The Unification Mainline

You say, Columbus with his argosies
Who rash and greedy took the screaming main
And vanished out before the hurricane
Into the sunset after merchandise,
Then under western palms with simple eyes
Trafficked and robbed and triumphed home again:
You say this is the glory of the brain
And human life no other use than this?

(Trumbull Stickney, 'You say, Columbus with his argosies')

Culture & Politics

Extraterrestrial Unification activities have a particular orientation not shared with the mainstream of that civilization. Unification culture beyond the Core not only draws upon a different combination of sources than anything encountered around Sol or the Centauris, but has a unique character of its own. Even the powerful centralizing and homogenizing forces in the Unification cannot entirely overcome the vast distances, long separation, and great isolation of interstellar expansion.

Demographically speaking, the Mainline sees significant numbers of foreigners working and living among Unification citizens: researchers, technicians, crews and support staff from the SPL in particular, but also the CDN, Indonesia, or some of the smaller non-aligned 'corporate nations'. And of course, there are the ubiquitous Exo-Americans. This kind of cosmopolitanism is not as common on Earth.

In the sphere of religion, Baha'is are a particularly well-represented group along the Mainline, even more than in the Core; the Raelians are even more disproportionately influential. Conversely, of the 800-plus dioceses of the New (a.k.a. 'Green') Catholic Church, exactly one lies beyond Barnard's Star.

Where political traditions are concerned, one cannot fail to note the dominance of a school of thought (‘party’ is far too strong a word) descended from the late phase of a minor 20th century Marxist faction: Posadism. In its contemporary form, Posadism extends Trotsky's argument that socialism in one country is untenable. Posadists argue that socialism on one planet is unworkable and that only interstellar, even universal communism can obtain. Contact with the Squids, who have an arguably 'socialist' socio-economic organization, served as fuel to this theory's resurgence,1 and through the 22nd century various subsects of Posadists have nudged the Unification into interstellar space. Until recently active Posadists were loosely coordinated as the ANPW (Association of Neo-Posadist Workgroups), but there is no central body or committee.2

The Unification Mainline has no single authority, naturally. Local councils and committees report back directly to the World Council on Earth; there are no intermediary levels of government and no centralized extrasolar political body. A few agencies are particularly important all along the Mainline, each with their particular concerns: ConCom (the Contact Committee), QuaBSEn (Quarantine and Biosafety Enforcement), AsASN (Astrogational and Aerospace Safety Network), ComCore, and PeaceForce (the Peacekeeping Forces, i.e., the Unification military).

The Contact Committee may not have the largest staff, or even the greatest resources under its direct control, but it absolutely has the most political clout. After all, from the perspective of the World Council – and Unification popular opinion – the primary justification for supporting the creation of the Unification Mainline was communication with the Squids. ConCom is the body charged with effecting that, and as other xenosophonts have been encountered since then, their remit has grown (as well as the quantity of numbered subcommittees). Accordingly, ConCom has far more influence on the other agencies and programs along the Mainline than vice versa.

Likewise, scientific organizations have more pull than comparably sized and situated commercial ones. Industry and business is present in Unification space in order to support research and education, not the other way around. Many of these scientific programs are what the Unification recognizes as 'Independent Reconnaissance Groups' – self-organizing autonomous bodies created to pursue a particular line of investigation beyond the interests and priorities of the Unification's councils. Only a few actually live up to the name and in fact explore beyond established frontiers.

Quarantine and Biosafety Enforcement (QuaBSEn, QBSE) is a Unification agency with wide reach; it is responsible for ensuring decontamination of all materials, including sophonts, as they move between ecosystems – both natural and artificial ones. It also funds continuing development of bioblockade and fukamization protocols and provides the service as needed to unmodified humans (or Phants, Pins, etc.) departing Earth. The Astrogational and Aerospace Safety Network performs regulatory and safety inspections of space vessels and in particular SDRT drive-equipped starships, provides orbital traffic control and debris-clearing services, and to the extent possible in the remote reaches of outer space, rescue and salvage services. ComCore nominally just provides communications with the Core systems, but on an interstellar scale this involves managing a fleet of packet ships with high-bandwidth information relays as well as maintaining the infrastructures of "local" (planetary-orbital scale) communications networks. In practice they provide mass media and news services to the inhabitants of the Mainline; they are also responsible for data security. The military presence is light or even completely absent, outside of chokepoint systems (Barnard's Star, 36 Ophiuchi) where the Unification confronts the seething savagery of the ESA.

The official language of the Mainline is Esperanto, as in the rest of Unification. Aside from being the language of government, corporate-level business, and education, it’s also the home language to a much larger proportion of the population than in the Core systems: the inhabitants of the Mainline are drawn from throughout the Unification (and some of its allies) and live together, so tend to wind up speaking Esperanto at home as a compromise between native speakers of different old-fashioned ancestral languages. That being said, the initial wave of exploration predated the entrenchment of Esperanto in the Unification, and was largely sinophone. As a result many place names and local slang terms are from Chinese, and the most widespread secondary language is still Chinese. (Or English, among the Exo-Americans.)3 The Unification Pins speak their own creolized forms of Cantonese or Yoruba but usually have a basic grasp of Esperanto. The Squids technically speak Lojban with humans, but it is almost always machine-translated to Esperanto or some other more natural(istic) human language.

On the subject of language, it is worth noting that the Unification tends not to give extrasolar planets official names – only settlements, stations, or outposts. Most worlds have nicknames used by one or another faction in the area.

