by David Weber
Asteroid Belt
The Asteroid Belt, which has never been given a name, provides the source of raw materials for the Grayson construction programs both orbiting Grayson and at Blackbird. Resource extraction ships move constantly between the processing nodes that are spaced equidistantly around the Belt. Refined materials are shipped from the nodes either in-system to Grayson or out to the Blackbird yards.
Blackbird Shipyards
The major Grayson Naval shipyard was built in orbit around the gas giant Uriel, and takes its name—“Blackbird”—from one of Uriel’s moons. Blackbird was the site of a secretly constructed Masadan base during the last war with Masada and the shipyard’s name was chosen as a deliberate memorial to the Graysons and Manticorans killed in the last Masadan attack on the home system. Heavy investment from the Hauptman Cartel of Manticore and Skydomes of Grayson was fundamental to the yard’s initial construction. The Hauptman Cartel had been repaid in full by the time of the cease-fire of 1915 PD, but Skydomes remains a fully participating partner and major stockholder in Blackbird.
The shipyards consist of dispersed construction slips distributed around the Uriel subsystem, as well as an impressive dispersed defensive system consisting of both static and mobile assets.
History
The colonization of the planet Grayson represented an even greater leap of faith—in every sense—than the majority of pre-hyperdrive colony expeditions. Basic astronomic surveys had shown an apparently habitable world in the green zone for Yelstin’s Star, with an atmosphere and surface temperatures permitting liquid water on most portions of the planet. Those bare facts were entirely correct, but for a planned self-supporting human colony the precolonization research was grossly and fatefully inadequate, for while the planet hosted no native sentient species prior to human colonization, it was an exceedingly hostile environment for humans.
The exclusive rights to the Yeltsin’s Star System were acquired by the Church of Humanity Unchained, a religious group centered in an Old Earth polity known as the State of Idaho. While the Church’s theology had Judeo-Christian roots, much of the Church’s antitechnology doctrine was inspired by later Green and New Luddite teachings. Church leaders Reverend Austin Grayson and his deputy Oliver Mayhew hoped to build a new, more holy society far from the sinful technological temptations of Old Earth. Although Reverend Grayson’s Book of the New Way, the core of the Church’s new teachings, was actually less rabidly prejudiced against the evils of technology than many groups of the time, the combination of that prejudice with deep religious faith produced a zealotry which took them far beyond the range at which any truly detailed planetary survey could have been achieved in the belief that “God will provide.”
Colonial Period, the Time of the Testing
988–1063 PD
On October 24, 988 PD (3090 CE), the starship Gideon, the Church’s single cyroship, arrived in Yeltsin’s Star System. The system’s distant and isolated location, far beyond any other planned colonization efforts, had been a major factor in the colony planners’ selection of their destination, and indeed it would be many centuries before any other ships would pass through that out-of-the-way corner of the universe.
Early records from just prior to landing name the colony planet as “Zion” and christen the other nine planets in the Yeltsin’s Star System after Judeo-Christian archangels. A recording of the prayer made by Reverend Grayson prior to landing calls on God to ask the archangels to watch over their new colony just as the nine sister planets will patrol the heavens above Zion.
The name Zion was not to last. The planet’s heavy-metal-rich surface proved sufficiently hostile to have tested human survival even in the most technologically advanced colony, far less one which had deliberately discarded technology. In the early days of the colony, heavy-metal poisoning caused horrific rates of miscarriage, with few pregnancies progressing to reach even a stillbirth. In the intense physical struggle for survival, a time when many of the colonists found themselves questioning what sin might have led God to test them so severely, the colonists balked at calling their home after the Holy City. During Reverend Grayson’s lifetime, their planet became simply “the world”; after his death, it was formally renamed “Grayson’s World” as a tribute to his leadership. Over the centuries, “Grayson’s World” was shortened to the simple “Grayson” of today.
The hostile environment inspired a theological change as well. Reverend Grayson himself modified and extended the Church’s doctrine to include the concept of the “Test” as God’s way of refining and purifying His people. The doctrinal change faced minimal theological criticism during Grayson’s lifetime and continued to evolve after his death, in accordance with Grayson’s teaching that God is never done teaching His people new ways and new concepts. Born in this founding crucible, Graysons came to speak of their God as the Tester and commonly held that the human condition called for all good people to meet the Test set before them.
Reverend Grayson had gathered the first-generation colonists and served as the first planetary administrator, but he died only ten years after landing, leaving no heir, and leadership devolved on Oliver Mayhew, the Church’s Second Elder, and Captain Hugh Yanakov, Gideon’s commanding officer. Mayhew and Yanakov were instrumental in creating the social and political structures the colonists required to survive the Test presented by their planet. It was clear they could not survive without technology, and Mayhew completed a doctrinal evolution—begun by Grayson—which held that the lesson of their Test was that it had been the misuse of technology on Old Earth, not technology itself, which had been evil. This cleared the way for the colonists to embrace the necessary technologies, albeit in a cautious and circumspect fashion. What the majority of the colonists were not told was that Mayhew, with the blessing of the dying Reverend Grayson, had also authorized a secret genetic modification project designed to increase their heavy-metal poison tolerance.
