The evening before he left, Bayard Story invited Nicholas van Rijn to join him for dinner. The Council of the League had dissolved in dissonance, and the delegates must now see to their own affairs as best they could.
The Saturn Room of the Hotel Universe was nearly full, though thanks to widely spaced tables and discreet lighting it did not seem so. Perhaps, when rumors of war hissed everywhere about them, friends and lovers were seizing whatever enjoyment they might while the chance lasted; or perhaps not. The Solar System had been without direct experience of armed conflict for so long that it was hard to guess how anybody would behave. Couples held each other close while they moved about on the dance floor. Was there really a wistful note in the music of the live orchestra? Overhead lifted the vast half-circles of the rings, tinted more subtly than rainbows in a violet sky where four moons were presently visible. Sparks of light flickered in the streaming arcs and meteors clove the heavens. Where a tiny sun was setting, dimmed by thick air, clouds lay tawny and rosy.
"The place is more suitable for romance than for a pair of tired businessmen," Story remarked with a slight smile.
"Well, any notion we can agree is plenty romantic," grunted van Rijn from the depths of the menu. His free hand brought to his mouth alternate slurps of akvavit and gulps of beer. Story sipped a champagne and rum. "Let me see—dood en ondergang, please to let me see, this place is dim like a bureaucrat's brain!—I begin with a dozen Limfjord oysters, Limfjord, mind you, waiter, the chilled crab legs and asparagus tips, and fifty grams of Strasbourg paté. Then while I eat my appetizer you can fill me a nice bowl of onion soup à la Ansa. You do not want to miss that, Story, it uses spices we maybe do not get any more if comes something as stupid as a war. For a wine with the soup—" He went on for several minutes.
"Oh, bring me the tournedos on the regular dinner, medium rare," Story laughed. "And, all right, I will have the onion soup, since it's recommended."
"You should pay better attention to what you eat, boy," van Rijn said.
Story shrugged. "I don't make a god of my stomach."
"You think I do, ha? No, by damn, I make my stomach work for me, like a slave it works. My palate, that is what I pay attention to. And what is wrong with that? Who is harmed? The very first miracle Our Lord did was turning water into wine, and a select vintage it was, too." Van Rijn shook his head; the ringlets swirled across his brocade jacket. "The troublemakers, they are those what are not contented with God's gifts of good food, drink, music, women, profit. No, they bring on misery because they must play at being God themselves, they will be our Saviors with a capital ass."
Story grew grave. "Are you sure you're not the self-righteous one? What you were advocating at the Council could have, almost certainly would have gotten the League into war."
Van Rijn's hedge of eyebrows twisted together in a scowl. "I think not. League and Commonwealth together would be too much for Babur. It would retreat."
"Maybe—if the Commonwealth were willing to go along with putting Mirkheim under League administration. But you know the Home Companies would never agree to that. Commonwealth—government—trusteeship will mean that they dispose of the supermetals. It'll be their entry into space on a scale of operations grand enough to threaten the Seven and the independents with being driven to the wall."
"So by keeping us deadlocked, you pest-bespattered Seven guaranteed the united League does nothing, does not even exist."
"The League will stay neutral, you mean. Do you actually want an open, irrevocable breach in it? As is, the Seven keeping on reasonably good terms with Babur, whichever side wins, the League as a whole will have a voice. In fact, when I'm back in my headquarters, I'm going to see if the Seven can lend their good offices toward a settlement." Story lifted a finger. "That's why I wanted to see you tonight, Freeman van Rijn. A last appeal. If you'd cooperate with us, and try to get the independents to join you—"
"Cooperate?" Van Rijn took out his snuffbox and brought a pinch to his nose. "What would that amount to? Doing whatever you tell? (Hrrromp!)"
"Well, of course we'd have to have a central strategy. It would involve an embargo, declared or undeclared, on trade with either side. We could plead hazard, to be diplomatic about it. Both would soon start hurting for materials, including military materials, and be more ready to accept League mediation."
