The Ways Of Love II

"'...I wish you could give me an idea of what the indissoluble unit is among humans.'" (Poul Anderson, Explorations, New York, 1981, p. 139)

A very basic question: in "The Ways of Love," (see here) Terangi Maclaren, survivor of The Enemy Stars, asks it of an Arvelan couple whose biology makes the nuclear family their most fundamental social unit whereas the structure of human families has changed throughout history and is changing now.

But I do not think that there is any answer to Maclaren's question. Human beings are differentiated from all other Terrestrial species by the fact that we change our environment with hands and brain and that we do it together. Thinking about our environment gives us Reason while society gives us Morality. By social morality, I mean not just arbitrary tabus but common interests and mutual obligations which can only exist in a social context.

Cooperative environmental alterations (redecorating, if you like) must be common to all technologically civilized species? But in addition the Arvelans have biological features that oblige them to live and work as indissoluble couples, not as plastic individuals capable of functioning within widely differing social arrangements - that's us.

Anderson's Merseians, Ythrians of the New Faith and Arvelans are all monotheists but how different:

the God steels the Race;
God the Hunter stoops on all;
God is love and love is mostly sex...

A Terrestrial monotheist seeking a basis for interstellar ecumenism would encounter major problems.

The Ways Of Love

If I buy an anthology because it contains a story by James Blish or Poul Anderson, I do not read the entire anthology but, if I buy an Anderson collection, I expect to read any stories in it that I have not already read elsewhere.

Despite this, Explorations (New York, 1981) has been on my shelf for years yet I have no memory of ever reading "The Ways Of Love" and either had not known or had completely forgotten that this story is a sequel to Anderson's The Enemy Stars.

A logical sequel: the novel climaxes with First Contact so how was that contact perceived by the other side? And what happened next?

"Sometimes a vessel in transit gets used as a relay station by a couple or a party bound for too distant a world to make it in a single jump. Then they stop for a short visit. This would happen in Fleetwing, she being on our uttermost frontier and bound onward into strangeness." (p. 118)

Meaning and context make it clear that the word "not" should be inserted between "...would..." and "...happen..."

In the novel, human matter transmission is by instantaneous gravitational propagation whereas, in the short story, the Arvelans use a "...modulated tachyonic beam..." (p. 118). Tachyons, although not instantaneous, are faster than light with no upward speed limit so they would clearly be able to serve the same purpose.

The Arvelan process of child-nurturing fully involves both parents, ensuring that:

they are naturally monogamous;
their basic social unit is the nuclear family;
remarriage would mean becoming a different person;
they become killing machines if their partners are threatened (Terrestrial kidnappers do not know what has hit them);
they have never had nation-states! (This is a revolutionary idea - make love, not war - that the Terrestrial Protectorate all too understandably wants to suppress.)

It is good to see what had happened to two human characters after the events of the novel. The sole survivor of a space expedition married his shipmate's widow although this shocks their Arvelan friends.