Admiralty, p.1
Admiralty, page 1
Admiralty
Volume Four
The Collected Short Works of
Poul Anderson
Edited by Rick Katze
© 2011 by the Trigonier Trust
“Poul Anderson” © 2011 by David G. Hartwell
© 1957, 1983 by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson
“The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound”
Dust jacket illustration © 2011 by John Picacio
Dust jacket design © 2011 by Alice N. S. Lewis
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic, magical or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval, without permission
in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer,
who may quote brief passages in a review.
First Hardcover Edition, February 2011
ISBN: 978-1-886778-94-8 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-61037-330-2 (epub) March, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61037-011-0 (mobi) March, 2021
NESFA Press is an imprint of, and NESFA® is a registered trademark of,
the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.
Post Office Box 809
Framingham, MA 01701
www.nesfapress.org
info@nesfapress.org
Contents
Editor’s Introduction
“Poul Anderson” by David G. Hartwell
Admiralty
The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound
Delenda Est
The Pugilist
Inside Straight
Lodestar
The Bitter Bread
Gypsy
Marius
Home
Quixote and the Windmill
Black Bodies
Kyrie
The Problem of Pain
Holmgang
Goat Song
The Barrier Moment
The Star Beast
Eutopia
Eutopia (afterword)
Horse Trader
Murphy’s Hall
Sister Planet
Among Thieves
Operation Changeling
Acknowledgments
Sources
Admiralty
Editors’ Introduction
This is the fourth volume of a seven-volume series of collections of Poul Anderson’s short works. The series contains about half of the approximately 4 million words of short fiction that he wrote during his career.
Some stories are elements of series. Some are stand-alone pieces. Except for the first volume, which contained the three “Wing Alak” stories, these volumes are not intended to compile complete series or offer a chronological collection of his works. This series is intended to preserve the original magazine versions of the included stories, though a few stories are from later publications revised by Poul.
In this volume, as in the others, you will find a mix of time travel, fantasy. humor, technology, near future, and the far future.
Manse Everard, David Falkyn, and Nicholas van Rijn appear in this volume. A later volume contains a Dominic Flandry story.
Inevitably, the passage of time has turned some stories into alternate-world fantasies, originally thought to be science fiction. “The Pugilist” is based on an event which, fortunately, didn’t happen in the 20th Century. Recently discovered details about Venus have made in “Sister Planet” impossible. But the stories remain fun to read.
Poul Anderson was a devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes. Previous volumes included Sherlockian stories, as does this one: “The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound”, co-written with Gordon R. Dickson.
Take up this book and enjoy works by a master craftsman.
NESFA Editors
March 2021
Poul Anderson
by David G. Hartwell
Poul Anderson’s “The Saturn Game” won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novella in 1982, a choice therefore of both readers and writers. It is a story of men and women who have traveled far, some of whom out of boredom and lack of useful work have allowed themselves too much involvement in fantasy role-playing—they have turned away from real nature into the realms of the imagination. Then the natural universe confronts them with great beauty and great danger. And, enchanted by the beauty, they blind themselves to the danger. Time and again they fail to hear the voice of reason and so their flaw is sad and frustrating, if not tragic. Certainly it is deadly. And it is not theirs alone, for there are other groups of gamers exploring elsewhere perhaps in similar danger.
This is an allegory for our time as well as theirs, I think, calling out for psychological strength and balance in the face of the seduction of beguiling entertainments, in order that we might survive and achieve our goals. It is a sad story, in a way, but a wonderful story too, and filled with strange and compelling landscapes that have the virtue of reality. In it, Anderson uses both a fantasy style, a poetic language of allusion and metric rhythms, and a science fiction style, colloquial and clear, perhaps a bit hard-boiled in this case for contrast. The voice of reason is, in the end more powerful, but only just. There are many moments throughout the story when we feel, with the characters, that fantasy will get us through the worst moments, and this is perhaps Anderson’s greatest achievement, and the root source of the story’s emotional impact: that it does not, though often we want it to, and that SF triumphs over fantasy.
Poul Anderson, one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction who lent particular honor to that title, died at the end of July 2001. He was a gentleman, a gentle wit, and a professional writer of astonishing competence, varied talents and interests, and a thoughtful and underappreciated stylist.
Poul Anderson’s first published SF story was in Astounding, 1947. His first novel, Vault of the Ages, was published in 1952 and I read it in seventh grade a year or so later, already familiar with Anderson’s early short fiction. I thought it was a neat and engaging story then and still do. I began to follow his fiction, seek out his stories, and continue to do so to this day. I remember finally tracking down a hardcover of The Broken Sword, his rich, intriguing fantasy novel after several more years, (I didn’t live near a bookstore til then) and being even more impressed. I still consider it one of the best fantasy novels of the 20th century. By the end of the 1950s he was one of my favorite SF writers. It was a particular pleasure to grow up and become, on several occasions between 1970 and the end of his life, his editor. I bought his books every chance I got, nearly everywhere I worked as an editor, for 30 years.
