The Commercial Society

The Long Way Home.

See Interesting Reading And The Commercial Society. 

Additional information:

Each Society spaceship handles ordinary affairs and files reports and pays taxes at a planetary office but neither the spaceship crews nor the office workers know where the reports or the taxes go. Special orders come through a sealed circuit from a secret cell-type bureaucracy. Valti, current chief of the Solar offices, says:

"'...promotion to the bureaucracy involves complete disappearance, probably surgical disguise; I will gladly accept the offer if it is ever made to me.'" (CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 81)

At least one of Valti's superiors must be present on Earth despite being completely unknown to him. Valti passes all this off as a necessary security measure. The Society has prospered for a thousand years, its members conditioned by rituals and oaths. In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Supermetals Company of necessity protects itself with strict secrecy but cannot maintain that for a thousand years. The source of the company's wealth is revealed in the lifetime of its founder.

A sinister pattern has emerged:

the location of the Solar Technon is secret;

the location and identities of the Commercial Society bureaucrats are secret;

the Council of the League of Alpha Centauri comprises human Thorians but also the mysterious, telepathic, gas-giant-dwelling Thrymans.

So who is really in charge anywhere and what are their aims?