Coya Conyon

Rereading Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization has returned us to my favourite passage in this entire future history series, Coya Conyon's reflections as she accompanies her grandfather, Nicholas van Rijn, on a dangerous mission in an Ythrian spaceship. Coya gives us some sense of life in the Solar Commonwealth. When she was very young, van Rijn:

"...would roll roaring into her parents' home..."

-Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, March 2010), pp. 631-680 AT p. 641.

We are not told whether the "home" is a house or an apartment. Checking the earlier story, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," we find that the Riefenstahls lived in an apartment in San Francisco Integrate. We know from more than one story that van Rijn lives in a penthouse on the Winged Cross in Chicago Integrate which stretches around the planet. On returning to Earth, van Rijn would take Coya out in a sailboat, to a live performance or around the Solar System. Now aged twenty-five, she is an astrophysicist working at Luna Astrocenter and is "...a typical modern human..." (pp. 643-644) whose contemporaries are turning away from the wildness of her grandfather's generation.

Coya had told van Rijn that she wanted to accompany him simply for the adventure and indeed she enjoys travelling with the Ythrians. For both Coya and van Rijn, more is happening below the surface.