"Not the League's," van Rijn said. "Not the whole League's. How would the Home Companies fit in? They and the Commonwealth government is two sides of the same counterfeit coin, by damn. They been that way more and more for—how long?—ever since the Council of Hiawatha, I think."
"I'm not saying anything I haven't often before," Story pursued. "I simply have a—well, I won't call it a prospect of making you see reason. Let's say I feel it my duty to keep trying to persuade you till the last minute."
"My duty is not that I listen. I told you and told you, me, if the independents join up with the Seven, or with the Home Companies either, that is truly the end of the League, because we Independents is the last properly spiritous members of it." Van Rijn leaned back, glass to lips, and gazed at the mighty simulacrum above him. Night had fallen on the scene, the moons hung in frost halos and Saturn's shadow began to creep across the rings. No stars had appeared. He sighed. "We was born too late, though. If I had been at the Council of Hiawatha, what I could have warned them!"
"They made a perfectly logical decision," Story said.
Van Rijn nodded. "Ja. That was the deadly part of it."
Not until long afterward would historians appreciate the irony of the meeting having gathered where it did. At the time, if there was any conscious symbolism in the choice of site, it expressed optimism. After all, the O'Neill colonies had not only given man his first dwellings in space, the burgeoning of wholly new industries within them had been of primary importance in a revival of free enterprise. So thoroughgoing did that revival become, in ways of thinking and living as well as in economics, that, together with the alloying of formerly disparate Terrestrial societies, a whole civilization can be thought to have come freshly into existence—the Technic. After the development of the hyperdrive, man's explosive expansion away from Sol made the artificial worldlets obsolete. Yet they continued faithfully orbiting around their Lagrangian points, in Luna's path but sixty degrees ahead or behind, and were not abandoned overnight. In particular, Hiawatha and its companion Minnehaha still housed substantial working populations when the Polesotechnic League called the most fateful of its executive sessions.
The problem it faced was manifold. Quite naturally, most governments resented it. Although its constitution made it simply a mutual-help association, it wielded more strength than any single state. It hampered as well as humiliated governments when it gave them no part in decisions which deeply affected domestic trade; when its hard credit displaced their fiat money; when their attempts at regulation were covertly subverted or openly scorned. Nor was this a mere matter of officialdom hankering for power. Many grudges were genuine. No system that mortals devise is perfect; all break their share of lives. A poor boy or girl or nonhuman might rise to living like a god and controlling forces that would have been beyond the imagination of mythmakers. Efficient underlings could do very well for themselves. But those would always exist who did not have the special abilities or the plain luck. Most were not too unhappy at becoming routineers; some were poisonously embittered. More important, perhaps, was that large percentage of mankind which never really wanted to be free. Of this, a majority yearned for security, which political candidates promised to get for them. A more active minority wanted solidarity behind exciting causes, and thought that everybody else should desire the same thing.
The League had its own troubles. Sheer scale and diversity of undertakings, the overwhelming rate of information flow, were undermining administration of the larger companies. The concept of free contract was being increasingly abused, as in the establishment of indentures. Reckless exploitation of societies and natural resources was waxing. Ominous was the introduction of modern technologies to backward races without careful prior consideration—irresponsibly, for a quick credit, regardless of whether it was desirable to have such cultures loose with things like spaceships and nuclear weapons.
A parliament was finally elected in the Commonwealth that was pledged to thoroughgoing reforms; and its jurisdiction was still the League's greatest market and source of manpower. In the "thousand days" it passed an astonishing number of radical new laws and, what counted, began enforcing them as well as a good many old ones.
Therefore the Polesotechnic League called a Grand Council at Hiawatha to discuss what to do.
