Nicholas van Rijn's Solar Spice & Liquors Company was not involved. However, his trade pioneer crew led by David Falkayn had stopped on Tametha for a few days leave and barely escaped with their lives - only because they have learned to respond to emergencies as a team. If they report the uprising, will League warcraft bomb Tamethan villages? Falkayn hopes that the Council decision will be that the exploiting companies suffered the consequences of their own actions.
"...Adzel's hoofs pounded on the gangway. It retracted, the airlock closed, gravity drive purred, and Muddlin' Through ascended to heaven."
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 635.
At the beginning of a sentence, the trade crew's spaceship is on the Tamethan surface with its airlock open and gangway extended. By the end of that sentence, the ship is flying into space. How easily are planetary problems left behind by owners of advanced technology.
Chee Lan thinks that the poorer species must simply accumulate capital in order to join Technic Civilization but Falkayn points out that they can easily be cheated out of that capital by market manipulations or covert piracy. He ends this introductory passage joking about a new van Rijn isotope while looking at the Crab Nebula, then has one of those Anderson moments of suddenly realizing a possible solution that will not be divulged to the reader as yet...
1 comment:
Hi, Paul!
Commenting on your last paragraph here. I lean more to accepting Chee Lan's view that poorer races/human colonies should be patient and buckle down to accumulating the capital needed for becoming full participants in Technic Civilization. I suggest, as an analogy, Poul Anderson's story "The Helping Hand," which details the dangers and risks for a race accepting too much help from another species.
More directly, there Is the example of the planet Trillia, as seen in "A Little Knowledge," giving us an example of a less advanced race doing precisely as Chee Lan suggested, gradually modernizing as capital is patiently accumulated.
Mind you, I don't think it was wrong (setting aside for the moment the issue of him breaking his oath of fealty to Nicholas van Rijn) in itself of Falkayn to have searched out a world with rare and valuable metals like Mirkheim and setting up the Supermetals Company, the profits of which were used to assist less advanced worlds and colonies.
Sean
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