PROLOGUE:
From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation
There is an old saying, originating, we believe, on the mother world, to the effect that “you are what you were back when.” We, here, on the new world, a world of war, the world we call “Terra Nova” or something that means just that in some other language, know this better than most.
The whole planet knows the story of the first colonization effort for Terra Nova, under the aegis of what was then Earth’s United Nations, via the Colonization Ship Cheng Ho, how order broke down and then morphed into a shipboard civil war.
We have two well-known versions of the story, of course. One is the story given us by the Earthwoman, Marjorie Billings-Rajamana, who was among the few survivors and whose tale of events—an escalating ethnic and religious breakdown, centered on Islamic intolerance and belligerence, which was smuggled out from Earth through what must have been a maze of censorship. The other, maintained to this day by the more progressive elements of this planet and all of the United Earth Peace Fleet, lays all blame on mechanical and technological problems, exacerbated by Christian opposition to science, with prominent place given to those same Moslems as self-sacrificing saviors of those who managed to survive.
What actually happened we are unlikely ever to know . . .