The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson

by Roger Elwood

  Barbro breathed, “She said to me, when their banners flew in the last of our cities, we would rejoice.”

  “I think we would have, by then,” Sherrinford admitted. “Nevertheless, I believe in choosing one’s destiny.”

  He shook himself, as if casting off a burden. He knocked the dottle from his pipe and stretched, muscle by muscle. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t going to happen.”

  She looked straight at him. ‘Thanks to you.”

  A flush went up his thin cheeks. “In time, I’m sure, somebody else would have—What matters is what we do next, and that’s too big a decision for one individual or one generation to make.”

  She rose. “Unless the decision is personal, Eric,” she suggested, feeling heat in her own face.

  It was curious to see him shy. “I was hoping we might meet again.”

  “We will.”

  §

  Ayoch sat on Wolund’s Barrow. Aurora shuddered so brilliant, in such vast sheafs of light, as almost to hide the waning moons. Firethorn blooms had fallen; a few still glowed around the tree roots, amidst dry brok which crackled underfoot and smelled like woodsmoke. The air remained warm, but no gleam was left on the sunset horizon.

  “Farewell, fare lucky,” the pook called. Mistherd and Shadow-of-a-Dream never looked back. It was as if they didn’t dare. They trudged on out of sight, toward the human camp whose lights made a harsh new star in the south.

  Ayoch lingered. He felt he should also offer good-bye to her who had lately joined him that slept in the dolmen. Likely none would meet here again for loving or magic. But he could only think of one old verse that might do. He stood and trilled:

  “Out of her breast

  a blossom ascended.

  The summer burned it.

  The song is ended.”

  Then he spread his wings for the long flight away.

  “Her Strong

  Enchantments Failing”

  “The Queen of Air and Darkness” displays many of the best characteristics of Poul Anderson’s writing. This fact earned the novelette a first place in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fictions special Anderson issue (April 1971), then a Nebula award from the Science Fiction Writers of America and a Hugo from the Thirtieth World Science Fiction Convention. But the work does exhibit some of Anderson’s characteristic weaknesses as well, and is thus representative enough so that a close examination of this one work should enhance the appreciation of Anderson’s production as a whole. We shall approach ‘The Queen of Air and Darkness” with this larger aim in mind.

  But before we move on to analysis, it may be useful to review some of the prominent features of the novelette’s plot and background: On the colony planet Roland, a young widow, Barbro Cullen, comes to private detective Eric Sherrinford for help. Barbro had taken her three-year-old son Jimmy along on a scientific expedition to the polar Darklands. When Jimmy disappears from camp, Barbro believes he must have been stolen by the mysterious Outlings, known principally from the colonists’ folklore. This lore, however, portrays the Outlings so much like elves or fairies of terrestrial tradition that the authorities dismiss them as superstition—or defer to them as supernatural beings. Whether or not supernatural, the Outlings are real, as we learn from alternate scenes from the viewpoint of kidnapped humans. The relatively warm but dark polar region seems a sort of Rolandic fairyland, peopled by various eldritch creatures, ruled by the majestic and beautiful Queen of Air and Darkness.

  However, as the novelette progresses we learn that the Outling realm is in fact a sham, an illusion cast by Roland’s hitherto-undiscovered aboriginal population, who intend to subvert the value system of the human civilization. Through such means as telepathic suggestion and induced hallucination, they gradually resurrect man’s ancient superstitions, concretions of tendencies never deeply buried in the human mind, in the hope that this resurgence of an antiscientific way of thought will facilitate the absorption of the humans into the aborigines’ biologically oriented, nonmechanical culture.

  When Sherrinford’s deductions have made at least some of the above clear to him, he ventures with Barbro into the Darklands in a ground-effect car shielded against telepathic interference. But when Sherrinford leaves the car to capture a changeling for interrogation, the nicor cuts off his return. Barbro leaves the jammer field to help him and is lured away.

  We follow from her viewpoint as she is brought before the Queen, struggling feebly the while to regain her sense of reality despite an illusion of her late husband and other comforting visions from times past. In the nick of time, Sherrinford arrives at the rescue, and pits the ground-effect car’s armament against the mere muscle of the Queen’s guardians—“tanks” against “cavalry.” The grand illusion dispels, and the Queen is revealed as a vaguely humanoid saurian.

  Thus the aborigines’ plot is undone; Sherrinford, however, expresses the hope that humankind will not be vindictive in its triumph. Roland was the “Outlings’ ” world first, after all, and in any case the aborigines have much to teach the colonists.

  In the “personal subplot” typical of Anderson, Barbro comes to realize that life goes on outside the memory of her husband, while Sherrinford overcomes his Sherlock-Holmesian reserve toward women. At the conclusion of the novelette, there are hints of romance.

  §

  The image of the Queen of Air and Darkness pervades Anderson’s novelette. The Queen-persona assumed by the aborigine leader is an “archetype,” as is the Queen’s realm, in approximately a Jungian sense. This accounts in part for the Outlings’ power. As Sherrinford explains,

  “We meet persons who, in varying degrees, suggest Christ or Buddha or the Earth Mother or, say, on a less exalted plane, Hamlet or d'Artagnan. Historical, fictional, and mythical, such figures crystallize basic aspects of the human psyche, and when we meet them in our real experience, our reaction goes deeper than consciousness.

