Later Days

The main section of Poul Anderson's "Lodestar" begins by summarizing the ten years of Nicholas van Rijn's life immediately following the Satan episode:

he has sworn never to leave the Solar Commonwealth again;
his business blooms in established sites while trade pioneer crews open new ones;
he sells franchises on the industrially valuable planet, Satan, and continues to confound his competitors;
much of his success comes from appointing excellent personnel -

- we know from other stories that he trains entrepreneurs like Emil Dalmady and owns a trading squadron commanded by Bahadur Torrance.

This ten year summary segues into an account of the ultimate confrontation between van Rijn and the leader of his first trade pioneer crew, David Falkayn, a confrontation that does take the unwilling van Rijn back outside known space. The link is van Rijn's twenty five year old granddaughter, Coya Conyon, here introduced to the reader for the very first time. Coya was fifteen at the time of the Satan episode and has admired the hero of that episode, Falkayn, since then. Her grandfather has taken her around most of the Solar System and she also space travels both as a tourist and as an astrophysicist working at Luna Astrocenter. Her parents are Malcolm Conyon and Beatrix Yeo. Malcolm's ancestry includes Scottish via Hermes and African via Nyanza. However, he has settled on Earth and married Beatrice, daughter of the Dutch-Malayan van Rijn and a Chinese-Mexican woman. Van Rijn complains about how moralistic Coya's generation is. She herself has never fully approved of the waning Pax Mercatorica but also dreads the future. As we continue to read Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, we learn that some of the post-League future is indeed dreadful.

These ten years are "later days" for the elderly van Rijn although the next installment of the History, Mirkheim, informs us that his long life will have at least two further phases: patching up the disintegrating Polesotechnic League, then exploring unknown space. And we wish that we could follow him there. David and Coya will colonize Avalon, thus enriching the Technic History with The People Of The Wind and The Earth Book Of Stormgate. Avaolonians will remember David Falkayn as "the Founder" and will need to be reminded of the historical importance of his mentor, and children's great-grandfather, Nicholas van Rijn.