Official News - page 6

THE HISTORY OF THE GALACTIC TRADING GUILD

by Hally Godarkly

Last week I introduced you to the secretive world of undercover accountancy - all part of the way the Galactic Trading Guild keeps a stranglehold on commerce throughout the Galaxy. I was curious about how they came to have such influence, dominating economic matters throughout the Galaxy, and decided to find out the origin of this tight control.

Switching to full research mode, I started to delve into the past and look at the history of human colonization of the Galaxy. There exists a whole heap of documentation in many different forms dating back to this period and before, but it doesn't seem to be of interest to the average person-in-the-street today so most of it has been dumped in storage archives in no particular order. I tried to find out what I needed to know but frankly the cataloging was a disgrace, and in the end I had to turn to a trained archivist to help me: Professor Henrig Forsendunt.

The Professor has made something of a speciality of finding obscure bits of information from the massive datadumps that make up the various archives in the Galaxy, and putting them together to form a detailed picture of how things turned out the way they did. She agreed to help me, and seemed quite flattered that such an important publication as the Fed2 Star would be mentioning her name. She gave me a sort of mini-lecture about how the Solar System came to prominence in the Galaxy. Here's what she said:

"It's fashionable to blame everything on the ex-Emperor Ming, but while he was responsible for a great many unpleasant things, the human domination of Galactic trade is not one of them. It actually dates back to long before the mad despot's brutal reign.

"You have to realise that when mankind discovered hyperspace travel and first ventured out into the Galaxy, our expectation that superior aliens would have formed a federation of allies or a galactic empire turned out to be false. On the contrary, there was no overall political structure at all. There was intelligent alien life on many planets but star systems mostly remained independent of each other. Very few alien races had bothered to set up colonies on other worlds - alien civilizations just didn't seem to have much of a drive to expand. They had the technology, in the form of a hyperspace drive similar to the one we had discovered, but they didn't have the will.

"That's not to say there was no contact between these different alien races. A healthy amount of trading, carried out by independent traders, kept goods and information flowing across the Galaxy, but not in any organized way. Individuals who felt the wanderlust, the urge to travel to other star civilizations, were few and far between.

"This, then, was the state the Galaxy was in when humans exuberantly burst out of the Solar System. Far from the two extremes that various sections of humanity had been expecting - an open-limbed welcome on the one hand, and hostility on the other - we were faced with polite indifference from most of the alien civilizations we contacted. It was quite an anti-climax.

"Contrary to the belief of those who enjoy conspiracy theories, at no point did anybody from Sol say, "We're going to take over the Galaxy." It wasn't deliberate, it just happened by default as humans both individually and collectively stepped into the power vacuum. An explosion of emigration saw humans move to alien worlds, colonize empty planets, terraform lumps of rock all over the Galaxy, and just generally spread like weeds until we far out-numbered all of the other aliens put together.

"This allowed the Galactic Administration to spread its tentacles throughout the Galaxy. Although the kinds of humans that chose to leave Sol were not particularly enamored of bureaucracy, they were unable to escape the authorities completely, and the GA makes sure that contact between systems is tightly controlled - while ignoring what happens on the surface of the out-of-Sol planets.

"It would be impossible, for example, for a star system to wage war against another - the GA and the Imperial Navy would step in before a shot was fired and just make sure it couldn't happen. Star systems cannot access the interstellar link network without GA approval, and at the first sign of trouble, the system would be cut off which would make an invasion very difficult!

"But you were asking about the Galactic Trading Guild and how it gained its wide-reaching influence. Well, just as the GA regulates contact between systems, humans came up with ways to regulate trade between planets, and the Guild was formed. The old alien civilizations were faced with a stark choice: they could either join in with this new human-dominated Galactic trading network, or miss out on the benefits. To choose the latter would have lead to stagnatation; many worlds did that, and where are they now? Gone. Extinct. Barely a memory.

"Having taken on the task of monitoring standards and regulating economic disputes between star systems, it was inevitable that the Guild would end up in the position of power it enjoys today. Nature abhors a power vacuum, and this was a role that somebody was eventually going to fill. Today, any planet that wants to take part in the global trading network needs to gain approval by the Guild - it just can't trade without it."

I was left slightly stunned by this picture that Professor Forsendunt painted, of the way humankind had taken over the Galaxy almost by accident, but it certainly explained to me why a new star system's application to the Guild is considered so important, and it highlighted the power that these undercover accountants have in giving the final thumbs up or down to a planet.

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