A sharp edged bar is "'Not an assegai..." but:
"''Tis enough, 'twill serve...'" (p. 382)
Why does such an inconsequential passage come to be quoted? A few lines above it, we find:
"A plague o' both your houses."
(That's the trouble with Shakespeare: too many quotes!)
Objects are seen against the background of interstellar space:
"...the wheel turned, enormous, a mill athwart stars..." (pp. 386-387)
"...turrets, bays, webs, masts, murky against the constellations." (p. 387)
"Distance-dwindled, a shape went slowly, black, across the Milky Way." (ibid.)
The mutiny takes two more lives:
"'Unto Almighty God we commend the souls of our brothers departed...'
"Nansen read the service through to the end. His crew responded according to their faiths, or kept silence." (p. 389)
If the mutiny had succeeded, then the captain taking the service would have been Brent, not Nansen.
The crew rightly respond or keep silence. We come together for events like funerals and discuss our differences of belief on other occasions.
The bodies are buried in the black hole.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A pity Brent could not have dismissed the petty politics of the 22nd century!* After 10,000 years or more the quarrels and controversies of that time were ludicrously irrelevant.
Ad astra! Sean
*At least I think "Envoy" left Earth in the 22nd century AD.
Sean,
I think it did.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
That was the impression I got from STARFARERS, more or less 100 years from now, Earth time.
Ad astra! Sean
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