The Master Key

I remarked once before on the elaborate structure of "The Master Key" by Poul Anderson. It is a Nicholas van Rijn story but we do not just get van Rijn and a few subordinate characters. We get:

the narrator;
the narrator's friend;
the friend's son;
the son's ensign;
the son's and ensign's employer, van Rijn.

Many rich details give substance to the story.

(i) Long ago on another planet, the narrator and his friend, Harry Stenvik, discomfited "...a king who set himself above the foreign merchants." (David Falkayn: Star Trader, New York, 2010, p. 275) This reads like a reference back to an earlier story in the series but is not. We know only the little that we are told here. The narrator uses that familiar, evocative phrase, "...the wench is dead..." (p. 275) to communicate that there were intense experiences back then but it is all over now.

After humiliating the king so that "...the name of the Polesotechnic League was great in the land...," the two friends "...made inroads on the stock-in-trade of the Solar Spice & Liquors Company factor..." (p. 275) I think this means that they were van Rijn's competitors?

(ii) When the narrator makes a brief business trip to Earth, van Rijn invites him to dinner because Harry will be there. As the narrator's flitter lands outside van Rijn's penthouse on top of the Winged Cross, we are treated to an Andersonian descriptive passage:

"A summer's dusk softened the mass of lesser buildings that stretched to the horizon and beyond..." (p. 276)

He walks among roses and jasmine. Inside, he and Harry "...crossed a few light years of trollcat rug to the far end of the living room. Three men sat by the viewer wall, at the moment transparent to sky and city." (p. 277) I cannot help thinking: imagine a story set in a universe where there really was a rug several light years long.

If we have read the series in sequence, then we have been here before. "Esau" began when Emil Dalmady's cab landed on the Winged Cross and "The garden was fragrant around him in a warm deep-blue summer's dusk..." where other towers "...were an elven forest..." (The Van Rijn Method, New York, 2009, p. 519). Dalmady also "...crossed an improbably long stretch of trollcat rug to the VieWall end of a luxury-cluttered living room..." (ibid., p. 520)

(iii) Harry, married to Sigrid, "...had built a house on the cliffs above Hardanger Fjord and raised mastiffs and sons." (David Falkayn: Star Trader, p. 276) The narrator begins to tell us about his own personal circumstances but then breaks off, although we do know that he has been on a planet with ammonia in its atmosphere where he has had to handle a lot of negotiation and some violence.

I have summarized only as far as the top of the third page of a fifty two and a half page story, my point being that these two or three pages contain rich details which are there for us to reread at any time but that we will soon forget if we simply read through once to find out what happens in the story. Harry and the narrator have entered the penthouse, crossed the rug and approached three seated men. We know that one of the three should be their host. Further, conversation in the doorway has informed us that Harry's son, Per, now a Master Merchant of the Polesotechnic League, is present with a story to tell.

That will be our story, containing adventure and violence enough, but it will be related in a relaxed conversational style so that, although we accompany Per and his ensign to the mysterious planet Cain, we never really leave the comfort and security of van Rijn's penthouse where our host, never leaving his lounger, bellows for beer, hears the story and solves the problem.

The narrator "...bowed to him as is fitting to a merchant prince..." (p. 277)

Is it? These are the customs of the Polesotechnic League. Van Rijn was born poor so a very interesting novel could have been written about his rise to wealth. JRR Tolkien rightly wrote of The Lord Of The Rings, "It is too short" and the same can be said of the History of Technic Civilization.