of Phoenix’s departure, the authorities had begun losing control. All that had stopped the colonists from going down to the Earth in the first place was the simple fact that, among the colonists or on the ship, there was nobody who knew how to land in a gravity well, or fly in an atmosphere, with weather and winds. Phoenix itself had been fairly confident that the colonists would, without the ship’s crew, have to agree among themselves to survive, and that the solution would not involve experimental manned landings on the planet.