Life And Time

Mirkheim, I.

David Falkayn was a trade pioneer for over twenty years whereas Coya was in the team for just five years. They both stopped when their first child, Juanita, was born. There is an echo of the "Lodestar" generation gap between Coya and van Rijn:

"An older, more hedonistic, less settled generation than Coya's had bred enough neurotics that she felt, and made her husband feel, children needed and deserved a solid home. And now she had another on the way." (p. 34)

Nicholas Falkayn will be born before the end of Mirkheim. We will see him in conversation with his son, Nathaniel/"Nat," on Avalon in the following instalment, "Wingless." Depending on our reading order, we either have already seen or will later see their remote descendant, Tabitha Falkayn, on Avalon in The People of the Wind. The Falkayns will lead the colonization of Avalon between instalments. We see a little of of the early days of that colonization in "Wingless" but through Nat's eyes, not through those of either his parents or his grandparents. A handful of stories must cover a lot of history.

These reflections, prompted by the reference to Coya's second child "on the way," have swept us up onto a historical level and have taken us away from David's and Coya's immediate circumstances at the beginning of Mirkheim. The members of the original trader team, David Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan, must embark on a diplomatic mission and this time Coya, both mother and expecting, cannot go with them.

(This gets complicated. Both the original reading order and the chronological reading order involve reading The People of the Wind some time after Mirkheim. However, we must also take into account those of us who read the Technic History just in the random order in which we came across individual novels, short stories or collections. The narrative seems to shift around as if it were real history.)