The modification was initially (and covertly) tested on the Mayhew and Yanakov families. Once it proved successful, it was implemented across the entire population, but Mayhew recognized that even if he were to posthumously reveal Grayson’s blessing, the modification would be highly controversial. A fervent, well organized minority among the colonists, the progenitors of the present day “Faithful” of Masada, continued to believe that faith in God alone would heal the colonists. Though never more than a quarter of the total population, that minority continued to believe and to militantly insist that any reliance on technology, even for medical purposes, was but the first step into the “Sin of the Machine.” Unwilling to risk a potentially deadly conflict when the entire colony’s survival hung in the balance, Mayhew, Yanakov, and their inner circle decided to keep the genetic modification secret from the general public, propagating it throughout the total population under the guise of a common cold.
Given the technology available to them, it was a remarkable achievement, but the modification was not perfect and an unintended side effect caused a high miscarriage rate among male fetuses. The Church of Humanity Unchained had enshrined polygyny even before leaving Old Earth, and the sexual imbalance provided long-term social pressure to maintain that institution. In general, however, the modification proved very successful in mitigating the consequences of heavy-metal poisoning. While the miscarriage rate (especially among boys) remained tragically high, it nonetheless represented a vast improvement on the status quo. Knowledge of the genetic manipulation was so closely held, it was completely lost for a thousand T-years, until it was discovered by Dr. Allison Harrington in 1912 PD.
The Church’s tendency towards patriarchy became increasingly pronounced after Reverend Grayson’s death. This development was only exacerbated by the survival imperatives of the Grayson environment and the skewed birth rate, and despite efforts by Oliver Mayhew to prevent it, female social and legal rights began a steady erosion. In addition, the most ardent members of the Church, those who had most fervently opposed the easing of the Church’s anti
technology tenets despite Reverend Grayson’s approval, began to emerge as “the Faithful,” an organized, minority sect which preached that the immediate struggle to survive had actually been a punishment, not simply a test. God had acted to chastise Man for failing to place his faith in Him rather than in technology, and if only the Church had remained faithful to God’s true intent and rejected the Sin of the Machine, relying upon His power, He would have delivered them from their trials and transformed the Grayson environment into the technology-free Zion they had fled Old Earth to find. The Faithful’s theologians grudgingly permitted the use of technology, regarding it as a necessary evil in a fallen world. Yet they argued that it was necessary only because of Man’s “Second Fall” on Grayson, and the most ardent of them taught that if Man could be returned even now, fully and humbly, to God’s original intent, God would relent and transform Grayson. In their theology the Test became a test of humanity’s willingness to accept God’s promise and return to His true will, despite the temptations of its fallen and corrupt existence, rather than a trial designed by God to refine those He loved and correct their original misunderstanding of His intent.
Consolidation, the Time of Learning
1063–1138 PD
After decades, the Grayson population finally achieved sufficient victories over its hostile environment that survival on the planet was no longer in doubt. Adequate locally produced technology became available to secure a minimum sustainable standard of living. The institution of the Steadholder had emerged as a hierarchical, authoritarian response to the demands of survival, expanding levels of population, and the technological cushion required for both. The doctrine of the Test was fully accepted by the mainstream Church, polarizing religious dissidents outside the mainstream into the still relatively small sect of the Faithful.
It should not be surprising that the original colonists, intent upon building a technology-free Eden, had brought very few tech manuals and textbooks with them. They were fortunate in that the technology they had intended to preserve had been heavily biased towards the life sciences and medicine, but they had underestimated the extent to which those technologies depended upon a robust, diversified base of other technologies. While Grayson preserved pockets of advanced technology, especially in environmental capabilities, the planetary tech level as a whole regressed to one comparable to Old Earth’s Victorian Era.
In one other area—spaceflight—a limited capability was preserved largely as the work of one man: Hugh Yanakov. Yanakov succeeded in winning Grayson’s approval for the preservation of Gideon rather than the complete cannibalization contemplated by the original colonization plan, which proved critical to the colony’s early survival. Gideon’s sick bay was absolutely essential at more than one point in the struggle, and evidence suggests that the genetic modification was developed aboard ship. After Yanakov’s death in 1018 PD, his eldest son took up the task of keeping a handful of the original shuttles operable and managed to do so for almost another fifty years, despite the powerful opposition of the Faithful and at least some of the mainstream Church.
Expansion, the Time of the Five Keys
1138–1261 PD
This period was generally one of optimism, of faith in both God and the future, and a broad sense of dynamism. The indigenous technology base improved in areas publicly acknowledged as direct and immediate needs, despite the Faithful’s best efforts to prevent it. Even now, however, Grayson efforts focused on solving specific problems, rather than the pursuit of research for its own sake, and there were holes in Grayson’s tech base which other planets would have found peculiar. The colonists had brought no lethal weapons with them, for example, and when personal weapons reemerged on Grayson, they took the form of swords and other muscle-powered weapons which were only slowly replaced by the reinvention of relatively crude firearms.
