"We guard the great Pact: but the young generations, the folk of the star frontier, so often do not understand." (p. 137)
"We" turn out to be not mankind in general but the members of the Stellar Union Coordination Service. Two groups allegedly do not understand, the younger generations and the inhabitants of the "star frontier." Imagine living in a civilization with a permanent interstellar frontier. "We" becomes "I" further down the page. However, this first person narrator is not the central character, Trevelyan Micah, and indeed remains off-stage. He, the narrator, claims to be recounting the story a generation later. Thus, he reflects on the significance of the events.
Trevelyan's friend, Braganza Diane, lives in a renovated medieval house in Dordogne beside an excavated site formerly occupied by reindeer hunters and in regular sight both of transcontinental aircraft and of departing spacecraft. This reminds us of the Andersons' visit to Brittany described in "The Discovery of the Past." They saw a Neolithic dolmen and menhir and a nearby radome.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A very appropriate image for "The Pirate." And the bit you quoted from that story made me think of a possibly analogous text from "Kyrie," Anderson's black hole tale: "This is not the work of the sisters [of the order of St. Martha of Bethany]. They minister to the sick, the needy, the crippled, the insane, all whom space has broken and cast back. Luna is full of such, exiles because they can no longer endure Earth's pull or because it is feared they may be incubating a plague from some unknown planet or because men are so busy with their frontiers that they have no time to spare for the failures. The sisters wear space suits as often as habits, are as likely to hold a medikit as a rosary."
If mankind is to have frontiers in space, first the Solar System and then the stars, as I hope will happen, We will have to accept the certainty that some will fail.
And Braganza Diane's name came from that of the former ruling house of Portugal, the Braganza. A family which still exists. And it's almost a dead certainty Anderson knew that!
Ad astra! Sean
I remember a news report of a doughboy in Paris in 1917, staring at Norte Dame and remarking that until he left home he’d never seen a building older than he was.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
While that was not the case with me, in MA, due to there being plenty of buildings much older than me in that state, it was not till I first went to Rome in 1994 that I truly gained some experience of the DEPTHS of time. However battered and ruinous they might have been, I could tell how OLD the ruins of the palaces on the Palatine Hill and the Colosseum were.
Ad astra! Sean
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