Liannathan

Aycharaych is a single individual who served but also misled the Merseians in order to prevent them from appropriating Chereionite technology and also to preserve his recorded planetary heritage. We should not assume that any other Chereionites, if they had survived, would have approved of anything that he did. Aycharaych tells Flandry that he is able to meet the likenesses of the greatest spiritual, philosophical, scientific and political figures in Chereionite history. Flandry meets a hologram of a Chereionite which says:

"'We are not wholly the last of an ancient race; the others have gone before us. We are those who have not reached the Goal; the bitter need of the universe for help still binds us. Our numbers are few, we have no need of numbers. Very near we are to those desires which lie beyond desire, those powers that lie beyond power.' Compassion softened Liannathan's words. 'Terran, we mourn the torment of you and yours. We mourn that you never feel the final reality, the spirit born out of pain. We have no wish to return you to nothingness. Go in love, before too late.'"

-Poul Anderson,  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT XX, p. 597.

We read this dialogue before we are informed that the speaker is a hologram. Consequently, we wonder how a civilization of mystical philosophers can possibly think that Aycharaych's disruptive and murderous activities could in any way help other beings toward an experience of the final reality. However, Liannathan is not a confederate of Aycharaych. His image and voice are recorded. Thus, it is possible that his words do express what some or even a majority of Chereionites did think before they became extinct.

One great tragedy of the Technic History is that Axor was never able to study the records that were destroyed when the Dennitzans bombarded Chereion. Those records would have enabled him to meet the likenesses of the Chereionite equivalents of the Buddha, Christ etc. I like to imagine that Aycharaych escaped from the planet and later helped Axor in his researches.

Our last sight of Aycharaych:

"Aycharaych's eidolon brought fingers together as if he prayed." (ibid., p. 600)