Coming Home

Mirkheim, XV.

Newly arrived back on his home planet, Hermes, David Falkayn experiences late afternoon light in a forest where:

"Ornithoids flitted among bare twigs and buzzbugs danced in the sunbeams like dustmotes." (p. 210)

His response:

"A sudden powerful sense of - not homecoming - longing gripped Falkayn. Was this his country yet, or had he roamed from it for overly many years?" (pp. 210-211)

Before this novel, we have only seen Falkayn roaming and we would not have read this description of Hermes if Poul Anderson had, as originally expected, ended the trader team sub-series with "Lodestar."

Falkayn's concern that the Hermetian forest might no longer be "his country" reminded me of a passage in Mary Lutyens' biography of Jiddu Krishnamurti. Google enables us to link to that very passage:

"'Adyar is not the same. The beauty of moonlit nights, the palm leaf shadows and the stillness of the evenings, but something has gone out of Adyar.' It was he who had gone out of Adyar."

-see here.