FACTION

Centauri Compact

Alpha Centauri · The Conversion Act, 2902

The Centauri Compact abolished its nobility by buying it. Every patent held at Alpha Centauri was surrendered to the Firstlight Exchange and reissued as shares at a rate fixed by rank, and the offices that came with those patents, jurisdiction, toll, inspection and refusal, were extinguished outright. Power at Firstlight is held by weight of stock, decided by filing time, and the Compact has never pretended otherwise.

The settlement

The Conversion Act was enrolled in 2902, drafted in nine weeks by Berenike Longhaul, Viscountess of the Longhaul, on an instruction from the Prime Factor that ran to one sentence: pay them enough that they sign, and not one share more. Every Centauri patent was surrendered within four hundred days or declared void without compensation on the four hundred and first, and the holding was valued and reissued as a share class by rank: a duchy at ten thousand A-shares, a marquessate at four thousand B, an earldom at twenty-five hundred, a viscounty at nine hundred, a barony at four hundred C, a baronetcy at a transferable yard-management contract. The drafter priced her own viscounty ninth from the top and let the floor watch her do it.

Character

The Compact prices things, and the price is filed. Attainder, escheat, corruption of blood and the striking of prefixes were all repealed as mechanisms in 2902 on the reasoning that a share cannot be attainted, only sold. What replaced inheritance is a rule with no sentiment in it at all: shares pass to the person named in the last instrument filed with the Registry before the moment of death. Blood has no effect, legitimacy has no effect, marriage has no effect, and an intestate holding escheats to the issuing guild to be re-auctioned within four hundred days. Compact families answer this by filing a contingent instrument at every birth.

The clause that made the modern Compact is Article 9, and it was never hidden. The Act converted patents; it did not convert books of business. A patent was a grant of the crown and therefore the Exchange's to buy, while a ledger, a customer list, an underwriting book or a pattern book was private property no empress had ever given anyone, and passed untouched. Berenike Longhaul surrendered the Writ of Carriage, took nine hundred B-shares for it, and walked out of the hall still holding the book that priced every courier hull between Sol and Firstlight. The Compact's nobility did not die. It listed, and it kept the drawer.

It fights with clearing and underwriting rather than with fleets, and it has believed since its second year that this makes money a weapon system. In 2903 Hallis Braith, Marquess of the Firstlight March, refused to surrender his patent and held the gate approach for sixty-one days under his own writ, tolling traffic. Nobody fired at him. The Exchange stopped clearing his receipts and let it be known that no hull paying a Braith toll would be insured for its onward leg, and his revenue was at zero in eleven days. The doctrine that grew out of this rests on a single uncontrolled experiment: the Eridani yards were dark that year, gate volume was down two fifths before the Exchange resolved anything, and eight of the eleven hulls he tolled in his first week were his own cousins'. Sera Norlin wrote from the Gambit in 2929 that the Compact had mistaken a closed door for a hand on it. The letter is in a family file at Firstlight and has never been cited.

Its blind spot is anything that was never property. The Kin families, refused a barony in 2534 and given a hereditary warrant instead, were converted at sixty C-shares apiece on the ground that a warrant is not a title. Kin Cradleworks has sued over that valuation four times in three hundred and forty years and has been told, in one form or another, that you cannot be underpaid for something that was never property. The same instinct cuts the other way: the Compact is honest to the letter and unforgiving about intention. In the Firstlight Determination of 3113 an authentic, witnessed deed of gift was held void because the Registry's own clerks, nine days into a strike, had refused to accept the lodgement. The claimant was arguably right, lost, was paid four percent of the block, and the rule is named after him, which is the Compact's way of paying somebody.

What it will not say aloud is that its discretion has sometimes worked. The Settlement Row berth spine lost tolerance in 3159, and a published finding would have emptied the Exchange in a fortnight; the Prime Factor doubled berth charges across two quarters in 3161 with no schedule, no reason and no appeal, funded the recut out of the rents of the people standing on the thing, and nobody died. It is the strongest argument unpublished rates have ever had, and it is never made, because making it requires admitting what 3161 was.

History

2902

The Conversion Act is enrolled at the Firstlight Exchange. Titles are legally extinguished and holdings made tradeable, while Article 9 leaves every ledger, contract book and pattern book in private hands.

2903

The Sixty-One Days. Hallis Braith tolls the Alpha Centauri gate approach under a writ the Compact says no longer exists, and is broken by the Exchange refusing to clear his receipts or insure any hull that pays him. He converts at a punitive four hundred B.

2905

The Norlin Determination. The Court of Registry holds that a design unenclosable in perpetuity has no enclosable value, and converts the Norlin baseline works at twelve A-shares. The most widely used parts catalogue in human space casts twelve votes in Convocation, and the determination is read aloud at every Convocation opening.

