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weren’t living for themselves at all, but for their descendants. The only purpose in their lives was to give their children a perfect world. That purpose had to be strong. Living aboard a generation ship is not a good life. Eventually, they found that world, and their children inherited it. But the children also inherited the sense of purpose. Inevitably, their attitude to Chao Phrya was the same as their ancestors’. It was the Promised Land. Sacred Soil. Marked down to them and to no others; all they were entitled to want and need for all eternity. It’s a common syndrome. It wears off, but not for several generations. In a way, the children of the Zodiac were immensely fortunate in that the world they finally found was still undiscovered. It was well within the rim. But civilisation had gone toward the heart, ignoring a lot of worlds en route . Chao Phrya was discovered by the galactic civilisation only forty years ago—less than a century after the Zodiac had landed.
    â€˜Perhaps you can imagine the reactions of the children of the Zodiac . They had a tradition of twenty-two generations of sacrifice. Now here were these people flitting about the stars with virtually no effort at all, calmly ignoring what the Zodiac people still thought to be immutable Laws of Nature—the quaint old ideas of relativity. Their immediate reaction was to shut themselves off totally—to ignore the galaxy and forget the rest of the human race. But that couldn’t be permitted. They had to accept the Law of New Rome. They were offered no choice. Because of the Anacaona.
    â€˜To the children of the Zodiac , you understand, the Anacaona were just part of the Promised Land package. It simply couldn’t occur to any of the Zodiac people that the Anacaona had any sort of right to this planet. They were here, but that only meant that they had been provided by a benign providence for the convenience of the children of the Zodiac . They weren’t people. They were slaves. So the families—still administered by the crew, who simply became the government of the New World—just moved in and took over. They eradicated virtually all traces of the native culture within hundreds of miles of their landing point, and they were expanding at a frightening rate when the world was rediscovered. There had been no bloodshed—the Anacaona had been conquered without a blow. They were extremely amenable to being conquered. If the rediscovery had been a hundred years later, there might not have been a single wild Anacaon left on the planet. The entire species would have been domesticated and humanised. The Anacaona were intelligent and imitative—the perfect slaves. They had a limited continental range, too. Their own expansion as a species hadn’t really got under way.
    â€˜The Zodiac people were in no danger of committing actual genocide, but they came perilously close to cultural genocide. New Rome sent representatives out, and so did New Alexandria. The quarrel lasted for years. I was sent out during its final stages, to make arrangements for the Anacaon project which has been going on at the colony near Corinth. There’s no point in going over all the details of the diplomatic war. You can imagine the difficulties. The children of the Zodiac were eventually persuaded that they had no choice. If they didn’t let the Anacaona alone, New Rome would move in troops. If Chao Phrya wasn’t to be run under the Law of New Rome by the Zodiac crew, then it would be run under the Law of New Rome by a military authority. There was no question of Let Well Alone. That principle only applies to alien worlds which don’t want to be colonised and human worlds where there are no other considerations to be taken into account but the eccentricities of the particular humans involved.
    â€˜The crew had to capitulate. They agreed to handle their world our way, provided that we let them get on with it. If anything,