Ancients And Stars

"Territory."

"'...a single failure to predict a flare for us could weaken our whole country for invasion.'" (p. 72)

That is how much power the Ancients of t'Kela wield. It is a mistake to think that the only holders of power are those who directly control a body of armed men or a state apparatus.

Van Rijn must prove that he is more powerful:

"'...my people's ship that will come from our own territory, which is the whole skyful of stars...'" (p. 71)

"Territory" matters to intelligent carnivores and van Rijn creatively turns the word on its head by identifying it with its opposite, the sky, in fact with the whole sky.

Yet again, he recalls a passage in James Blish's Cities In Flight:

"There was writing enough in the stars that he could see, because he had written it there. There was a constellation called Wagoner, and every star in the sky belonged to it. That was surely enough."
-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CODA, p. 129.

It was enough for me when I read They Shall Have Stars, then called Year 2018!, in the 1960s and it is still enough now that I can reread both Blish and Anderson in 2020.