It enacted several resolutions which founded more humane and farsighted policies than hitherto. Where it unknowingly came to grief was in the question raised by the measures in the Commonwealth. These included a central banking commission, floors and ceilings on interest rates, income tax, an antitrust rule, compulsory arbitration of certain kinds of disputes, loans by the state to distressed enterprises, subsidies to industries deemed critical, production quotas, and much else.
A few hotheads among the delegates talked about resorting to arms, but were shouted down. While members of the League had occasionally overturned difficult local governments, the League itself was not in the business of government. The decision to be made was: Should it boycott the Commonwealth until the recent legislation was repealed, or should it acquiesce within the Solar System?
Acquiescence won. A boycott would be immensely expensive, would ruin several members if they weren't underwritten and badly hurt the rest. It would also create an unpleasant image of saber-toothed greed versus the altruistic statesman. In vain did some speakers argue that in the long run it is best to stand firm by one's principles, and that the principle which gave the League its sole meaning and justification was liberty. Opponents retorted that liberty demands frequent compromises and, on a less exalted plane, so does common sense; the laws were not totally bad, they actually had various features desirable from a mercantile point of view; and in any case, by remaining on the scene the League companies would stay influential and could work for modifications.
And indeed this proved to be true. Regulatory commissions soon turned into creatures of the industries they regulated—and discouraged (at first) or stifled (later) all new competition. This was much aided by a tax structure heavily weighted against the middle class. After a while, the great bankers were not just handling money, they were creating it, with a vested interest in inflation. Union leaders, with enormous funds to invest, fitted cozily into the system; if you did not enroll, you did not work, and the leaders and the managers between them set the conditions under which you must work. Antitrust actions penalized efficient management to the satisfaction of the less enterprising. Likewise did quotas, tariffs, wage and price limits, preferential contract policies. A set of ineffective but self-perpetuating welfare programs helped produce the votes useful for maintaining the corporate state.
For that is what the Commonwealth became. No longer distinct from politicians or bureaucrats, the magnates of the Home Companies gained a powerful say in decisions about matters far removed from finance or engineering. Their natural allies became the heads of various other constituencies—geographical, cultural, professional—which were thus brought under ever closer governmental control.
Meanwhile, companies which did not have an originally strong position in the Commonwealth found themselves being more and more squeezed out. Accordingly, they concentrated on developing markets beyond its borders. They were involved in the declarations of independence of several colony planets, some of whose politics they then gradually took over. Certain of them began to make cooperative agreements, limiting competition among themselves, to the exclusion of the rest of the League. Thus, by slow stages, were born the Seven In Space.
Lesser companies, fearful of being engulfed, avoided joining either side, and formed no organization of their own. They were the independents.
By no means did the Council of Hiawatha produce these results overnight. In fact, the period which came immediately after seemed, if anything, more dominated by capitalists than before. It was the most expansive, most brilliant time which Technic civilization would ever know. At home, remedies applied to the body politic took hold quite gradually, and their side effects were still slower to become obvious. On the stellar frontier, discovery followed discovery, triumph followed triumph; each year told of an evil conquered, a fortune made; if strife ran high, likewise did hope. The tree was growing, ever leafing, though a snake gnawed its roots. Thus was it often before on Earth, in the age of the Chun-Chiu, the age of the Delian alliance, the age of the Renaissance.
But when a century had passed—
"Well, never mind stale history," Story said. "We're alive now, not then. Will you join the Seven in making a peace effort?"
"Join." Van Rijn tugged his goatee. "You mean take orders from you and not ask rude questions."
"We'll try to consult, of course. But with communications as slow as they are, compared to the speed with which a crisis can build up, we must have a clear chain of command."
Van Rijn shook his head. "No, always I am too hungry for feedback."
Story made a chopping gesture. "Do you want to cut yourself off entirely from whatever congress makes the peace?"
"It is not sure there will be a congress, and double not sure what tune it will dance to . . . . Ah, here comes my appetizers. You will be surprised, Freeman, at how much I can bite all by myself."