C.J. Cherryh's Fiction
Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Burton Raffel
Consider, first, a novel about a thirty-seven-year-old ship's crew-woman, thrown up on the beach by an economic squeeze, unemployed and unemployable because unwilling to change a way of life that simply does not exist on shore. She has been left in a dying port, where ships seldom dock and those that do cannot offer her employment. Without alternatives or resources, she contemplates starvation (or even suicide). She is becoming physically shrunken; her clothing is worn, almost tattered. "She smelled strongly of soap, of restroom disinfectant soap, a scent [one] had to think awhile to place."
A local resident, struck by her persistence and pride, gives her what work he can, illegally; a sex-driven barkeep gives her a place to sleep (with him, of course) and a bit of food. The barkeep turns sadistic; trained in violence as well as ship-board mechanics, she kills him. Unexpectedly, a disguised quasi-military ship arrives, and she talks her way into a rock-bottom berth. But before she can leave, the dead man is found, she is arrested--and then freed when the ship uses its military status and authority to claim her. Safely on board, still half dazed, "she avoided looking at people, especially looking them in the eye or starting up a conversation, just stared blankly at the main-deck [which she has been ordered to clean] and all those possible footprints people were making walking back and forth--footprints had occupied her mind all day, still occupied it, in her condition--and she mentally numbed out, tasting the food and the tea down to its molecules, it was so good, and finding her hands so sore [that] holding a fork hurt."
Written throughout in consistently clear, probing prose, perfectly suited to both characters and subject matter, C.J. Cherryh's Rimrunners (1989) is obviously a tale of adventure. Less obviously, it is also a close, intense psychological study and a keen exposition, in strongly presented, deeply imagined detail, of complex interrelationships between and among individual and social forces, in a time and place not our own. In pure stylistic terms, some of B. J. Traven's work comes to mind; so too does other determinedly nonLiterary literary fiction. Cherryh writes: "... they were a little gone, having a damn good time, but gone, and NG [short for `no good'] was gone too, out-there, deep-spaced and having trouble breathing."
Plainly, her prose has strong rhythms of its own--but how different is this, qualitatively, from, say: "Helene was not a teetotaler by any means. In fact, Ed encouraged her to drink. She was more fun when she drank. But she was liable to get drunk tonight, because it was Christmas, and Ed didn't want her to become reckless with the spirit of giving." That comes from John O`Hara's Appointment in Samarra (1934), which Alfred Kazin called "the best of the `hard-boiled' novels ... [and] a very serious book indeed" (On Native Grounds, 388). Nor would there be any difficulty setting out stylistically related passages from other American writers, notably the original hard-boiler himself, Ernest Hemingway.
The "beach" in Rimrunners is literally a space station; the "ships" are space-going. The fiction is science fiction. But genre labels become irrelevant, at such fully realized and masterful levels. The Lord of the Rings is high-quality fiction, period. It is not simply or primarily fairy-tale or fantasy fiction. Alice in Wonderland is high-quality fiction, not a children's book. Both are unassailably (and enduringly) literature. And so too are the adventure tales (though we tend for obvious reasons not to think of them as adventure tales) of Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth, Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville--and those of C. J. Cherryh.
Like most genuinely literary (not Literary) writers, Cherryh is not limited, either stylistically or in subject matter or approach. She employs "hard-boiled" prose when the particular book or approach seems to her to require it; from time to time, unpredictably and driven only by authorial impulses, she chooses to write of proletarian, feminine, or epic, or heroic, or genetically alien characters and themes, for, as she quite typically says, different subjects and approaches "stretch different muscles" (Amazon.com interview):
| QUOTE |
| It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar. Ariana Emory gazed down at it from the window. She kept to the passenger compartment now. Her eyesight, she had to admit it, was no longer sharp enough, her reflexes no longer fast enough for the jet. She could go up front, bump the pilot out of the chair and take the controls: it was her plane, her pilot, and a wide sky. Sometimes she did. But it was not the same. Only the land was, still most of the land was. And when she looked out the window, it might have been a century ago ... |
Thus begins the first chapter of Cyteen (1988), a massive, intricate, wise, and compelling novel (first published as a trilogy) to which I will return. I want to do no more, at this point, than simply note Cyteen's substantive as well as its quite apparent stylistic expansiveness. Indeed, Cyteen has been called Cherryh's masterpiece, and though that seems to me a valid judgment, the book's brilliance, its intensity, its depth, are I think very closely matched many times over in her work.
The second chapter of Kesrith opens with this intricately woven paragraph. So clear and always urgently to the point is Cherryh's writing that (1) every unfamiliar word and concept in this passage has already been more than satisfactorily explained, in the few pages of the short first chapter, and (2) in addition, time- and valuedimensions of great weight and power have been attached to each and every such term. The trilogy has large and pressingly important ecological dimensions--totally and very powerfully integrated into the plot. In Cherryh's work, one intellectual or analytical dimension tends to be no more insisted upon than any other. She has no need to proclaim, to thunder, to hammer at her readers with her ideas. In short, her literary confidence is as high as her literary energy level (she has said that, in full spate, she writes eighteen hours at a stretch); it enables her to operate in taut synch with her material:
The sheer authority of this seems to me all-compelling. And the weight of the conflicts and questions revolved in front of us, always in measured but only slowly apprehended and even more slowly appreciated fashion, is still further enhanced by heavy narrative reliance on dialogue. Cherryh's characters do not "converse," or merely talk: as all fictive masters know, novelistic dialogue at its best and most effective is a kind of embedded plot.
Constantly thus revealed, and then still further revealed in action (as well as in active introspection: Cherryh handles internal rumination as fluently and judiciously as she does that which is actually spoken), the carefully colored personages moving through these densely woven novels are opened to us as significantly, created as fully and as coherently spun into their and our orbits, as the characters who inhabit any fiction I know.
