Van Rijn Still Counts

Mirkheim, I.

When the Falkayns retired from trade pioneering, Chee Lan joined another team whereas Adzel entered a monastery on Earth. The Falkayns raise a family, Chee Lan gets rich and Adzel meditates. "O brave new world..."

Nicholas van Rijn, "The Man Who Counts," knows how to motivate each of the three original team members to come together once again for a different purpose. Falkayn agrees that the diplomatic and intelligence-gathering mission to Babur is necessary and that the old team has the best chance to achieve something. Van Rijn can appeal to Adzel's sense of duty. He will have to talk money with Chee Lan but makes a show of talking about everything else first. He asks her to think about many things, including travelling again with her closest friends and preventing trouble that kills people or cuts into profits. This reminds me of a line that I read somewhere else:

"This could kill hundreds, injure thousands, costs millions!"

Chee Lan travels by air:

"An extraterrestrial fellow traveller was still rather a rarity on Earth..." (p. 37)

Regular interstellar travel is still in its early days. There are passages in Robert Heinlein's Future History, Volume II, The Green Hills of Earth, where interplanetary travel is still in its early days and the narrator and his readers share this experience:

"Of course Space Terminal is quite a city, what with the Mars and Venus traffic, but even today Supra-New York is still rather primitive, hardly more than a fuelling-point and a restaurant waiting-room. It has only been the past five years that it has even been equipped to offer the comfort of one-gravity centrifuge service to passengers with queasy stomachs."

-Robert Heinlein, "Space Jockey" IN Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth (London, 1967), pp. 19-36 AT p. 21)

Someone said that Heinlein gave the future a daily life. The closest approach to this in Poul Anderson's Technic History is "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson." The narrator of "Space Jockey" is right in there with his readers whereas there is a historical perspective to the statement in Mirkheim that an extraterrestrial traveller was a rarity.

(The Green Hills of Earth has some other good passages like that.)