(Since "s" and "d" are beside each other on the keyboard, I might type "Orion Shall Ride" sometime. I might have already.)
It is difficult to find an image for "wind." In a generation ship in a Clifford Simak story, the crew, motivated by religious enthusiasm, revere holy pictures of a Tree, a House and The Wind That You Cannot See But Know Is There.
"The alarm cut off. Silence crashed down.
"For a short while, [Mikli] could not know that it had, as stunned as his ears were. Then he heard the signal that came after, high and icy, a sound like a winter wind.
"In three minutes, Orion Two would rise." (5, p. 420)
Can a signal sound icy? OK, it sounds like a winter wind. Regular readers of this blog will understand why I quote this passage. A sound like a winter wind is highly significant at such a dramatic moment.
Mikli and Wairao fight to their deaths. Three of our four viewpoint characters are still above ground, two of them soon to be above the atmosphere.
Plik, having prophesied a new Armaggedon/Ragnarok, has now composed a song which includes the lines:
"After Easter, need we dread
"Fire and ice when we are dead?
"Hell indwells in us instead." (CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO, 3, p. 395)
This is the old:
MEPHASTOPHILIS: Why
this is hell, nor am I out of it. (See here.)
- in new words. (Mephastophilis is quoted in James Blish's Black Easter.)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE begins not with Iern and Ronica in space but with "...the angry magnates..." (p. 422) back in the Domain. I cannot handle that big a change of perspective at this time of night! The TV news has just come on. Earth Real strikes again.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
A wind can be pictured by showing us its effects, such as in the image you chose for this blog piece.
And that poem Anderson wrote, which you quoted here, has stuck in my mind since I first read ORION SHALL RISE. It is one of the pieces of evidence which had me wondering how truly agnostic Anderson was about God in his later years.
Ad astra! Sean
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