I first met Sheriza Krazney—Sherry for short—when I was 10 and she was 8. Our families met while vacationing on Olympus Mons, the Solar System’s tallest mountain, and we got along so well that we decided to coordinate future vacations.
In those days Sheriza was OK, like a less annoying little sister than most I’d heard about. But her older brother, Yanci, then 11, was really neat. He’d do all the stuff I wasn’t supposed to, like ride the NJ jet skis on the next vacation after our Moon trip. They were “HX technology”—whatever that was—and my family disapproved of it. Although I didn’t know what “HX” meant, I did know the NJ jet skis were a whole lot neater than just sliding down a slope on a snowboard.
Snowboarding was hard to do! But both our fathers agreed that it was important for us kids to learn how. There was a whole lot they disagreed on, but they seemed to enjoy arguing with each other about those things. Once on that vacation, while we guys were watching a Swords–Cuirassiers game, they had a discussion that I was then only beginning to understand.
“Why shouldn’t we keep taking advantage of HX technology?” asked Mr. Krazney. “A lot of good men and women are giving their time, and even their lives, to acquire it.”
“It isn’t human technology,” Dad argued. “Using it perverts our basic science research skills. It’s Science-on-Pondune!” I knew about Pondune, an illegal additive to pleasure capsules, because it showed up in the action virties—the bad guys were always wanting to sell it or steal it.
“Pfft! Technology isn’t species-specific. It’s universal.”
“Every new step causes more social dislocation. Don’t tell me you want huge social dislocation, Ago!”
“Social dislocations happen because everyone gets better off. So yes, Ben, that’s the kind I want to suffer from! We’ve survived them handily. If we don’t lose our nerve, we’ll continue to do so.”
As you may have guessed, Dad was an Earth Firster. At that time he was a European Regional MP. Mr. Krazney was stationed in Greenland as a logistics officer for Titan Colony.
We’d already learned about Titan Colony in school, how it was founded as just another Outer System science base because Titan was a big moon whose thick atmosphere offered some interesting chemistry to research, and it produced some exportable cryogenic compounds, but nothing really special. Until the Honeycomb Comet was discovered, filled with alien technology! Then Titan Colony really took off.
And I’d actually been on Titan two years before, when we went on vacation to Old Bomorov’s Comet.
What I hadn’t learned when I was 10 was how at first nearly all that HX technology was sent straight to Earth, and from there it went to the rest of the Solar System. But soon a few conservative social scientists started warning that the new technologies were too powerful for Earth’s social systems. Their use had to be restricted, or the rich would get richer and the poor poorer, which would lead to social unrest, perhaps violent unrest. As the numbers of those warnings grew they were heeded and affected Earth policy. Earth got cautious. And the rich found other ways to get richer.
Of course the Honeycomb explorers were against anything that interfered with their markets, and every colony wanted all the technology it could lay its hands on, HX or otherwise. “We’re poor already! Have you priced air lately?” the colonists howled, with less than total truth. “We’re already paid diddly-squat for bringing back what will become restricted technology,” complained the mass of explorers who’d never hit a jackpot.
So inbound explorers began stopping at Titan, not just to have their catalysts and other finds analyzed and tested but to sell those that Earth was likely to restrict or even confiscate. Earthers made no objection. They figured it was OK for Titan Colony to let itself be blown to bits if something went seriously wrong. Besides, because Titan Colony was not then self-sufficient, if some technology worked out better than expected, Titan would sell it to Earth willingly. Earth was the market back then.
The arrangement worked for about fifty years, during which Titan Colony nearly blew itself to bits on two occasions followed closely by off-moon journaloggers, and all the colonies thrived on anything they could use—including the tech that nearly blew up Titan.
But inevitably the balance changed. Earth alarmists noted that the mix of goods being sold to Titan was getting lighter in machine tools and heavier in cultural goods and art. And more Earthers were emigrating to Titan.
Emigration from Earth cut many ways. It relieved population pressure, and at first Earth watched happily as Titan Colony’s population rocketed up to third largest in the Solar System, ahead of the Moon, but behind Mars—and far behind Earth. But when Earth’s population actually started to decline, the social scientists muttered about a “brain drain”.
That attitude helped lead to the “First Siege of Titan”, an Earth-wide anti-Titan/HX moratorium that backfired, not only because it ended up making Titan Colony far more self-sufficient and more likely to ignore Earther political opinion, but by demonstrating that Earth interests were no longer the same as Solar System interests.