"[The mri] were a beautiful people," thinks a human at the beginning of Shon'jir, looking down at an unconscious, barely living mri warrior, "tall and slim and golden beneath their black robes: golden manes streaked with bronze, delicate, humanoid features, long, slender hands; their ears had a little tuft of pale down at the tips, and their eyes were brilliant amber, with a nictating membrane that protected them from dust and glare. The mri were at once humanlike and disturbingly alien. Such also were their minds, that could grasp outsiders' ways and yet steadfastly refused to compromise with them."
Another human, at the end of Kutath, and at a moment of decisive and intensely dramatic choice affecting both peoples, thinks to herself:
Accordingly, these are novels that, inevitably, like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like A la recherche du temps perdu and Don Quijote, like The Magic Mountain and David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov, have no real ending, at least in the sense of narrow, two-dimensional, cartographic finality.
Cherryh is fiercely prolific. It would be foolish to expect that each and every novel she writes will maintain absolute, soaring levels. ("Even Homer nods," as Horace observed two thousand years ago.) Still, only Hestia, published in 1979 but probably written well before, and Wave Without a Shore (1981--but, again, probably written earlier), offer anything less than the subtle, passionate writing she has been giving us for more than two decades.
Brothers of Earth (1976), which deftly and convincingly explores the effects of new and long-separated environments on groups of human beings, is more than sufficiently memorable. Hunter of Worlds (1977) impressively explores not only multiple-levels of species relationship, but species differences of an extraordinary nature. Cherryh's driven imaginative urgency pushes her, in this novel, into a realm she does not usually deal with, namely, a race which is unquestionably, unalterably, almost unthinkably superior.
Serpent's Reach (1980) focuses powerfully on humans and a fascinatingly imagined ant-like species. Many of the scenes Cherryh here conjures up are profoundly unforgettable. Voyager in Night (1984), perhaps more intellectually than emotionally intense, once again deals with humans and a "species" far beyond human capacities.
But Cuckoo's Egg (1985), which seems to me almost a study for the writing of Cyteen, is as fine and stirring as anything Cherryh has ever done. It is in a way a brilliant tour de force, looking at humans entirely from an alien perspective--beautifully suggested in the book's very first paragraph, describing the alien at issue, as he waits for an infant human to be brought to him for rearing, in a cause no less than the ultimate survival of this aristocratic tutor's race.
This is prose of perfect suppleness, delicately aligned on word-choices of impeccable selection. The character may seem familiar, at the very first: he is sitting, which is completely within our human ken, and he is in a "room." But then the floor is revealed to be "sand," and not natural sand but "synthetic," and not merely synthetic but "shining with opal tints." Clearly, this is not a humanly familiar setting--and though the person being described (whatever his nature) is a house-dweller, he sits with "bare feet." What the windows display is a "continuously rotating panorama." This is pretty readily imaginable, if not precisely common in our world--but "the Khoggut plain"?
And just who is adding the sarcastic aside, labeling the rotating panorama "a lie"? There is "traffic" in the streets; this is obviously a city. But traffic and a city of exactly what sort? The concepts may be familiar, but by this point the reader is aware that the realities, the living, animate details, the sights and smells, the shapes and colors, cannot be ones with which we are acquainted. Cherryh presents us with all of this, and indeed more, in just three sentences, none of which is overlong, and the last of which is exceedingly short. It would be hard for prose to do more, or better, in so compressed a space.
Accordingly, these are novels that, inevitably, like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like A la recherche du temps perdu and Don Quijote, like The Magic Mountain and David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov, have no real ending, at least in the sense of narrow, two-dimensional, cartographic finality.
Cherryh is fiercely prolific. It would be foolish to expect that each and every novel she writes will maintain absolute, soaring levels. ("Even Homer nods," as Horace observed two thousand years ago.) Still, only Hestia, published in 1979 but probably written well before, and Wave Without a Shore (1981--but, again, probably written earlier), offer anything less than the subtle, passionate writing she has been giving us for more than two decades.
Brothers of Earth (1976), which deftly and convincingly explores the effects of new and long-separated environments on groups of human beings, is more than sufficiently memorable. Hunter of Worlds (1977) impressively explores not only multiple-levels of species relationship, but species differences of an extraordinary nature. Cherryh's driven imaginative urgency pushes her, in this novel, into a realm she does not usually deal with, namely, a race which is unquestionably, unalterably, almost unthinkably superior.
Serpent's Reach (1980) focuses powerfully on humans and a fascinatingly imagined ant-like species. Many of the scenes Cherryh here conjures up are profoundly unforgettable. Voyager in Night (1984), perhaps more intellectually than emotionally intense, once again deals with humans and a "species" far beyond human capacities.
But Cuckoo's Egg (1985), which seems to me almost a study for the writing of Cyteen, is as fine and stirring as anything Cherryh has ever done. It is in a way a brilliant tour de force, looking at humans entirely from an alien perspective--beautifully suggested in the book's very first paragraph, describing the alien at issue, as he waits for an infant human to be brought to him for rearing, in a cause no less than the ultimate survival of this aristocratic tutor's race.
This is prose of perfect suppleness, delicately aligned on word-choices of impeccable selection. The character may seem familiar, at the very first: he is sitting, which is completely within our human ken, and he is in a "room." But then the floor is revealed to be "sand," and not natural sand but "synthetic," and not merely synthetic but "shining with opal tints." Clearly, this is not a humanly familiar setting--and though the person being described (whatever his nature) is a house-dweller, he sits with "bare feet." What the windows display is a "continuously rotating panorama." This is pretty readily imaginable, if not precisely common in our world--but "the Khoggut plain"?
And just who is adding the sarcastic aside, labeling the rotating panorama "a lie"? There is "traffic" in the streets; this is obviously a city. But traffic and a city of exactly what sort? The concepts may be familiar, but by this point the reader is aware that the realities, the living, animate details, the sights and smells, the shapes and colors, cannot be ones with which we are acquainted. Cherryh presents us with all of this, and indeed more, in just three sentences, none of which is overlong, and the last of which is exceedingly short. It would be hard for prose to do more, or better, in so compressed a space.
