Starting The Day Of Their Return

"On the third day he arose, and ascended again to the light."

(Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry, New York, 2010, p. 75)

That is the opening sentence of Anderson's novel, The Day Of Their Return, here collected in Volume V of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga. Anderson writes what reads like a passage of scripture. Over the page:

"'I will grow with you, and you with me, and they with us, until mankind is...received into Oneness...'" (p. 76)

- echoes the Last Supper discourse of John's Gospel.

It is painful to reread this passage, knowing what is to be disclosed about it later in the novel. Aycharaych's guilt is incalculable, Satanic in scope. What could possibly be more reprehensible than cynically to infest a man's mind with a false religion for the sole purpose of initiating a jihad in order to destroy a civilization? Aycharaych does not inflict the tortures of an Inquisitor but his task will be successful precisely to the extent that it does unleash such mayhem and murder across human space.

Aycharaych's noble end, the preservation of his own Chereionite culture, cannot possibly justify such means. His careful fomentation of discord is purely evil precisely because of the care and attention to detail that he invests in it. Originally introduced as a one-off villain merely to give Flandry the problem of how to lie to a telepath, Aycharaych became an infinitely more refined opponent as Anderson developed him further in the later written installments.

He has not yet come on stage in this novel. We are simply witnessing what we will later recognize as his carefully crafted handiwork.