I thought so highly of his writings and his authorial persona that I was initially surprised, and I admit a little disappointed upon first meeting him to find he mostly wanted to talk about contracts and the mechanics of publishing. This was 1972 and I was a young consulting editor who had bought, or participated in buying, a five-book package of new novels from him. I remember him sitting there on the sofa at LACon 3 in the SFWA suite calmly talking business while Philip K. Dick convinced a young woman in a belly-dancing outfit to lie down on the carpet to demonstrate how she could move a quarter from her tummy into her navel by muscular control. I has mistakenly assumed that he would be personally flamboyant and dominate the room, as he so often dominated the issues of magazines in which his stories appeared.
Poul Anderson spent his early years as a writer in Minnesota, with his friends Gordon R. Dickson and Clifford D. Simak; later in the 1950s, he moved to California (the Bay Area, where he lived for the rest of his life) and become friends with Frank Herbert and Jack Vance as well. The three of them and their families all lived together on a houseboat one summer. I have heard stories about that summer from all of them. He was married to the poet and writer Karen Anderson, a famous beauty in her day—with whom he has also collaborated—and their daughter, Astrid, is married to Greg Bear. To the readers and writers who grew up reading his work he was something of a heroic figure, a living giant of the SF field.
And he was a big man, a sailor of small boats in his day (Jerry Pournelle used Poul the sailor as the model for the central character of one of his Wade Curtis paperback thrillers), stronger even than he looked, but also a talented poet. There was something of the Melancholy Dane about him, but also something of the Viking adventurer out for fun and profit. He used to go out and fight as a swordsman in mock battles put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism. I never saw it, but I heard he was a formidable opponent.
He never let his math skills from his undergraduate degree in physics rust, and was known to do appropriate calculations in designing the planetary and other settings of his fictions. I was pleased and somewhat awestruck to see that side of him in person, over dinner, as he enumerated—as he was calculating them in his head—many details of the nature of a world he might consider writing about, derived on the spot from the nature of its orbit and sun. First the science, then the fiction.
He was a popular guest at science fiction conventions around the world and an enthusiastic attendee. You might not have recognized him at first, because he was just as likely to be sitting in a corner drinking a beer and talking to someone about contractual terms, or politics, in later years as he moved somewhat to the right (somewhat in the manner of Robert A. Heinlein, who was his model early on). He didn’t want to be taken to dinner in Berkeley, which he referred to as The People’s Republic of Berkeley. But ask him a question and you would recognize in the response as wise and sharp a mind behind the answer as w
During the fifties and the following four decades he produced a long string of fine SF and fantasy adventure stories and novels. “He is perhaps sf’s most prolific writer of any consistent quality,” said The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. I concur. The extraordinary thing is that he continued to write so well, given that he wrote so much. James Blish, in the 1950s, called him “the continuing explosion.” I can’t think of an Anderson book or story I couldn’t recommend for reading pleasure.
His devotion both to science and to fiction made him one of the most admired and popular living SF writers. He continued the hard SF mode of Robert A. Heinlein and John W. Campbell, the Golden Age tradition that has yielded a high proportion of the classics of the field. It is also the tradition of Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells, of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. His best SF novels include Brain Wave, The Enemy Stars, The High Crusade, Tau Zero, and The Boat of a Million Years, and recently Genesis—and perhaps a dozen more. He won the Hugo Award for short fiction seven times. Of his many excellent collections, All One Universe is perhaps most revealing of the man, since it contains not only first class SF stories but also several fine essays and extensive story notes by Anderson, who has been notably reticent in his other books.
He also wrote an impressive body of fantasy fiction, most notably The Broken Sword, Three Hearts and Three Lions, A Midsummer Tempest, the novels of Ys, in collaboration with Karen, and the stories that make up Operation Chaos. He wrote mysteries for a while in the late fifties and early sixties, good ones, and was a Baker Street Irregular.
Anderson was a Romantic and a rugged individualist, with an affection for pastoral landscapes worthy of Wordsworth or Shelley, unusual in one who writes with such devotion about science, technology, and space travel. The only comparison that comes to mind is Arthur C. Clarke, for instance Clarke’s poetic description of earthrise as seen on the moon, in Earthlight. Look, for instance, at the opening paragraphs of his famous story, “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” for as lovely and precise a description of a field of flowers as you could find in SF—but they are alien flowers and the description serves to establish differences from our world as well as to give sensuous details and establish a mood. Not enough has been said about his command of technique and stylistic excellences as a writer, but I regard him as one of the premier masters of setting ever in the SF field. Whether he is being vivid and imaginative, as in the example above, or vivid and realistically true to known scientific facts and images, as in his depictions of distant astronomical vistas in Tau Zero or “Kyrie,” Anderson is precise and sensitive to sensuous detail.
His heroes are heroic and strong in the slightly tragic vein of 19th century Romanticism—often they have suffered some earlier emotional wound—but blended in is a practical streak, an allegiance to reason and to knowledge that is a hallmark of hard science fiction characters, that Heinlein and Campbell tradition referred to above. You know a fair amount about what they are feeling, but what really matters is what they do, regardless of how they feel.