Both leonine qualities and showy love of pomp and dazzle are in fact integral, basic and important aspects of Pyanfar's colorful, idiosyncratic character. It is she, as captain, who creates, complicates, endangers and ultimately redeems The Pride [a resplendent pun] of Chanur. This too is thoroughly in Cherryh's style: every small event is discovered to be linked to larger and larger causes and effects, to perhaps endlessly radiating circles of involvement. Cultures, worlds, and--in the Chanur universe--our human world come to have connections of a profoundly apposite sort. Cherryh is far too dedicated an explorer of other worlds and ways to allow readers merely passive engagement.
Humans, then, are by no means always set either at the center of Cherryh's vision, or off to the side. On the one hand, human beings are unsurprisingly quite like some of the sentient species she has created. Yet they are distinctly unlike others, much as the methane breathers Cherryh has imagined are inevitably unlike any of the oxygen breathers. It is in that context, I think, that it is most helpful to look at Cyteen, a book which cannot be diminished by being considered apart from the nine other novels (to date) which set out what Cherryh envisages as the events and consequences of human space exploration.
The circle-upon-circle of endlessly out-reaching civilizations does not press so visibly or so immediately, in Cyteen. But even in its own far-flung universe, Cyteen (the planet, not the book) is no more the center than, once upon a time, the Earth itself was thought to be. Cyteen is indeed a world, but it is an expropriated world, intrinsically hostile, and only in part terraformed and human-inhabited. Occupation and the partial transformation of a deeply alien environment have occurred relatively recently. And this planet, which in a very real sense can only be conquered step by step and keeps fighting back every moment of every day, is also the setting for a singularly powerful vector in Cherryh's picture of humanity's post-space-explorations, namely, a great functioning laboratory and factory, called Reseune, where ideas are turned into realities, and inanimate matter is turned into fully functioning, indistinguishably human creatures known as azi. (Indistinguishably human--but differently human.)
More: Cyteen the book is built around this ability of Reseune to create human beings, almost without quantitative limits, in whatever mould is wanted, including industrial or military drones as well as men and women of enhanced ability. Most especially--for the purposes of this novel--Reseune's capabilities have, after years of working toward that goal, achieved the more or less exact re-creation of human beings, in the form of perfect genetic, though of course not psycho-social, clones.
One such cloning, though for policy reasons disguised, is Justin Warrick, officially the "son" of Jordan Warrick, who is a Special--humans of so high a caliber that, by statute, they have vast privileges and protections. There are only twelve of them, in all; the most powerful, as well as the most visible and without question the imaginative center of Cyteen, all throughout its three parts, is Ariane Emory--already introduced in the book's first paragraph, which I have quoted earlier. Ari (as she is called) is herself genetically the child of two human parents, rather than a planned gene-set. Her genetic mother and father were both geneticists and, in fact, the founders of Reseune. More than a hundred years old when Ari was "conceived" (in and by the apparatus of Reseune, which provided a sustaining womb and thus became her physical birth place), the parents are long dead. The rejuvenation techniques that so long preserved them, techniques that have been still further perfected, have brought Ari herself to the age of a hundred and twenty, which starts to approach rejuv's outer limits.(*)
Much feared, for good reason, and much hated, also for good reason, Ari is suddenly mysteriously murdered, midway in the trilogy's first volume. The murderer's identity is and remains unknown, though Jordan Warrick is maneuvered into a confession. Falsely? We never know, though he seems likely to have been guilty. But Reseune cannot manage without Ari, and the decision is made to immediately produce a clone, a possibility which Ari had anticipated and for which she has elaborately planned: her instructions, tapes, videos, and the like, are designed to carry the re-creation to full maturity. The birth, rearing, and coming to adulthood of the clone are then stunningly traced across the often breathtaking pages of volumes two and three. Similarities, and differences, between Ari I and Ari II are developed no less profoundly or achingly affecting than the evolving similarities and differences of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, over which readers and critics through the centuries have wondered and exulted.
This is however only the basic, more or less skeletal structure of Cyteen. I will leave for discussion by others such quietly dropped clues as that the expansionist drive of the interstellar Union, shaped and still dominated by Cyteen, was directly and unquestionably a continuation of that "fervor which had led to the establishment of the original thirteen star stations," or that "Cyteen was founded by people seeking independence from colonial policies of the Earth Company" (315). We even hear of "the framers of the [Union] Constitution." (The very word "union" has of course its own reverberations in these contexts; the names of humanity's other two branches, in Cherryh's grand scheme, are "Sol" and "Alliance," which have no such political echoes.) The heart and soul of the book is the flawlessly interwoven stream of meaningful story and high-powered insight, of fascinating character and palpitating event, all of it embedded in and sometimes set against a detailed matrix that can and regularly does flash with the beautifully melded incandescence of intelligence and sensitized experience.
Were all of the complex matters raised in the novel handled, fictively, as mere concepts, abstractions, the work would be a boring tract--intelligent, well-informed, but lifeless. All of the trilogy's issues are fully enacted and completely embedded in the novel's fabric. Here in its entirety is section iii of chapter 3, pages 102-103 of Cyteen, bringing to life the original Ari as she works in her laboratory--and as we very soon thereafter find out, these are almost the very last moments of her life. Her murderer enters at the end of this brief section:
QUOTE The new separator was working. The rest of the equipment was scheduled for checkout. Ari made notes by hand, but mostly because she worked on a system
and the Scriber got in her way: in some things only state of the art would
do, but when it came to her notes, she still wrote them with a lightpen on
the TranSlate, in a shorthand her [computerized] Base in the House system
continually dumped into her archives because it knew her handwriting:
old-fashioned program, but it equally well served as a privacy barrier. The
Base then went on to translate, transcribe and archive under her passwords
and handprint, because she had given it the password at the top of the
input.