2911

Hesper Kin files the first Cradle suit against the sixty-share conversion of the Warrant of Cradle and is dismissed for want of a converted interest. Three further suits follow, in 3009, 3115 and 3251.

2918

The first contested election for Prime Factor. Convocation fails quorum twice and elects on a plurality of those present, which becomes settled procedure and remains the only route past a blocked floor.

2939 to 2949

Longhaul couriers carry the Eridani Foundry Exodus and the Guild writes their transit cover. Forgehold calls it an act of war and the Directorate embargoes Centauri hulls for eight years. The Compact absorbs it and never apologizes.

2967

Halder Braith sells the Exchange's lane-clearance schedule to the Vermilion Chain for a heritable one part in forty of the second lane's toll, published on the Chain's open sheet. It is the Compact's first documented defection and the template for every one since.

3034 to 3036

An acting registrar in his nineteenth hour on shift clears four hundred hulls' receipts after a flare takes the Sol relay chain down, sixty-one of them against a syndicate that had already failed. The Rule of the Second Signature follows: no clearing without two Registrars' hands.

3106 to 3113

The Firstlight Determination. Shares pass by registry and by nothing else, and a wrongful refusal to accept a lodgement lies in damages and never in title. Blood, legitimacy and intention are stripped out of Compact succession permanently.

3161 to 3163

The Berth-Rent Crisis. Firstlight berth charges double in one quarter with no published schedule, and the Published Rate Association forms to demand that the Exchange post its rates the way the Vermilion Chain posts its tolls. It has been called the Vermilion Sympathizers since its second meeting.

Houses

Longhaul Guild (LH-) carries nothing and covers everything. It began with a Writ of Carriage in 2536, courier warrants and lane tolls and eleven despatch hulls on call in perpetuity, and it surrendered all of that in 2902 and kept the underwriting book, which was the asset. It writes the Compact's courier and lane cover. Odile Longhaul chairs the Fourth Syndicate and sits at the bolt end of the Long Room table, where the loss-book is strapped through the back board so that it may be read and not carried out.

Ninefold Reach (NR-) is nine branch offices descended from one duchy split by partible intestacy in 2549. Its founding patent required it to build to any pattern presented under the Register's seal, so it has never been permitted to refuse a customer, which is why everybody buys from it and why nine cousins have undercut each other into ubiquity. The Ring Table has no head: the chair is drawn by lot, and Garn Marrow holds it.

Norlin Standard (NS-) supplies the baseline parts half of human space is built from, under an open-specification patent of 2621 that cannot be enclosed by anyone, including Norlin. It is the only imperial instrument all six blocs still obey, and it is the reason the works were valued at twelve A-shares in 2905. Bex Norlin has held the house since 3259 and is called nothing but the counter.

Kin Cradleworks (DK-) builds and crews the cradle tenders. Its founding instrument is the Warrant of Cradle of 2534, granted to a tender master who had lifted four hundred and eleven yard workers off a burning berth and had asked for a barony. It carries hereditary rank, no nobility, no estate, one clause of obligation, to answer any distress within reach and never make the answer conditional on a fee, and, there being nothing to escheat, no clause of forfeiture at all. Ruarc Tolm has been route-master since 3262.

What they tell each other

The woman at the dock. The floor says that in Ninthmonth 2939 the Chair of the Fourth Syndicate took the brass strap off the loss-book, carried it down to the courier dock, and wrote the Foundry Exodus cover in her own hand, and that asked under whose authority she said: mine. She was at Firstlight all nine days, in committee, losing. The hand in the folio belongs to a storekeeper on the Guild's books. The authority was two words over a relay, and the standing resolution she was breaking has never been repealed, which is why the Guild has paid every claim on that cover since rather than test one in front of a court.

Berenike's schedule. Apprentices are told that the drafter of the Conversion Act priced the imperial peerage twice, once at what she charged and once at what she thought it was worth, that the second column is a tenth of the first, and that whoever finds the working sheets ends the Compact. Her last instrument of 2921 declines to lodge them on the ground that they are not property of the Exchange, and the household inventory of that year lists a drawer and no contents. The Cradle rate is said to stand in it at two figures, sixty and eleven hundred, the second struck through with one word beside it. The Chain claims a copy went to Bellhouse in 2967 and will sell a sight of it for a lane share.

The ninth counter. Every floor tells it about a different man: a broker who insured his own life at a rate he set himself, in the name of a syndicate he invented that afternoon, and whose estate was paid in full and on time, because the Registry does not ask whether a syndicate exists, only whether it filed. Nobody can produce the death, the payment or the man. What can be produced is the syndicate, lodged in 3088, one page, correct in every particular, no members named because the form does not ask, never having written a policy or been wound up. Any registrar could close it by asking for one member's name. None has.