Terrans will descend to talk to the Seafolk and Flandry must accompany them to validate the mission in the eyes of his friends, the Tigeries. Dragoika is imaginative enough to envisage the sea bottom as perceived by her species but not as it would appear to its inhabitants:
"'Down where the bones of our mothers lie, whom they drowned,' she said. 'Down where there is no sun, no moons, no stars, only blackness and cold sliding currents. Among enemies and horrors. Combat was better.'" (p. 68)
By contrast, she thinks that stories of Terra are:
"'...like a dream. Like the lost island. Perhaps it is in truth?'
"'I fear not.' Flandry wondered why the Eden motif was universal in the land cultures of Starkad.'" (p. 69)
Land Starkadians/Tigeries/Toborko live only on islands and will have migrated between islands in their ancestral past so it is unsurprising that their legends include a "lost island."
In James Blish's Cities In Flight, Okie legends include the Lost City which has found an idyllic planet.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And those Tigery legends about the Lost Island also struck me as their equivalents of the stories Genesis gave us about Eden and the Fall of mankind.
Ad astra! Sean
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