Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 29 July 2014:
(This is the 150th post this month so possibly the last until next month.)
I missed certain details on previous readings of "The Game of Glory" by Poul Anderson.
Marker lights were:
"...color-coded for depth so that all Jairnovaunt was one great jewelbox..."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 326.
This
is both neat and plausible: not only marker lights above tidally
submerged buildings but also color-coding for depth and the visual
impression that this would generate.
Air-locked
buildings are alternately below or just above the ocean surface. At low
tide, Nyanzans swim, guided by buoys, between buildings on rocks. At
high tide, they swim down to, up from or between submerged buildings
wearing aqualungs. Between cities and countries, they travel in sail
boats and also have submarines. Thus, their entire lives are spent in,
on, above or under water. We knew that but what does it imply about
their deaths? When Dominic Flandry tells John Umbolu that his son, Tom,
died in combat on another planet:
"'Drowning is the single decent death,' whispered the Nyanzan. 'My other children, all but Derek, had that much luck.'" (p. 325)
How
many Nyanzans die by drowning? How many children has John Umbolu lost? A
warrior culture would see death in combat as the best. Since drowning
is the single greatest hazard to Nyanzans, they accept it and regard it
as "...the single decent death..." We are not told whether they have
their equivalent of Fiddler's Green or Aegir's Hall.
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