the solar system when the Enye arrived, whose cities were scarred and half-ruined by a series of vicious and nearly terminal “tactical” wars, whose biosphere was scummed and strangled by pollution, whose natural resources were nearly depleted—was immense.
Although he had been only a child when the Enye came, Farber was old enough to remember the tension, the fear, the knots of people in the streets of his little German village who spent half the night staring apprehensively at the sky; most of all, he remembered his parents’ frightened voices, coming dimly to him through his bedroom door as he lay sleepless and watched dusty moonlight on the cracked wood of his windowpane, thinking about the worlds beyond the sky, the endless black depths into which one could fall out and up forever. . . . For a day and a night and a day, the seven great egg-shaped spacecraft—each over a mile long, defying both Terran weaponry and our understanding of natural law—hung in the air above Stockholm, Rio De Janeiro, Chicago, Addis Ababa, Tokyo, Melbourne and Ulan Bator, and then the Enye emerged with their offer of incorporation, with the gift of stars.
In the months that followed, brushfire wars flared, guttered and died all across Earth, governments toppled, nations vanished as viable political entities. When the shooting stopped, amalgamations were formed among the survivors, the Terran Co-operative was hastily created, and its members were charged with the task of going out and getting a nice juicy piece of the pie in the sky for impoverished Earth. Earthmen went forth to the stars, first as paying passengers on alien ships, then, later, in human-crewed ships purchased at staggering cost from other worlds. Terran trade missions were gradually established on some of those other worlds, while meantime the Enye—and later, the Jejun—mission on Earth was doing a land-office business, mostly in “quaint” Terran trinkets and primitive native art.
Amidst all this forced-draft confusion and hothouse change, Farber grew up, and, growing up, partook of the rapacious spirit of the times. For many, the arrival of the Enye had been a miracle, divine intervention, an eleventh-hour reprieve for an exhausted civilization that had been just about to start an inevitable, irreversible spiral down into barbarism and degeneracy. The common response to this reprieve was buoyant relief and a sudden giddy sense of destiny. Suddenly, just when things had seemed darkest, the top was off the sky again—in fact, the polluted gray sky of Earth was nowhere near being the limit anymore, now that the alien cavalry had ridden to our racial rescue at the last possible minute. If there was any shame attached to the realization that we had needed the Enye to pull us out of the hole we had dug for ourselves—and the condescending, scornfully blunt Enye were hardly easy on Terran egos—then that very shame would make us work harder and scramble higher to blot it out. All at once, “manifest destiny” meant something again, was believed in again with a naive, almost religious optimism that had not been a serious political force since the muddled, saddening middle of the twentieth century. It was the age of the Robber Barons again, with those very Third World powers who had suffered most under the colonial yoke the most eager to go and carve some sort of colonial empire in the sky.
God was alive, after a long dry spell of atheism, and God helped those who helped themselves.
Like most of his compatriots—especially those who, as adolescents, had scored high on their aptitude tests and had been inducted into the Co-op—Farber grew up into a cocksure and confidently aggressive man. By the time he was ready to space, Earth’s sweet imperialistic dreams had begun to sour and darken a little, but Farber remained untouched by any hint of pessimism. Perhaps he was even more headstrong and arrogant than the majority of his fellows—or perhaps he was just young.