New Kanem's charter faces its second-decade test

The charter of New Kanem sits behind glass that fogs when the environmental cycle runs cold, in an alcove off the assembly hall built for ceremony rather than use. Fewer than nine hundred people signed the thing when it was ratified, in the colony's first hungry season. Tonight the assembly hall holds a fraction of the roughly two thousand who now live here, and every one of them has an opinion about whether those nine hundred had the right to speak for the rest.

That is the whole of it, really. A colony that has doubled its population inside a single decade has arrived at the oldest question a voyage asks. May the people who set the course bind the people who came aboard later — who never touched the tiller, who woke one transfer window into a world already steered?

I have covered New Kanem since its founders were still arguing over air margins. They were idealists then and they are idealists now, and that is both the colony's glory and the reason its second decade is proving harder than its first. The charter they wrote promises that no resident may be denied longevity therapy for want of means, that the colony's ice and metal revenues are held in common trust, that no office may be held past a fixed term. That last one was a deliberate jab at the Earthside incumbents who simply refuse to leave. These are the promises a young colony makes when it is small enough to keep them by a show of hands.

The clause that will not settle

The fight has gathered around the trust clause. When New Kanem was nine hundred souls, common revenue was a matter of trust and a handshake. At two thousand, with a metal contract now clearing on the Orbital Exchange and settlement bonds drawing real interest, the handshake has become a fortune. Fortunes attract lawyers even out here.

"I did not sign this," Adaeze Okonjo told the assembly, and she said it without heat, which made it land harder. She arrived two windows ago, a fitter by trade, exactly the kind of skilled newcomer the colony spent its bond money to attract. "I honor it. But a promise I did not make is not a chain you may hang on me. Let the charter be amended, or let it be admitted that it governs only the dead."

Across the hall sat Josiah Mbeki, one of the original nine hundred, a founder whose signature is on the glass-cased page. By my count he has served three of the terms the charter permits, and he will age out of office within the year — a fact he raised himself, unprompted, as if to remind the room he means to honor the rule that costs him something.

"A charter you can rewrite whenever it costs you something is not a charter," he said. "It is a mood. We made these promises to people who were not yet aboard. That was the point. If the second generation may throw out what the first generation swore, then no colony can bind its future at all, and the whole enterprise is just weather. Whatever the loudest room wants on a given night."

Between those two wrecks — the charter that cannot bind, and the charter that cannot bend — New Kanem now sails. Not beautifully. Anxiously, with the crew arguing at the rail.

The founding text, unusually, contains its own amendment provision, buried in a late article the founders plainly hoped never to invoke: a two-thirds vote of resident adults, ratified across two successive transfer windows so no single heated season can carry it. That last requirement is the founders' quiet wisdom. It forces the argument to survive the better part of an Earth year before it becomes law. Long enough for tempers to cool. Long enough for the mail to Earth and back. Long enough that whoever wins must still want it once the window has closed and opened again.

Whether the amendment clears its first vote won't be known until the current window shuts. New Kanem's charter advocates have already signaled they may carry the question to the Charter Court regardless of the outcome, asking whether a colony's founding provision on binding its grandchildren is itself the sort of promise the Accord will enforce.

Mbeki will be out of office before the second ratifying window opens. "Then it will be their charter," he said, nodding across the hall at Okonjo, "and their promise to keep, or not. I only ask that they make one. Drifting is worse."