Tuesday, 23 January 2018

"Wings Of Victory"

Poul Anderson's "Wings of Victory" names six people aboard the Grand Survey exploratory spaceship, the Olga:

Ali Hamid, who has died;
Manuel Gonsalves, recovering from a skull fracture;
Vaughn Webner, by default chief xenologist and therefore also leader of the first landing party;
Aram Turekian, landing boat pilot;
Yukiko Sachansky, landing boat gunner;
Captain Gray, who thinks that women make better gunners - better at watching and waiting, less likely to fire hastily.

There is also an unnamed first person narrator who:

discusses the inhabitants of the newly discovered planet with Webner but does not join the landing party;

describes the landing expedition in the third person, from Turekian's point of view;

has played poker profitably with Turekian;

at the end, explains that the Ythrian supercharger, worked by the flapping of the wings, pumps oxygen directly into the veins and comments:

"I wonder how it feels to be so alive.
"I remember how Yukiko Sachansky stood in the curve of Aram Turekian's arm, under a dawn heaven, and watched the farewell dance that the Ythrians gave for us, and cried through tears: 'To fly like that! To fly like that!'"
-Poul Anderson, "Wings of Victory" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 75-102 AT p. 102.

Strangely, the story tells us neither the name nor the profession of this narrator whose existence might be missed by a hasty reader.

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