Nothing today of a real security nature. Lab-work. Student-work. Any of the
azi techs could be down here checking things, but she enjoyed this return
to the old days. She had helped wear smooth the wooden seats in Lab One,
hours and hours over the equipment, doing just this sort of thing, on
equipment that made the rejected separator look like a technologist's
dream.
That part of it she had no desire to re-create. But quite plainly, she
wanted to say/in her write-up of this project. She wanted her stamp on it
and her hand on the fine details right from the conception upward. I was
most careful, in the initiation of this project--
I prepared the tank--
There were very few nowadays who were trained in all the steps. Everyone
specialized. She belonged to the colonial period, to the beginnings of the
science. Nowadays there were colleges turning out educated apes, so-named scientists who punched buttons and read tapes without understanding how the biology worked. She fought that push-the-button tendency, put an especially high priority on producing methodology tapes even while Reseune kept its essential secrets.
Some of those secrets would come out in her book. She had intended it that way. It would be a classic work of science--the entire evolution of
Reseune's procedures, with the Rubin project [cloning Specials] hindmost in
its proper perspective, as the test of theories developed over the decades
of her research. IN PRINCIPIO was the title she had tentatively adopted.
She was still searching for a better one.
The machine came up with the answer on a known sequence. The comp blinked red on an area of discrepancy.
Damn it to bloody hell. Was it contamination or was it a glitch-up in the
machine? She made the note, mercilessly honest. And wondered whether to
lose the time to replace the damn thing again and try with a completely
different test sample, or whether to try to ferret out the cause and
document it for the sake of the record. Doing the former, was a dirty
solution. Being reduced to the latter and, God help her, failing to find
solid evidence, which was a good bet in a mechanical glitch-up, made her
look like a damn fool or forced her to have recourse to the techs more
current with the equipment.
Dump the machine and consign it to the techs, run the suspect sample in a
clean machine, and install a third machine for the project, with a new
sample-run.
Every real-life project is bound to have its glitch-ups, or the researcher
is lying ...
The outer lab-door opened. There were distant voices. Florian and Catlin.
And another one she knew. Damn.
"Jordan?" she yelled, loud enough to carry. "What's your problem?"
She heard the footsteps. She heard Florian's and Catlin's. She had confused
the azi, and they trailed Jordan as far as the cold-lab door.
"I need to talk to you."
"Jordie, I've got a problem here. Can we do it in about an hour? My
Office?"
"Here is just fine. Now. In private."
She drew a long breath. Let it go again. Grant, she thought. Or Merild and
Corain. "All right. Damn, we're going to have Jane and her clutch traipsing
through the lab out there in about thirty minutes. --Florian, go over to B
and tell them their damn machine won't work." She turned and ejected the
sample. "I want another one. We'll go through every damn machine they've
got if that's what it takes. I want the thing cleaner than it's providing.
God, what kind of tolerances are they accepting these days? And you bring
it over yourself. I don't trust those aides. Catlin, get up there and tell
Jane she can take her damn students somewhere else. I'm shutting down this lab until I get this thing running." She drew a second long breath and used the waldo to send the offending sample back through cryogenics, then
ejected the sample-chamber to a safe-cell and sent it the same route. When
she turned around the azi were gone and Jordan was still standing there.
This is as close to a clear picture of the "crime," if indeed it was a crime and not a complex accident, as Cherryh ever gives us. The irresolution is typical. But so too is the patient build-up of detail, of which every smallest item is totally consistent with everything else we are told, anywhere in the novel. No one in Cyteen is any more black-and-white than are any of the book's inanimate furnishings, whether small or large or in-between. Ari is "mercilessly honest" about an experimental error, and fantastically careful about the necessary follow-up. She is also casually arrogant and profane, simultaneously an egomaniac and a person of great and patient consideration. Which matters more, the positive or the negative? For Cherryh, obviously, the answer is regularly: neither.
And Ari senior prevails. In Cyteen's penultimate chapter, Justin Warrick suddenly looks up at Grant, an azi of Alpha status specially and purposefully designed by Ari, and sees him "as a stranger would, in an objective way he had never looked at Grant, the unlikely perfection--Ari's handiwork too, from his genesets to his psychset. // Everything was, everything. No good, any longer, in fighting [her] design. Even Grant was part of it. He was snared, he had always been. / She wanted Jordan. Jordan failed her. She saw to my creation. Designed Grant. // Fixed me on her ... // Everything's connected to everything--" (604) Cherryh is completely conscious of that universal connection. "Everything is related to everything," she says in the Amazon.com interview already cited from--and then she adds, "especially in my writing."
How many writers have both that degree of awareness and the literary power needed to make their thought brilliantly real, passionately true, and beautiful?
(*) Just as Cervantes has Don Quijote making absurd mistakes in arithmetic, so, too, Cherryh has the original Ari's "parliamentary" opponent, Mikhail Corain, reflecting that she had died at age "one hundred forty-odd." Don Quijote's and Corain's mistakes are totally in character, and characterologically revealing. So too the recreated Ari, in a state of psychological turmoil after claiming vast new freedoms for herself, at age twelve, uncharacteristically but revealingly fumbles and bumbles over the first Ari's age at death, calculating "a hundred fifty" and, a moment later, "a hundred--twenty-something." Cherryh, like Cervantes and indeed all masters of literature, constantly "works" stories and readers, to the enrichment of everyone and everything concerned. That sort of almost endlessly complex self-enrichment is perhaps the clearest mark of great, as opposed to merely good literary art.
