Birthright

Brastillios stared hard at the Man. He, too, had his doubts about this alliance. Men, after all, were Men.

Then he, too, shrugged. This temporary partnership was a necessary evil, no more, no less. Sooner or later there would be a redress of power in the galaxy, and if some Men wished to bring it about sooner while helping to destroy others of their race, why should he object to it? They made arrangements for a series of future meetings at which every minute detail would be hashed out. Then, for the first time in galactic history, Man and alien shook hands in mutual friendship and brotherhood.

Both of them had their fingers crossed. SEVENTEENTH MILLENNIUM: ANARCHY

23: THE ARCHEOLOGISTS

...Thus, as Man's empire dwindled, no central governmental body was formed among the other races, and a galaxy-wide state of anarchy came into being.... It was during the Seventeenth Millennium (G.E.) that the race of Man, no longer possessed of its once-mighty military and economic power, turned toward more peaceful pursuits. There was a general reawakening of interest in the species’ racial roots, and Earth and the early colonies were at last thoroughly explored and examined by scores of archaeologists. One of the most successful of these was Breece, a female from Belthar III, whose published works are still read today.... —Origin and History of the Sentient Races, Vol. 9 Breece stood on Earth and wondered where the tens and hundreds of centuries had gone. Earth was not deserted—exactly; and the race of Man was not on the verge of extinction—exactly. But oh, she reflected, how the mighty have fallen! So high had Man ascended that it had taken him many long millennia to lose every last vestige of his primacy, his power, his property. In fact, some tiny portions of the latter still remained: the Deluros system, a series of ghost worlds, all shining and efficient and unused; Sirius V, whose frontiers had retrogressed until it now housed only one vast city; Caliban, a still-living, still-functioning anachronism, a mechanism that would wait for all eternity to report the movements of a Navy that had been dead and forgotten for centuries; the Floating Kingdom, its imperial palaces converted into factories, its motive power no longer operational, doomed to float aimlessly from system to system until some star finally reached out and dragged it to its bosom; the Capellan and Denebian colonies; some four thousand scattered worlds; and ancient old Earth itself. Over the ages, after the fall of the Commonwealth—or the Monarchy, as it had come to be known—race after race began reasserting itself, taking back some or all of what Man had appropriated. Many of them didn't really care about Man or what he had done to or for them, but there were those—the Canphorites, the Lodinites, the Elmrans, and a hundred others—who cared passionately enough to make up for the lethargy of the other races. Bit by bit, with the patience of Job and the skill of Grath, they had begun pushing Man back, forcing him into planetary alcoves, denying him access to a world here, a system there, nationalizing a factory on this world, destroying a laboratory or college on that world.

Man fought back, as Man would always fight back. At first his losses were minimal, but he had reached his peak, had held the galaxy in the palm of his hand, and there was no place to go but down. He did it much the same way he had gone up: scrapping, fighting, bluffing, lying, with just enough isolated instances of nobility and of barbarism to make the galaxy wonder if he was either a god or perhaps some demon straight out of hell, rather than just another sentient race.