What "The Master Key" Gives Us Apart From Cain

 

This is a rich story.

(i) "...the name of the Polesotechnic League was great in the land."

-Poul Anderson, "The Master Key" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, January 2009), pp. 195-233 AT p. 197.

The name of the League was great because the unnamed first person narrator and his friend, Harry Stenvik, had humbled:

"...a king who set himself above the foreign merchants." (ibid.)

(ii) Then the two merchants celebrated by patronizing:

"...the Solar Spice & Liquors factor..." (ibid.)

Regular readers know that SSL is van Rijn's outfit.

(iii) The narrator is on only a very brief business trip to Earth. He has been on a planet where there is ammonia in the air and some conflict.

(iv) Because they are both guests of van Rijn, the narrator and Stenvik meet in the SSL owner's Winged Cross penthouse which we have seen before and will again. There is a view of Chicago Integrate, roses and jasmine in the garden and a long trollcat rug inside.

(v) Stenvik raises mastiffs and sons in a house that he has built above Hardanger Fjord.

(vi) His oldest son, Per, was apprenticed on a van Rijn ship in the Hercules region and has recently become a Master Merchant.

(vii) Per's ensign is from Nuevo Mexico beyond Arcturus.

(viii) Cain, where they have recently been, is in the direction of Pegasus.

(ix) Van Rijn has been on enough planets to recognize patterns. Saying that he has been on Cain not in the flesh but in his brain, he is most like Poirot.