Burton Raffel is an internationally known writer and translator and a frequent reviewer of contemporary poetry.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
Port Eternity (1982), for example, is an absorbingly passionate study in isolation and dream-worlds--not "fantasy" fiction, which Cherryh also writes (and which I will not here discuss), but plainly "science" fiction. The novel's narrator is Elaine, an android servant on the private spaceship of lady Dela, a rich and spoiled aristocrat, who amuses herself by naming all those who serve her after the Arthurian characters in Tennyson's Idylls of the King (freely quoted throughout) and having them constantly act out those roles. Dela's current voyage becomes, unwittingly, her last, when her ship and all its occupants are seized--they do not know how or why, if there is in fact a "why"--by a silent, unbreakable, unknowable power. Dela's response is to stage an elaborate banquet:
| QUOTE |
| There was a division in the world, marked by a causeway of white rock. On the one side, and at the lower end, lay the regul of Kesrith--city-folk, slow-moving, long-remembering. The lowland city was entirely theirs: flat, sprawling buildings, a port, commerce with the stars, mining that scarred the earth, a plant that extracted water from the Alkaline Sea. The land had been called the Dus plain before there were regul on [the planet] Kesrith: the mri remembered. For this reason the mri had avoided the plain, in respect of the dusei [beasts of great bulk, sensitivity, and intelligence, bound to the warrior mri]; but the regul had insisted on setting their city there, and the dusei left it. |
The second chapter of Kesrith opens with this intricately woven paragraph. So clear and always urgently to the point is Cherryh's writing that (1) every unfamiliar word and concept in this passage has already been more than satisfactorily explained, in the few pages of the short first chapter, and (2) in addition, time- and valuedimensions of great weight and power have been attached to each and every such term. The trilogy has large and pressingly important ecological dimensions--totally and very powerfully integrated into the plot. In Cherryh's work, one intellectual or analytical dimension tends to be no more insisted upon than any other. She has no need to proclaim, to thunder, to hammer at her readers with her ideas. In short, her literary confidence is as high as her literary energy level (she has said that, in full spate, she writes eighteen hours at a stretch); it enables her to operate in taut synch with her material:
| QUOTE |
| He was tall, even of his kind. His high cheekbones bore the seta'al, the triple scars of his caste, blue-stained and indelible; this meant that he was a full-fledged member of the Kel ... Being of the Kel, he went robed from collar to boot-tops in unrelieved black; and black veil and tasseled headcloth, mez and zaidhe, concealed all but his brow and his eyes from the gaze of outsiders when he chose to meet them; and the zaidhe further had a dark transparent visor that could meet the veil when dust blew or red Arain reached its unpleasant zenith. He was a man: his face, like his thoughts, was considered a private identity, one indecent to reveal to strangers. The veils enveloped him as did the robes, a distinguishing mark of the only caste of the [mri] that might deal with outsiders. |
The sheer authority of this seems to me all-compelling. And the weight of the conflicts and questions revolved in front of us, always in measured but only slowly apprehended and even more slowly appreciated fashion, is still further enhanced by heavy narrative reliance on dialogue. Cherryh's characters do not "converse," or merely talk: as all fictive masters know, novelistic dialogue at its best and most effective is a kind of embedded plot.
Constantly thus revealed, and then still further revealed in action (as well as in active introspection: Cherryh handles internal rumination as fluently and judiciously as she does that which is actually spoken), the carefully colored personages moving through these densely woven novels are opened to us as significantly, created as fully and as coherently spun into their and our orbits, as the characters who inhabit any fiction I know.
"[The mri] were a beautiful people," thinks a human at the beginning of Shon'jir, looking down at an unconscious, barely living mri warrior, "tall and slim and golden beneath their black robes: golden manes streaked with bronze, delicate, humanoid features, long, slender hands; their ears had a little tuft of pale down at the tips, and their eyes were brilliant amber, with a nictating membrane that protected them from dust and glare. The mri were at once humanlike and disturbingly alien. Such also were their minds, that could grasp outsiders' ways and yet steadfastly refused to compromise with them."
Another human, at the end of Kutath, and at a moment of decisive and intensely dramatic choice affecting both peoples, thinks to herself:
| QUOTE |
| ... Fear had killed the worlds between. To use the mri, one had to play the Game, to cast them from the hand and let them go. The belief that it would be different ... this, she cherished, as she believed in humankind. She played the Game. |
Accordingly, these are novels that, inevitably, like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like A la recherche du temps perdu and Don Quijote, like The Magic Mountain and David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov, have no real ending, at least in the sense of narrow, two-dimensional, cartographic finality.
Cherryh is fiercely prolific. It would be foolish to expect that each and every novel she writes will maintain absolute, soaring levels. ("Even Homer nods," as Horace observed two thousand years ago.) Still, only Hestia, published in 1979 but probably written well before, and Wave Without a Shore (1981--but, again, probably written earlier), offer anything less than the subtle, passionate writing she has been giving us for more than two decades.
Brothers of Earth (1976), which deftly and convincingly explores the effects of new and long-separated environments on groups of human beings, is more than sufficiently memorable. Hunter of Worlds (1977) impressively explores not only multiple-levels of species relationship, but species differences of an extraordinary nature. Cherryh's driven imaginative urgency pushes her, in this novel, into a realm she does not usually deal with, namely, a race which is unquestionably, unalterably, almost unthinkably superior.
Serpent's Reach (1980) focuses powerfully on humans and a fascinatingly imagined ant-like species. Many of the scenes Cherryh here conjures up are profoundly unforgettable. Voyager in Night (1984), perhaps more intellectually than emotionally intense, once again deals with humans and a "species" far beyond human capacities.
But Cuckoo's Egg (1985), which seems to me almost a study for the writing of Cyteen, is as fine and stirring as anything Cherryh has ever done. It is in a way a brilliant tour de force, looking at humans entirely from an alien perspective--beautifully suggested in the book's very first paragraph, describing the alien at issue, as he waits for an infant human to be brought to him for rearing, in a cause no less than the ultimate survival of this aristocratic tutor's race.
| QUOTE |
| He sat in a room, the sand of which was synthetic, and shining with opal tints, fine and light beneath his bare feet. The windows held no cityview, but a continuously rotating panorama of the Khogghut plain: a lie. Traffic noise came through. |
This is prose of perfect suppleness, delicately aligned on word-choices of impeccable selection. The character may seem familiar, at the very first: he is sitting, which is completely within our human ken, and he is in a "room." But then the floor is revealed to be "sand," and not natural sand but "synthetic," and not merely synthetic but "shining with opal tints." Clearly, this is not a humanly familiar setting--and though the person being described (whatever his nature) is a house-dweller, he sits with "bare feet." What the windows display is a "continuously rotating panorama." This is pretty readily imaginable, if not precisely common in our world--but "the Khoggut plain"?
