THE ENEMY STARS, Concluding Chapters

The Enemy Stars, 17-18.

It would be possible to compile a very long collection just of Poul Anderson's descriptions of nature. For example, Chapter 17 opens:

"Where Sunda Straits lay beneath rain (but sunlight came through to walk upon the water) the land fell steep. It was altogether green, in a million subtle hues, jungle and plantation and rice paddy, it burned with green leaves. White mists wreathed the peak of a volcano, and was it thunder across wind or did the mountain talk in sleep?" (p. 131)

Sunda Straits reminds alert readers of Nicholas van Rijn. As ever, wind speaks if only we could interpret it.

Chapter 17 opens:

"The North Atlantic rolled in from the west, gray and green and full of thunder. A wind blew white manes up on the waves. Low to the south gleamed the last autumnal daylight, and clouds massed iron-colored in the north, brewing sleet." (p. 137)

For once, this wind is just part of the weather.

Maclaren tells Tamara Ryerson:

"'...I will arrange the funeral in any way you desire and -' His voice trailed off. The rain laughed on the thatch." (17, pp. 132-133)

Laughter after a reference to a funeral? Does nature laugh at the characters? Or does the rain's laughter prefigure a happy later life for Maclaren and Tamara who apparently become a couple hereafter?

"...men went to space, as they had gone to sea, and space destroyed them..." (18, p. 138)

"...high hopes upon the sea and the stars..." (ibid.)

"...they died and their kin mourned them, as would be the fate of seafarers for the next several thousand years...and afterward spacefarers, timefarers..."

-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrolman (New York, 1983), pp. 7-115 AT pp. 108-109.

"The People of the Sea and the People of the Stars..."

-front cover blurb on Poul Anderson, Maurai & Kith (New York, 1982).

(Ironically, in the concluding Kith, "People of the Stars," story, the starfarers meet human beings who have adapted to living in a sea.)

It is all one. There is more but later.