Wherever You Are

Poul Anderson, "Wherever You Are" (IN Anderson, Space Folk, New York, 1989, pp. 84-113) is yet another story that I have either never read before or completely forgotten. For me, a fresh new story although combining elements familiar from other works by Anderson:

an interstellar League with a civilizing program, but this one led by Earth in future;
a colonized planet (called New Sythia) with a militechnic service, a clan system and big-boned, powerfully muscled colonials (after generations under one point five gravities);
a planet with dinosauroid natives who have no chairs because they sit on their tails (they also have no doors because these would catch tails);
Anderson's incongruous rendering of aristocratic speech in the mouth of one of the natives;
a shipwrecked man and woman unable to contact the human base on this planet (Lonesome Landing), who will die when they run out of vitamin supplements unless they can persuade the warlike natives to sail them to the base (this sounds like Nicholas van Rijn and his companions trying to reach Thursday Landing in The Man Who Counts).

The story begins by reversing a cliche:

"The monster laid a taloned hand on the girl's shoulder." (p. 84)

Then the girl yells and threatens; the monster wails and scuttles away. Another reversal is the contrast between the woman warrior Ulrica and the quietly studious Didymus Mudge, who has escaped his mother's influence at the age of thirty. Could Ulrica and Mudge possibly get together before the end of the story? (Maybe not but I will continue to read the story with interest.) (Later: Mudge reverses roles not by confirming his uselessness but by saving the day in an unexpected way.)