Two Deaths

Both Dominic Flandry's fiancee, Kossara Vymezal, and Fenn's fiancee, Kinna Ronay, are shot dead during exchanges of gunfire. Kossara's death was devastating and I thought that Chives' immediately ensuing flippant dialogue:

"'I say...you chaps might pitch in a bit, don't you know.'"

-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT XVII, p. 562 -

- was highly discordant and inappropriate.

By contrast, I had forgotten about Kinna's death and was surprised by it on rereading The Fleet Of Stars although I had remembered that Fenn would not wind up happily married. How does he wind up? Glancing ahead to the last page of the novel, we find that the concluding chapter, 32, comprises two words:

"FENN WOKE." (p. 403)

And thus ends this tetralogy. To quote the Coda of James Blish's Tetralogy, Volume I:

"'Every end,' Wagoner wrote on the wall of his cell on the last day, 'is a new beginning.'"

-James Blish, They Shall Have Stars IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 7-129 AT CODA, p. 129.

 

(Volume IV of that Tetralogy ends: "Creation began." (p. 596))

The universe continues:

"The hugeness, diversity, mystery of the universe through space, through time. What was coming into being as he talked, what joys, triumphs, griefs, horrors, creations - what life?"

-The Fleet Of Stars, 19, p. 230.

Poul Anderson shows us some of it.