Men With Guns

"Moonlight glimmered on the guns of the men who stood there waiting for him."
-Poul Anderson, The Star Fox (London, 1968), p. 154.

An armed reception committee! Gunnar Heim has gone to meet some Basque-speaking New European partisans - like World War II revisited - but how does he know that these armed men are not the enemy waiting in ambush? Because, in this case, the enemy are not men but Aleriona.

Human beings have not yet fought members of another rational species, and I hope we never will, but there are times when our own physical differences begin to matter. Fighting the Japanese must have felt different from fighting the Germans - an immediately identifiable enemy even out of uniform.

Some of us traveled by coach to another city to take part in an anti-racist mobilization. The (Nazi) National Front were due to march with police protection so we planned to counter-demonstrate, hopefully in much larger numbers to demoralize our opponents. We had to walk in small groups from a coach disembarkation point to a counter-demonstration assembly point. We did not want to meet any groups of Nazis, especially not larger groups, moving in the same direction but there seemed to be a group of youths standing on every street corner...

I soon learned an important lesson. If even one youth in a group was black, then every member of that group was my friend whereas I had to be provisionally cautious about any group whose every member had the same skin color as myself! An unpleasant but fortunately infrequent experience.

It is unsettling suddenly to find yourself in a racial minority, like in a Manchester drinking club or in the shop on our street, but it soon becomes the norm unless someone makes an issue of it. Two white youths on our street who made a habit of racially taunting an Asian schoolgirl were fortunate that the girl's father was unable to break down their front door. They left the following day. But that was decades ago. Unlike some other cities, we have enjoyed peace since then.

Poul Anderson shows anti-Naqsan sentiment in his Star Fox future and James Blish's Chronology of Cities in Flight lists an anti-Earth pogrom in the Malar Cluster.