A Tragedy Of Errors

Either the omniscient narrator or a later historian tells us about the ambiguous significance of Roan Tom, a mythical star rover of the Long Night. Then our informant imagines Tom's ghost reminiscing in his version of Valhalla. Then, after a gap between paragraphs, we are into a narrative about the living Tom, who is two hundred light years from Earth, on the edge of the former Terran Empire. The text mentions Lochlann, Kraken and Sassania, then introduces one of Poul Anderson's many unusual planets. Tom's young wife, Yasmin, sounds like Yasmin from Lancaster, now in London.

Tom in Valhalla tells us that he kept his brawls a long ways from home. I learned that, if I was going to get into fights, then I should have chosen the battleground myself instead of wandering casually into the mouth of a cannon - but I got through them somehow.

Under space armor, Tom wears a coverall and mukluks. His impellers take him a kilometer away from the orbiting Firedrake. We are about to read a Star Trek-like tale about a spaceship arriving at an isolated planet. The captain, in this case Tom, must solve local problems and misunderstandings in order to complete his mission, in this case survival.