Also, it bears repeating that the Unification's purpose in being there is research, not empire. If a settlement or outpost exists, it can be assumed that there is something there interesting enough to scientists to warrant the expense. An installation of primarily economic, residential, or military purpose is the exception, not the rule.

It may also pay to recall that humans were not the first explorers to visit the stars along the Mainline. Aside from the relics of prehistoric spacefarers in one section of it, more recently the Squids traveled most of its length to get to Earth, before human explorers had penetrated past Ross 154.

Astrography

A map, and some notes, and below that some brief sketches of the more interesting points of interstellar space explored by the Unification and its allies.

unimain.png
  • From many of the systems named here, one can also reach other, unnamed star systems – uninhabited and lifeless ones, centered on minor red dwarfs or white dwarfs, of little interest or value except to specialized astronomers. They're not shown on this map.
  • Packet ships carrying priority passengers and high-value cargoes move between the stars at about 0.4 to 0.5 light years per 24-hour day (lypd), while the heavy transports, moving bulk cargos and large pieces of equipment, average 0.1 lypd. Data moves at around 0.9 lypd.

Ross 154, Lacaille 8760, CD-44 11909, and L204-128

A series of red dwarf stars that never earned new, more pronounceable names before they became the stepping stones to new worlds and new lives beyond them. Even today their main role is to be big lumps of mass you can aim an SDRT drive at. Perhaps in ESA space they’d be ringed with deep-space habitats and home to millions; being in Unification space, the four systems probably don’t support 5,000 inhabitants between them – beacon-keepers, maintenance/tender crews, a few astronomers. Unofficially, the systems are called after four mythological paradises of classical China and Mesoamerica: Tlalocan, Kunlun, Tamoanchan, and Penglai.4

36 Ophiuchi ABC

Delta Pavonis

Since I came to Cold Mountain
how many thousand years have passed? […]
No one visits the cliffs
forever hidden by clouds.
Soft grass serves as a mattress,
my quilt is the dark blue sky.
A boulder makes a fine pillow;
Heaven and Earth can crumble and change.
(Hanshan, Poem 26; tr. Red Pine)

CD-49 13515

Another snoozer. Red dwarf,9 some rocks, some beacons, an emergency response craft standing by, move on.

Epsilon Indi AB(ab)

CD-37 15492

Another non-entity of a red-dwarf-centric pit stop. Its great claim to fame? Being the first numbered entry in both the Gliese and the Luyten Half-Second star catalogues.

Tau Ceti

Epsilon Eridani

Bein' young and all liquored up – WHOOOOEEEEE!
(Some guy staggering past my window the other Friday night.)

40 Eridani ABC

Hemp Maiden confided, 'Since I began my service, I have seen the blue sea turn into mulberry fields three times. When I walked across to Penglai Mountain just now, the water only came up to my waist. I wonder whether it will change into dry land again?' Wang Yuan sighed. 'Oh, all the sages say the blue sea will once more become blowing sand.'
(From the hagiography of Wang Yuan in Shenxian Zhuan)

BD-03 1123

From BD-03 1123 the Unification Mainline extends yet farther: first to the binary red dwarf system Ross 614 and next the brilliant yellow-white subgiant Procyon A (with its extremely elderly white dwarf companion Procyon B). Both are visited by Unification science and survey teams every few months, and more infrequently transited by the expeditions into the great unknown beyond Procyon. BD-03 1123 is already eight months from Earth by fast courier (which means by regular transports, easily over two and a half years’ travel time) – and money is always an issue, while life on Earth hangs in the balance.

The Short Arm

The first branch of the Unification Mainline starts at Delta Pavonis and consists of a string of main sequence stars with life-bearing planets, including the homeworld of another alien intelligence: the Guanxiong. Furthermore, ruins and remains of earlier intelligent spacefarers have been discovered in every system of this arm, starting at Beta Hydri.

Beta Hydri

Be still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream
That over Persian roses flew to kiss
The curlèd lashes of Semiramis.
Troy never was, nor green Skamander stream.
Provence and Troubadour are merest lies
The glorious hair of Venice was a beam
Made within Titian's eye. The sunsets seem,
The world is very old and nothing is.
Be still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake,
Nor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart,
But patter in the darkness of thy heart.
(Trumbull Stickney, ‘Be Still. The Hanging Gardens were a Dream’)

Zeta Tucanae

It was Christmas Eve, babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me
Won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you.
(J. Finer & S. MacGowan, ‘Fairytale of New York’)

p Eridani AB

Flying Hapalochlaena. Why’d it have to be flying Hapalochlaena?
(Joey Lim, on Xtreem Planetologists Gone Wild!!!, Season 10 Episode 4.)

82 Eridani

Important enough for our purposes to have its own page.

The Squid Arm

The second arm of the Unification Mainline branches out from Tau Ceti, and is nicknamed the 'Tentacle' by early human astrographers, as distinct from the 'Arm'.38 It's short, and interesting only for the planet that lies at its far end: the Squid homeworld. To get there one must transit the systems of Van Maanen’s Star and BD+01 4774, a bog-standard white dwarf and red dwarf roundabout respectively. While the Tentacle is open to Unification and ESA traffic alike without any special considerations, as a matter of courtesy and diplomacy the Squids are considered responsible for navigation and safety and travelers are expected to defer to them.

BD+04 123


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