  … “Man also creates archetypes that are not individuals. The Anima, the Shadow—and, it seems, the Outworld. The world of magic, of glamour—which originally meant enchantment— of half-human beings . . (p. 82)1

  In his introduction to the novelette (in the magazine publication), Anderson explains that mythological figures resembling the Queen can be found all over the world and as far back in prehistory as archeology can take us. The universality of the “Queen” archetype suggests what a close grip the concept has on human minds. Something of this power comes through even in a short description of the Queen:

  Very tall she was in her robes woven of northlights, and her starry crown and her garlands of kiss-me-never. Her countenance recalled Aphrodite of Milos, whose picture Barbro had often seen in the realms of men, save that the Queen’s was more fair and more majesty dwelt upon it and in the night-blue eyes. Around her the gardens woke to new reality, the court of the Dwellers and the heaven-climbing spires.

  “Be welcome,” she spoke, her speaking a song, “forever.” (p. 76)

  However universal the basic conception, the Queen must manifest herself in a particular form, and for this Anderson relies heavily on the medieval tradition of the Fairy Queen as recorded in ballads and romances. The Fairy Queen probably began as a powerful mother goddess,2 but gradually the various European peoples modified their ideas. The Irish fairy-folk, the Tuatha De Danann, preserved the old conception in their name, which may be explained as “the people of the goddess Dana/’3 but, powers once confined to a single goddess were distributed among numerous fay women. Even when Fairyland retains a queen, she often acquires a king: indeed, in some traditions, the most important woman fay is the daughter of the Fairy King.4 Furthermore, in much of folklore, the role of the Fairy Queen as lover overshadows her role as mother. This notion too is very ancient, but perhaps its most familiar expression came with the almost-human fay ladies of medieval romance:

  The fay of the Arthurian romance is essentially a supernatural woman, always more beautiful than imagination can possibly fancy her, untouched by time, unha
mpered by lack of resources for the accomplishment of her pleasure, superior to human necessity, in short, unlimited in her power.0

  In his fantasy novels The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions, Anderson portrays elf women much along medieval lines, and they do entice the heroes of those works into sexual entanglements; but this erotic element has almost entirely disappeared in “The Queen of Air and Darkness.” The Queen is incomparably beautiful, but she is to be worshipped from afar.

  Given the fact that the aborigines cannot maintain a perfect deception at short range (Barbro begins to see through the illusion of her husband), it would be out of the question for the Queen to take human lovers, but we may also look for some deeper significance here. We can, of course, refer to other relevant models, such as the Norwegian Huldra (beautiful from the front, hideous from the rear; like the aborigines possessing a tail), or the medieval cult of the Virgin. But beyond this, inaccessibility contributes to the definition of the Queen’s persona in other ways, which we shall discuss below.

  One reason for the aborigines’ choice of the Fairy Queen archetype out of the many types available to them is her association with a call away from responsibility and rationality. This aspect of Fairyland has a long history—Circes island; the tenth-century Irish Imram Brain maic Febrail, which tells of Bran Fabailson’s voyage to the Land of Women; Morgans Avalon—but the idea remains attractive to a “‘modern” society.

  In the first place, the Queen promises precious fellowship and security to the Rolandic colonist. The entire colony is horribly alone, tens of parsecs from other humans in an Einsteinian universe in which there is no faster-than-light travel. The million human colonists are not precisely beyond the help of other men—Sherrinford himself is an immigrant— but they are beyond the assurance of help. Such aid could, in any case, come only from other struggling settlements: ‘Two or three times a century, a ship may call from some other colony. (Not from Earth. Earth has long ago sunk into alien concerns.)” (p. 41) This last sombre statement is virtually all we hear of Earth in “The Queen of Air and Darkness.” However, Anderson also alludes to the planet Rustum (p. 46), and thereby both explains Roland’s isolation from the mother planet and suggests the sort of disaster which may befall the colony.

  The colonization of Rustum is the subject of Anderson’s 1959-1961 series of novelettes collected as Orbit Unlimited. The series details the tribulations of a middle-class, largely North American group, the Constitutionalists, who stubbornly adhere to a scientific outlook and a libertarian theory of government on an Earth which has abandoned both concepts. The mother planet, under the weight of increasing population and diminishing resources, is sinking into ignorance and tyranny, and Earth’s culture is shifting toward heavy drug use and toward Oriental mysticism. The Constitutionalists can find no way to protect their values except to escape. They pressure the government into allowing them to colonize a recently discovered habitable planet, Rustum. The characters of Orbit Unlimited believe that the colonization of Rustum probably represents Earths last act in space. Obviously, in light of ‘The Queen of Air and Darkness,” their fears were premature. In a manner characteristic of many dying cultures, Earth managed one last resurgence, lasting probably for several centuries (for in Orbit Unlimited no man-habitable worlds but Rustum had even been discovered), and planted other colonies. However, eventually the end foreseen in Orbit Unlimited must have come. After a severe struggle, Earth has succumbed to a Darkness similar to that which now threatens Rolands colonists.