And just who is adding the sarcastic aside, labeling the rotating panorama "a lie"? There is "traffic" in the streets; this is obviously a city. But traffic and a city of exactly what sort? The concepts may be familiar, but by this point the reader is aware that the realities, the living, animate details, the sights and smells, the shapes and colors, cannot be ones with which we are acquainted. Cherryh presents us with all of this, and indeed more, in just three sentences, none of which is overlong, and the last of which is exceedingly short. It would be hard for prose to do more, or better, in so compressed a space.
| QUOTE |
| ... Fear had killed the worlds between. To use the mri, one had to play the Game, to cast them from the hand and let them go. The belief that it would be different ... this, she cherished, as she believed in humankind. She played the Game. |
Accordingly, these are novels that, inevitably, like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, like A la recherche du temps perdu and Don Quijote, like The Magic Mountain and David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov, have no real ending, at least in the sense of narrow, two-dimensional, cartographic finality.
Cherryh is fiercely prolific. It would be foolish to expect that each and every novel she writes will maintain absolute, soaring levels. ("Even Homer nods," as Horace observed two thousand years ago.) Still, only Hestia, published in 1979 but probably written well before, and Wave Without a Shore (1981--but, again, probably written earlier), offer anything less than the subtle, passionate writing she has been giving us for more than two decades.
Brothers of Earth (1976), which deftly and convincingly explores the effects of new and long-separated environments on groups of human beings, is more than sufficiently memorable. Hunter of Worlds (1977) impressively explores not only multiple-levels of species relationship, but species differences of an extraordinary nature. Cherryh's driven imaginative urgency pushes her, in this novel, into a realm she does not usually deal with, namely, a race which is unquestionably, unalterably, almost unthinkably superior.
Serpent's Reach (1980) focuses powerfully on humans and a fascinatingly imagined ant-like species. Many of the scenes Cherryh here conjures up are profoundly unforgettable. Voyager in Night (1984), perhaps more intellectually than emotionally intense, once again deals with humans and a "species" far beyond human capacities.
But Cuckoo's Egg (1985), which seems to me almost a study for the writing of Cyteen, is as fine and stirring as anything Cherryh has ever done. It is in a way a brilliant tour de force, looking at humans entirely from an alien perspective--beautifully suggested in the book's very first paragraph, describing the alien at issue, as he waits for an infant human to be brought to him for rearing, in a cause no less than the ultimate survival of this aristocratic tutor's race.
| QUOTE |
| He sat in a room, the sand of which was synthetic, and shining with opal tints, fine and light beneath his bare feet. The windows held no cityview, but a continuously rotating panorama of the Khogghut plain: a lie. Traffic noise came through. |
This is prose of perfect suppleness, delicately aligned on word-choices of impeccable selection. The character may seem familiar, at the very first: he is sitting, which is completely within our human ken, and he is in a "room." But then the floor is revealed to be "sand," and not natural sand but "synthetic," and not merely synthetic but "shining with opal tints." Clearly, this is not a humanly familiar setting--and though the person being described (whatever his nature) is a house-dweller, he sits with "bare feet." What the windows display is a "continuously rotating panorama." This is pretty readily imaginable, if not precisely common in our world--but "the Khoggut plain"?
And just who is adding the sarcastic aside, labeling the rotating panorama "a lie"? There is "traffic" in the streets; this is obviously a city. But traffic and a city of exactly what sort? The concepts may be familiar, but by this point the reader is aware that the realities, the living, animate details, the sights and smells, the shapes and colors, cannot be ones with which we are acquainted. Cherryh presents us with all of this, and indeed more, in just three sentences, none of which is overlong, and the last of which is exceedingly short. It would be hard for prose to do more, or better, in so compressed a space.
Both leonine qualities and showy love of pomp and dazzle are in fact integral, basic and important aspects of Pyanfar's colorful, idiosyncratic character. It is she, as captain, who creates, complicates, endangers and ultimately redeems The Pride [a resplendent pun] of Chanur. This too is thoroughly in Cherryh's style: every small event is discovered to be linked to larger and larger causes and effects, to perhaps endlessly radiating circles of involvement. Cultures, worlds, and--in the Chanur universe--our human world come to have connections of a profoundly apposite sort. Cherryh is far too dedicated an explorer of other worlds and ways to allow readers merely passive engagement.
Humans, then, are by no means always set either at the center of Cherryh's vision, or off to the side. On the one hand, human beings are unsurprisingly quite like some of the sentient species she has created. Yet they are distinctly unlike others, much as the methane breathers Cherryh has imagined are inevitably unlike any of the oxygen breathers. It is in that context, I think, that it is most helpful to look at Cyteen, a book which cannot be diminished by being considered apart from the nine other novels (to date) which set out what Cherryh envisages as the events and consequences of human space exploration.
The circle-upon-circle of endlessly out-reaching civilizations does not press so visibly or so immediately, in Cyteen. But even in its own far-flung universe, Cyteen (the planet, not the book) is no more the center than, once upon a time, the Earth itself was thought to be. Cyteen is indeed a world, but it is an expropriated world, intrinsically hostile, and only in part terraformed and human-inhabited. Occupation and the partial transformation of a deeply alien environment have occurred relatively recently. And this planet, which in a very real sense can only be conquered step by step and keeps fighting back every moment of every day, is also the setting for a singularly powerful vector in Cherryh's picture of humanity's post-space-explorations, namely, a great functioning laboratory and factory, called Reseune, where ideas are turned into realities, and inanimate matter is turned into fully functioning, indistinguishably human creatures known as azi. (Indistinguishably human--but differently human.)
