Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) Read Online Free PDF Page A

mining and every other attribute of a reasonably advanced civilization … natives, with rights, to be sure. But not rights that outweighed their own rights.
    The sun sank in reds and yellows and golds. A planet shone above the hills. That was Mirage, second from the sun they called just … the sun, having no better name for it, the way they called the third planet the world, or sometimes … Down, in the way the Guild-born didn’t use the word.
    Stupid way to name the planet, Ian thought; he personally wished the first generation had come up with some definite name they could use for the world … Earth, some of them had wanted to call it, arguing that was what anyone called their home planet, and this was, in allsenses that mattered, home. The Guild had immediately rejected that reasoning.
    And others, notably the hydroponics biologist, Renaud Lenoir, had argued passionately and eloquently that, no, it wasn’t Earth. It mustn’t be. It wasn’t the Sun. And it wasn’t the star they’d been targeting—when whatever had happened in hyperspace, had happened, and Taylor had saved the ship.
    Taylor might be the Guild’s saint—Taylor and Mc-Donough and the miner-pilots that, God save them, every one alive owed their lives to—but Lenoir, who’d argued so convincingly not to confound the names of Earth with this place, was due a sainthood, too, no matter that what would soon become the Guild had voted with him for reasons totally opposed to what Lenoir believed in; and that the construction workers and the station technicians, whose sons and daughters would carry out Lenoir’s vision and go down to the surface, had mostly voted against him in that meeting.
    Not Earth, Lenoir had argued, and not their target star. The planet had undergone its own evolution, all the way to high intelligence, and by that process made up its own biological rules, through its own initially successful experiment at life, and its own unique demands of environment on those ancestral organisms.
    The biochemistry, the taxonomies and the relationships of species down to microbes and up to Earth’s major ecosystems—whole branches of human science sat in
Phoenix
’ library: the systematic knowledge of the one life-affected, human-impacted biosphere humans had thoroughly understood, thousands of years of accumulated understanding about Earth’s natural systems and their evolution and interrelationships.
    Pinning Earthly names on mere surface resemblances, Lenoir had argued, would confuse subsequent generations about where they were and who they were. It could create a mindset that thought of the world in a way connected with their own evolutionary history, a proprietary mindset,which Lenoir argued was not good; and more, a mindset that would repeatedly lead to mistaken connections throughout the life sciences and, by those mistaken connections, to expensively wrong decisions. Corrupting the language to identify what they didn’t wholly understand could on the one hand prove fatal to their own culture and their humanity, and on the other, prove damaging to the very ecosystems they looked to for survival.
    So, Earth it was not. The council had deadlocked on the other choices; and what could Lenoir’s great-great-grandson find now to call it but the world, this blue, cloud-swirled home they had, that Taylor had found for them?
    So now that they had mined the solar system, built the station, built an economy that could, with difficulty, build the lander to reach the planetary surface, the Pilots’ Guild wanted them to leave—asked them, after nearly a hundred fifty years of orbiting the world, to shut down the station and transfer everything to the airless, waterless planetary base the Guild would gladly give them on Maudette, fourth from the sun … far from interference in a world the Guild adamantly maintained should stay sacrosanct, untouched by human influence, uncontaminated by human presence.
    Meaning that the Guild wanted them all to