Following Oliver Mayhew’s death, the steadholders (already coming to be known as the Keys) consolidated their political authority, creating the Conclave of Steadholders as a body of co-equal peers, presided over by the Protector, to consult with one another and support the formation of new steadings as population and wealth permitted. The formation of the Conclave was legitimized by the approval of the Church, yet the Church remained the true secular as well as temporal authority. Over time, power came to reside in the most powerful steadholders, known collectively as “the Five Keys.” By the end of the era the five steadholders of the original Grayson steadings (Mayhew, Burdette, Mackenzie, Yanakov, and Bancroft) held effective control of the Conclave and through it, the planet. Anything like a true planetwide political state remained a purely nominal construct during this era, however.
Mayhew Steading, ruled by a direct patrilineal descendent of Oliver Mayhew, was Grayson’s largest single Steading, and the Conclave’s Articles of Establishment had provided that the Protector must be selected from all the adult males of the Mayhew line in perpetuity. This did not mean the planet had a single ruler, however. The Protector was primus inter pares (“first among equals”), responsible for presiding over the Conclave, administering its policies, and serving as the Conclave’s formal interface with the Church, but forced to govern by forging consensuses or at least pluralities among the other Keys rather than through his own legal authority. The First Elder of the Church retained a mandatory seat among the Keys and was the ultimate arbiter of matters pertaining to the Church, which made him the true fountainhead of authority, but the Protector was envisioned as the executor and enforcer of that authority on Father Church’s behalf.
By the end of the twelfth century, the life-or-death fight to survive on Grayson had stabilized in favor of survival, and by 1250 PD, sufficient resources had become available for the Five Keys to begin diverting a meaningful percentage of the planet’s available capabilities to reestablishing the space presence which had lapsed in 1065 with the failure of the last of the original landing shuttles. The proposal to do so was carried (over the vehement opposition of the Faithful) on the argument that the exploitation of the star system’s extra-planetary resources would repay the effort many times over. Ominously for the future, one of the Five Keys, Eustace Bancroft, Steadholder Bancroft, broke with his fellows to vote in opposition to the hotly contested decision.
Schism, the Time of Sundering
1261–1337 PD
The Faithful seized on this decision as “sin-filled and blasphemous,” and their attitudes and doctrines began to harden, sowing the seeds for the eventual Civil War. Indeed, the official formation of the “Congregation of the Faithful” in 1261 PD as what amounted to an openly schismatic sect within the Church of Humanity Unchained was expressly justified by its founders’ contention that in promoting a resumption of extra-atmospheric development, the Moderates had moved well beyond the technology absolutely essential to planetary survival and hence had returned to the “Sin of the Machine” against which Austin Grayson had preached.
Grayson society as a whole had by now acquired its highly consensual nature as a survival imperative, and Grayson remained a thoroughly theocratic state, but the Church enshrined a deep respect for individual belief, even when it conflicted with official doctrine, as a necessary and direct consequence of the Doctrine of the Test. Despite this, Grayson society had largely rejected the Faithful’s beliefs, and social pressure had prevented their membership from spreading broadly. As their doctrine diverged further and further from the mainstream, the Faithful found themselves increasingly marginalized, regarded as shrill extremists when they were regarded at all.
This attitude began to change, though, as the degree of discipline necessary to ensure survival decreased. The extremists, no longer seen as a direct threat to necessary conformity, were less thoroughly ostracized, and a certain percentage of the Grayson population began to regard the Faithful and their leaders with at least grudging admiration. A mainstream Church clergyman of the period famously wrote, “I reject their beliefs, yet I have no choice but to respect someone who meets his Test by living his
life one hundred percent in accordance with his beliefs, however unpopular they may be.”
By the colony’s three-hundredth birthday, this toleration had expanded to the point at which the Church of the Faithful first openly converted steadholders. Some personal journals of generally accepted provenance imply that, if not the steadholders themselves, members of the converting steadholders’ families (and quite probably Eustace Bancroft at the time of the space program vote) had been secret members of the Faithful for at least a full generation prior to their open conversion.
Ironically, religious toleration was one of the areas where the Faithful diverged from mainstream norms, and as soon as those few steadholders publicly converted, they implemented a policy of enforcing their interpretation of doctrine in their steadings, with very little toleration for those adherents of the mainstream Church. Given the autocratic power and autonomy of the Keys, those steadholders were able to alter conditions in their own steadings very quickly, which attracted the immigration of more Faithful from other steadings (and prompted the emigration from their steadings of adherents of the mainstream Church). Many of the other steadholders were secretly relieved to see their own Faithful go, but although they were a clear minority planetwide, there were large absolute numbers of them, and the populations of the Faithful steadings grew rapidly. The Faithful steadholders became individually more powerful, as a consequence . . . and they also became increasingly insistent on exporting their own doctrine. The emergence of a distinct, aggressively proselytizing, increasingly powerful and militant “Faction of the Faithful” began to alienate the mainstream once again, and by the 1320s, the mainstream Church hierarchy was threatened with a steadily growing schism.