More: Cyteen the book is built around this ability of Reseune to create human beings, almost without quantitative limits, in whatever mould is wanted, including industrial or military drones as well as men and women of enhanced ability. Most especially--for the purposes of this novel--Reseune's capabilities have, after years of working toward that goal, achieved the more or less exact re-creation of human beings, in the form of perfect genetic, though of course not psycho-social, clones.
One such cloning, though for policy reasons disguised, is Justin Warrick, officially the "son" of Jordan Warrick, who is a Special--humans of so high a caliber that, by statute, they have vast privileges and protections. There are only twelve of them, in all; the most powerful, as well as the most visible and without question the imaginative center of Cyteen, all throughout its three parts, is Ariane Emory--already introduced in the book's first paragraph, which I have quoted earlier. Ari (as she is called) is herself genetically the child of two human parents, rather than a planned gene-set. Her genetic mother and father were both geneticists and, in fact, the founders of Reseune. More than a hundred years old when Ari was "conceived" (in and by the apparatus of Reseune, which provided a sustaining womb and thus became her physical birth place), the parents are long dead. The rejuvenation techniques that so long preserved them, techniques that have been still further perfected, have brought Ari herself to the age of a hundred and twenty, which starts to approach rejuv's outer limits.(*)
Much feared, for good reason, and much hated, also for good reason, Ari is suddenly mysteriously murdered, midway in the trilogy's first volume. The murderer's identity is and remains unknown, though Jordan Warrick is maneuvered into a confession. Falsely? We never know, though he seems likely to have been guilty. But Reseune cannot manage without Ari, and the decision is made to immediately produce a clone, a possibility which Ari had anticipated and for which she has elaborately planned: her instructions, tapes, videos, and the like, are designed to carry the re-creation to full maturity. The birth, rearing, and coming to adulthood of the clone are then stunningly traced across the often breathtaking pages of volumes two and three. Similarities, and differences, between Ari I and Ari II are developed no less profoundly or achingly affecting than the evolving similarities and differences of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, over which readers and critics through the centuries have wondered and exulted.
This is however only the basic, more or less skeletal structure of Cyteen. I will leave for discussion by others such quietly dropped clues as that the expansionist drive of the interstellar Union, shaped and still dominated by Cyteen, was directly and unquestionably a continuation of that "fervor which had led to the establishment of the original thirteen star stations," or that "Cyteen was founded by people seeking independence from colonial policies of the Earth Company" (315). We even hear of "the framers of the [Union] Constitution." (The very word "union" has of course its own reverberations in these contexts; the names of humanity's other two branches, in Cherryh's grand scheme, are "Sol" and "Alliance," which have no such political echoes.) The heart and soul of the book is the flawlessly interwoven stream of meaningful story and high-powered insight, of fascinating character and palpitating event, all of it embedded in and sometimes set against a detailed matrix that can and regularly does flash with the beautifully melded incandescence of intelligence and sensitized experience.
Were all of the complex matters raised in the novel handled, fictively, as mere concepts, abstractions, the work would be a boring tract--intelligent, well-informed, but lifeless. All of the trilogy's issues are fully enacted and completely embedded in the novel's fabric. Here in its entirety is section iii of chapter 3, pages 102-103 of Cyteen, bringing to life the original Ari as she works in her laboratory--and as we very soon thereafter find out, these are almost the very last moments of her life. Her murderer enters at the end of this brief section:
QUOTE The new separator was working. The rest of the equipment was scheduled for checkout. Ari made notes by hand, but mostly because she worked on a system
and the Scriber got in her way: in some things only state of the art would
do, but when it came to her notes, she still wrote them with a lightpen on
the TranSlate, in a shorthand her [computerized] Base in the House system
continually dumped into her archives because it knew her handwriting:
old-fashioned program, but it equally well served as a privacy barrier. The
Base then went on to translate, transcribe and archive under her passwords
and handprint, because she had given it the password at the top of the
input.
Nothing today of a real security nature. Lab-work. Student-work. Any of the
azi techs could be down here checking things, but she enjoyed this return
to the old days. She had helped wear smooth the wooden seats in Lab One,
hours and hours over the equipment, doing just this sort of thing, on
equipment that made the rejected separator look like a technologist's
dream.
That part of it she had no desire to re-create. But quite plainly, she
wanted to say/in her write-up of this project. She wanted her stamp on it
and her hand on the fine details right from the conception upward. I was
most careful, in the initiation of this project--
I prepared the tank--
There were very few nowadays who were trained in all the steps. Everyone
specialized. She belonged to the colonial period, to the beginnings of the
science. Nowadays there were colleges turning out educated apes, so-named scientists who punched buttons and read tapes without understanding how the biology worked. She fought that push-the-button tendency, put an especially high priority on producing methodology tapes even while Reseune kept its essential secrets.
Some of those secrets would come out in her book. She had intended it that way. It would be a classic work of science--the entire evolution of
Reseune's procedures, with the Rubin project [cloning Specials] hindmost in
its proper perspective, as the test of theories developed over the decades
of her research. IN PRINCIPIO was the title she had tentatively adopted.
She was still searching for a better one.
The machine came up with the answer on a known sequence. The comp blinked red on an area of discrepancy.
Damn it to bloody hell. Was it contamination or was it a glitch-up in the
machine? She made the note, mercilessly honest. And wondered whether to
lose the time to replace the damn thing again and try with a completely
different test sample, or whether to try to ferret out the cause and
document it for the sake of the record. Doing the former, was a dirty
solution. Being reduced to the latter and, God help her, failing to find
solid evidence, which was a good bet in a mechanical glitch-up, made her
look like a damn fool or forced her to have recourse to the techs more
current with the equipment.
Dump the machine and consign it to the techs, run the suspect sample in a
clean machine, and install a third machine for the project, with a new
sample-run.
Every real-life project is bound to have its glitch-ups, or the researcher
is lying ...
The outer lab-door opened. There were distant voices. Florian and Catlin.
And another one she knew. Damn.
