The Cirban Protocol was the first agreement between humanity and another living species. It was signed at Hiverion on 11 June 2318 by Halima Rahal, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the United Nations of Earth, and the presiding member of the High Council of the Voor Confederacy. It was written in the shared notation built at first contact and in both languages.
The Protocol was an outline, and both sides said so. It provided for an exchange of envoys, a line at Cirban beyond which neither side's armed ships would pass without notice, and a trading station at Cirban, to be built by both, where the Voor could sell engineering and buy food. The Voor-Solar Treaty of 3 January 2319 filled it in. The trade it began held for ten years, until the High Council's ban of 1 January 2328.
Background
The survey ship Grissom met the Voor survey cruiser Lorni Indur at Cirban on 21 September 2317, and by early October the two ships shared a notation for numbers and physical constants. The Grissom spent November and December 2317 at Indata Mog as the Voor's guests. Dr Wanjiru Kamau's report on the contact reached Sol on 28 November and was published on 9 December, and President Okafor sent the federation's first mission to the Confederacy in the spring.
The mission left Circumstance on 2 March 2318. Rahal led it in the Asimov, with the Unity as escort and a party of forty that held Kamau, six xenologists, the Navy observer Captain Rawiri Smith and a physician. It met the Grissom and the Lorni Indur at Haedus on 9 April, entered orbit around Hiverion on 30 April and landed on 2 May, between a rank of 10,000 Legionaries.
Negotiation
The talks ran from 2 May to 11 June 2318. They began in the shared notation and, from the third week, ran in a spoken pidgin that the Institute of Xenology's linguists and the Voor's built between them. The Voor told the mission a great deal about themselves: their fourteen worlds and 30 billion people, the Fevarian wars, the Legion, the Maweer and the extinct species of the Gulf. The federation told the Voor where the Sun was, which the Voor already knew from two years of tracking the Grissom's flashes across the Gulf. It told them that it held five worlds and 14 billion people, which the Voor took as a modest lie, and that it wanted trade and a border.
The two sides of the High Council wanted different things. The civil factions, whose leaders Rahal met, wanted trade. The High Command, whose High Commander Rahal met once, wanted to know how many ships the federation had, and did not believe the answer. The Protocol's text was settled in the last ten days of the talks between Rahal's delegation and a committee of the civil factions. No officer of the High Command sat on the committee, and the High Command raised no veto against its text.
Terms
The Protocol had three provisions.
- Envoys. Each side would send an envoy to the other. The Voor envoy would sit at Circumstance from 2320.
- The line. A line was drawn at Cirban, beyond which neither side's armed ships would pass without notice.
- Trade. A trading station would be built at Cirban by both sides. There the Confederacy's civil factions could sell what they had, which was engineering, and buy what they wanted, which was, to the human party's surprise, food.
The Protocol set no tariff, required no inspection and licensed no goods. No later treaty between the two states did the same until the Voor Reconstruction Agreement of 2462.
Signing
The Protocol was signed on 11 June 2318 in the outer court of the Kindling, the inner sanctum of the Krakre, the Legion's fortress at Hiverion. Rahal signed for the United Nations of Earth and the presiding member of the High Council for the Confederacy. The signing followed the High Council's form for an agreement with a foreign power. The text was read aloud in the shared notation, then in Voor and then in English, and each signatory set a seal to it. Rahal's seal was cut for the occasion at Hiverion, on the Council's insistence, with the United Nations of Earth's emblem.
Reception
Rahal's final dispatch, written on the voyage home, was read to a closed session of both houses on 3 July 2318. It described the Voor as a proud, structured, ancient civilisation whose every institution had been built to survive a war. It judged that the civil factions that wanted trade were real, had power, and would have more if the federation gave them something to trade. Its recommendation was to give them something, and to build a fleet, in that order.
The Chamber did both, in the opposite order. The Naval Act of 2318 passed in September. The trading station's funding passed in November, by a smaller margin. The Institute's study of the Voor, drawn from the Asimov's months inside the Confederacy, was published in 2320.
The Voor-Solar Treaty
The treaty that filled in the Protocol was negotiated at Circumstance through the autumn of 2318. Rahal's ministry met a Voor delegation of the High Council's civil factions, led by the member the human record calls the Trade-Speaker of Vi Simni. The High Command was represented by an officer who said nothing for four months and then, in the last week, said where the line would be. The Voor-Solar Treaty was signed on 3 January 2319. It divided the Gulf's systems by name, set the trading station's tariff schedule and rules, and named the envoys. The trading station became the Cirban Exchange, built at Cirban's Pillai radius in 2319 and 2320. The Confederacy's first ambassador, the Envoy of Vur Duri, took up residence at Circumstance on 2 March 2320, and Rahal went to Hiverion as the federation's ambassador the same spring.
End and legacy
The trade of 2319 to 2328 moved 80 trillion credits of goods. It ended with the High Council's ban of 1 January 2328 on the passage of human goods through Voor space, the High Command's last use of its veto before the Voor War. The Cirban Exchange stayed open at a falling volume until the war, and the Treaty of Ximpok reopened it under the human tariff on 1 March 2341. It was rebuilt at Bounty's orbit in 2468 as the Bounty Exchange.
Rahal returned to the same hall's outer court on 21 December 2340, aged eighty, as one of the human party that accepted the Confederacy's surrender. The Institute's judgment is that both sides meant something by the choice of place and that neither said what.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.2 "The Birth of Interstellar Trade"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.7 "Solar Ascendant: The Voor Surrender"
- Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.7 "The Confederacy, the Maweer and the Veil's Edge"