  Half of Rolands million human inhabitants live in the one city of Christmas Landing. This concentration presumably allows the colony to maintain the degree of specialization necessary for a technological society, and it may in some measure compensate for the isolation of the colony as a whole. But the other half of the population is spread out over the entire continent, largely on one-family farmsteads. These produce for the market, and while such commerce decreases their isolation, it may increase their insecurity: Roland has a largely capitalist economy and a decentralized government, so that it seems likely that farm incomes fluctuate widely from year to year. The farmsteads are tied to the outside world through telecommunication and by air travel, but even these are subject to disruption by Roland’s erratic weather. An escape from this worry and this loneliness must seem enormously attractive, even an escape which must be purchased by the rejection of the influence of a scientific education. Once the countryside has gone over, the city must follow or starve.

  But this psychological predisposition is not all the aborigines have working for them. Though entirely within a “realistic” framework, their land has a striking resemblance to Faerie. From a point of view within the plot, this provides an additional motive for the aborigines’ adoption of the Fairy Queen archetype. From an “exterior” view, Anderson has provided a marvelously ingenious rationalization of the magical —and not entirely as a game, but also for serious reasons which we shall discuss below.

  Fairyland has certain specifications. There must be little or no sunlight, as Earthly legends tell us that fairies flee the sun. However, there must be some sort of eldritch illumination, both for the benefit of human visitors and because we know the fairies are not a gloomy folk. Faerie must have a location apart from usual human habitations, but one in which kidnapped humans can thrive. It should be ruled by a Queen who has at her command various sophont nonhuman creatures with abilities more or less specified by folklore. These include flight and spell-casting.0

  The Rolandic north-polar lands—and North is the “inauspicious quarter; realm of darkness, night. Symbolizes the mysterious, the unknown”7—fit these specifications exactly.

  There is indeed darkness. Roland has a highly eccentric orbit which will keep the arctic region in night through most of the year. This darkness is not intense and gloomy, for it is broken by bioluminescent plants, two moons, and brilliant auroras, which last are the result of the interaction between the atmosphere and the strong “wind” of charged particles emitted by Rolands type F9 sun. The high energy output of this star performs the further function of explaining the warmth of even the polar Darklands. Another factor contributing to this last effect is Rolands fairly slight axial tilt (10°) and small diameter (9500 km): the entire arctic circle must be only a little over five hundred miles (more nearly, 830 km) in radius. Masses of warmer air will constantly move into so small a region. Furthermore, the land area inside the circle is given as 1.25 million square kilometers (p. 39). This is just over half the total arctic area, so the rest must be ocean (the Gulf of Polaris), which further mitigates the climate.

  The darkness of the polar regions is enough to make them unattractive to Rolands colonists, at least at so early a stage of economic development. But Roland s powerful sun provides a third service by adding further guarantees of the Queen’s privacy. In conjunction with various planetary features, it induces great atmospheric turbulence and sudden, unpredictable storms. At the current level of development, this makes regular air traffic impossible.

  Roland has a surface gravity only 42% of Earth’s, but it has a nearly terrestrial air pressure. This is in accordance with cosmological theories that “blame” Earth’s large moon or some such factor for reducing the amount of atmosphere our planet retains, but beyond a contribution to verisimilitude, the function of endowing Roland with such a dense atmosphere is to permit the existence of large flying creatures such as the “pooks.” In this way, the Queen gains her traditional winged servants.

  Even so, evidence on Earth suggests that one intelligent species is likely to eliminate its close competitors, so that, as the Portolondon Chief Constable says, “ ‘No area the size of Arctica could spawn a dozen different intelligent species’” (p. 49). The simplest solution is to suppose that the aborigines themselves have “manufactured” multiple life-forms. This in turn requires that the aborigines be masters of the biological sciences.

  A race that began with biology would have a rather different view of
life from one beginning with mechanics, a view which could easily put them into conflict with “mechanico-technolog-ical” humans. Anderson has previously explored this same conflict in The Star Ways (1957)8 and After Doomsday (1962).

  In his descriptions of the bioengineered inhabitants of the Darklands, Anderson has modified the terrestrial traditions. Presumably the form which the archetypal creatures take on Roland is dictated partly by the restrictions of the aborigines’ biotechnology and partly by the culture of the human colonists. The departure from folklore may also reinforce the reader’s feeling of verisimilitude—the story is “science fiction” rather than “fantasy.”

  “Wraiths” are almost self-explanatory. They are the nearest Rolandic equivalent of a disembodied spirit: “ ‘a swarm of cells coordinated somehow … pheromonally?’ ” (p. 68). As befits their “demonic” estate, wraiths have high intelligence and great telepathic power.

  The word “pook” must be a derivative of “puck,”9 and thence the Anglo-Saxon puca. Anderson uses the word for a winged creature somewhat like the small “degenerate” sprite of later folklore, although the one pook we know well, Ayoch, has a rather more phlegmatic character than one would expect of a winged fairy. After all, to speak scientifically, even on Roland a flying creature large enough to carry a child must be somewhat ponderous.