Anderson respects the military virtues of courage, loyalty, honor and sacrifice, and often subjects his characters to situations of extreme hardship, allowing them to show these virtues. But he usually doesn’t write about battle. In fact, his characters are businessmen (such as series of books and stories about the wily trader Nicholas van Rijn) as often as soldiers (such as the Dominic Flandry series). In “The Saturn Game,” as in Tau Zero, they are scientists, multiple specialists. In The Boat of a Million Years, they are immortals living throughout human history, from the distant past into the far future, not necessarily above average in intelligence or emotional maturity—though the necessities of survival through the calamities of history have weeded out the weaker ones, and even some of the stronger.
Instead, again in the hard SF tradition, he most often wrote about strong men and women pitted against the challenge of survival in the face of the natural universe. Some of them die. But Anderson was optimist enough to see beyond the dark times into both a landscape, sometimes a starscape, and a future of wonders—for the survivors. Anderson’s future is not for the lazy or the stay-at-homes. He was fairly gloomy about current social trends, big government, repression of the individual, so he catapulted his characters into a future of new frontiers, making them face love and death in vividly imagined and depicted environments far from home. I recall the power and beauty and pathos of his fine black hole story, “Kyrie,” the wit of The Man Who Counts (The War of the Wing Men) the good humor of “A Bicycle Built for Brew,” the enormous scope and amazing compression of “Memorial.” His range was impressive.
When Anderson died, I wrote a piece that said that the loss of a writer and a man of his stature to the community that is the SF field is incalculable, but enormous. He has left a body of work as a model to other writers, but the constant challenge of his presence to advance the tradition of rational wonder and to use the Romantic literary tradition’s arsenal of styles and techniques to underpin the realism of the scientific ideas is irreplaceable.
David G. Hartwell
Pleasantville, NY
Admiralty
Consider his problem. The Phoenix region lay a hundred and fifty-odd light-years from Sol. The only human settlement in it was the French colony planet New Europe, circling the sun Aurore. Alerion had seized this and was rapidly building orbital defenses which would make it impregnable. Gunnar Heim had one ship. Fox II was, indeed, a cruiser, her gravitrons capable of fantastic acceleration, her automated armament able to curtain her in laser energy and nuclear hellfire while directing a fatal slash through an enemy’s similar defense. But she was alone, a privateer commissioned on a technicality. Her men had signed on less for loot than for the sake of striking at man’s old foe. However, she could only resupply by selling her captures. Thus every Aleriona vessel she took drained her strength. The prize crews could not return and rendezvous, when Fox depended for survival on unpredictable motion through immensity. No news came from home. And that, slowly, wore down men’s spirits.
The prisoners he interviewed continued to tell Heim that Earth had not moved, that the World Federation Navy was still merely glaring at Alerion’s, out on the Marches. He believed them. As the months passed, his own hope faded.
Yet he was doing tremendous damage. Aurore was not so close to The Eith either. The occupiers of New Europe sat at the end of a long supply line; and they could not spare much bottom for this garrison, when Earth’s superior force might strike. Heim had not killed anybody—he was proud of that—-but he had sent valuable personnel off to internment; he had grabbed ships and material that were sorely missed; he tied up an unholy number of warcraft on convoy duty and the hunt for him. In the end, Alerion sent one of the best naval minds it had, to deal with the situation. The newcomer started arming unescorted cargo carriers.
Fox encountered only one such Q-boat. Had the human crew been less carefully picked and trained, it could have been the end of her. As it was, she reacted smoothly to the surprise, warded off everything that was cast, and laid the enemy under her guns. Meroeth’s captain surrendered.
In a way, though, he had accomplished his purpose. None realized it, but Gunnar Heim’s raiding was at an end.
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Joy filled the ship, where she lay far outsystem with her captive. This was more than another success. There had been humans aboard Meroeth, who were now set free.
The mess seethed with men. Only twenty-five privateers remained, and a dozen New Europeans, in a room that had once held a hundred; but they seemed to overflow it, shouting, singing, clashing their glasses, until the bulkheads trembled. Endre Vadasz—wanderfooted troubadour of space, sworn brother to his captain—leaped onto a table. His slim body poised while his fingers flew across the guitar strings. More and more of the French began to sing with him:
C’est une fleur, fleur de prairie,
C’est une belle Rose de Provence—
At first Heim was laughing too loudly at Jean Irribarne’s last joke to hear. Then the music grew, and it took him. He remembered a certain night in Bonne Chance. Suddenly he was there again. Roofs peaked around the garden, black under the stars, but the yellow light from windows joined the light of Diane rising full. A small wind rustled the shrubs, to mingle scents of rose and lily with unnamed pungencies from native blooms. Madelon’s hand was trusting in his. Gravel scrunched beneath their feet as they walked toward the summerhouse. And somewhere someone was playing a tape, this very song drifted down the warm air, earthy and loving.
