The Hub: Dangerous Territory by James H. Schmitz & edited by Eric Flint

Author:James H. Schmitz & edited by Eric Flint [Schmitz, James H. ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 0-671-31984-1
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
Published: 2001-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Malatlo. The Malatlo Attitude.

Turn back something like two centuries from the night the giant cargo carrier came down to an untouched world.

The Federation of the Hub had been forged at last. It was forged in blood and fire and fury, but that was over now. For the first time in many human generations no Cluster Wars were being fought. And a great many people everywhere had begun to look back with shock and something like growing incredulity on the destruction and violence and cruelties of the immediate past. They wanted no more of that. None whatever.

But, of course, the forming of the Federation did not end violence and cruelties. It did establish a working society and one with a good deal of promise in it, but it was not a perfect society and probably never would be perfect. And when these people realized they couldn't change that, they simply wanted no more to do with the Federation either.

That was Malatlo, the Malatlo Attitude. No one seemed able to say how the term originated. On a thousand worlds it was somehow in the air. There were no great leaders of this movement or cult or philosophy, whatever one wanted to call it. But there were very many minor leaders.

They put it to the Federation. They wanted to be away from the Federation, these people who shared the Malatlo Attitude, away from all people who did not fully share it; they wanted to be by themselves. They had no dislike for other human beings, but they did not want to have Malatlo disturbed by those whose thinking and actions weren't in accord with it.

The Federation accepted the demand. Perhaps the men in authority looked on it as an experiment. Possibly they approved individually of the Malatlo Attitude but considered it impractical for most human beings—certainly impractical for the Federation. At any rate, they did everything needed to bring the world of Malatlo into being.

The location of the world was never made public. But it was known that it lay at an immense distance from the Hub, beyond any probability of chance discovery. It had a neighbor planet on which lived a race of beings who called themselves Raceels and called their world Tiurs. They had a well-developed civilization but had not yet discovered space flight. The followers of the Malatlo Attitude had wanted such neighbors to demonstrate that man could live in peace with all other creatures. Some eighty million of them were transferred to the world Malatlo within the time of a few years. Thereafter almost all ties with the Federation were dissolved. The people of Malatlo were opposed to galactic travel and retained only spacecraft designed to let them move about the system of their new sun.

By agreement, one connection with the Federation was retained. Once every ten years a small ship traveled from the Hub to the Malatlo system. It had few people on board, and all of them were sufficiently sympathetic to the Malatlo Attitude to create no discord.

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