"Jordan?" she yelled, loud enough to carry. "What's your problem?"
She heard the footsteps. She heard Florian's and Catlin's. She had confused
the azi, and they trailed Jordan as far as the cold-lab door.
"I need to talk to you."
"Jordie, I've got a problem here. Can we do it in about an hour? My
Office?"
"Here is just fine. Now. In private."
She drew a long breath. Let it go again. Grant, she thought. Or Merild and
Corain. "All right. Damn, we're going to have Jane and her clutch traipsing
through the lab out there in about thirty minutes. --Florian, go over to B
and tell them their damn machine won't work." She turned and ejected the
sample. "I want another one. We'll go through every damn machine they've
got if that's what it takes. I want the thing cleaner than it's providing.
God, what kind of tolerances are they accepting these days? And you bring
it over yourself. I don't trust those aides. Catlin, get up there and tell
Jane she can take her damn students somewhere else. I'm shutting down this lab until I get this thing running." She drew a second long breath and used the waldo to send the offending sample back through cryogenics, then
ejected the sample-chamber to a safe-cell and sent it the same route. When
she turned around the azi were gone and Jordan was still standing there.
This is as close to a clear picture of the "crime," if indeed it was a crime and not a complex accident, as Cherryh ever gives us. The irresolution is typical. But so too is the patient build-up of detail, of which every smallest item is totally consistent with everything else we are told, anywhere in the novel. No one in Cyteen is any more black-and-white than are any of the book's inanimate furnishings, whether small or large or in-between. Ari is "mercilessly honest" about an experimental error, and fantastically careful about the necessary follow-up. She is also casually arrogant and profane, simultaneously an egomaniac and a person of great and patient consideration. Which matters more, the positive or the negative? For Cherryh, obviously, the answer is regularly: neither.
And Ari senior prevails. In Cyteen's penultimate chapter, Justin Warrick suddenly looks up at Grant, an azi of Alpha status specially and purposefully designed by Ari, and sees him "as a stranger would, in an objective way he had never looked at Grant, the unlikely perfection--Ari's handiwork too, from his genesets to his psychset. // Everything was, everything. No good, any longer, in fighting [her] design. Even Grant was part of it. He was snared, he had always been. / She wanted Jordan. Jordan failed her. She saw to my creation. Designed Grant. // Fixed me on her ... // Everything's connected to everything--" (604) Cherryh is completely conscious of that universal connection. "Everything is related to everything," she says in the Amazon.com interview already cited from--and then she adds, "especially in my writing."
How many writers have both that degree of awareness and the literary power needed to make their thought brilliantly real, passionately true, and beautiful?
(*) Just as Cervantes has Don Quijote making absurd mistakes in arithmetic, so, too, Cherryh has the original Ari's "parliamentary" opponent, Mikhail Corain, reflecting that she had died at age "one hundred forty-odd." Don Quijote's and Corain's mistakes are totally in character, and characterologically revealing. So too the recreated Ari, in a state of psychological turmoil after claiming vast new freedoms for herself, at age twelve, uncharacteristically but revealingly fumbles and bumbles over the first Ari's age at death, calculating "a hundred fifty" and, a moment later, "a hundred--twenty-something." Cherryh, like Cervantes and indeed all masters of literature, constantly "works" stories and readers, to the enrichment of everyone and everything concerned. That sort of almost endlessly complex self-enrichment is perhaps the clearest mark of great, as opposed to merely good literary art.
Burton Raffel is an internationally known writer and translator and a frequent reviewer of contemporary poetry.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
Port Eternity (1982), for example, is an absorbingly passionate study in isolation and dream-worlds--not "fantasy" fiction, which Cherryh also writes (and which I will not here discuss), but plainly "science" fiction. The novel's narrator is Elaine, an android servant on the private spaceship of lady Dela, a rich and spoiled aristocrat, who amuses herself by naming all those who serve her after the Arthurian characters in Tennyson's Idylls of the King (freely quoted throughout) and having them constantly act out those roles. Dela's current voyage becomes, unwittingly, her last, when her ship and all its occupants are seized--they do not know how or why, if there is in fact a "why"--by a silent, unbreakable, unknowable power. Dela's response is to stage an elaborate banquet:
| QUOTE |
| We came topside, into that huge formal dining room with the weapons and the real wooden beams and the flickering lights like live flame. All of them who had sat down at table got up again to help serve, excepting Griffin [the last of the lady's paramours] and Dela of course, who sat together at the head of the table. It was a scandalous profusion of food, when we were only then setting up the lab that was, at best, never going to give us delicacies such as this: but Dela was never one to scant herself while the commodity held out--be it lovers or wines or the food we had to live on. Maybe it pleased her vanity to feed her servants so extravagantly; she had brought us to appreciate such things--even Mordred was not immune to such pleasures. Perhaps it was humor. Or perhaps it was something more compicated ... |
I trust that, by this point, something of Cherryh's literary range begins to become apparent. We can also see very clearly one of her most distinctively literary traits, namely, her reluctance to deal in straightforward, black-and-white terms. Except in a very few of her earliest and somewhat raw books, Cherryh's work is in many ways an elaborately detailed, wondrously extended commentary on the universe's irresolute subtlety and deeply determined indeterminedness. Port Eternity is a vividly drawn, eerily compelling narrative, for despite the unusual range of her fiction, its analytical depth and imaginative variety, Cherryh remains first and foremost what all of fiction's major figures must be, a storyteller.
The Faded Sun (1978-79), like Cyteen, is a trilogy of novels: Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath. Cherryh--something of a pseudonym, her birthname being Carolyn Janice Cherry--is a trained classicist and archeologist as well as a joyously creative linguist, formulating beautifully conceived languages for her invented cultures as fluently and realistically as she builds the cultures themselves and their intricately evoked settings.
Extraordinarily different from Cyteen in subject and style, filled with bleak but glowing desert landscapes and dark, shrouded characters with burning motivation and the purest of unchanging principles, The Faded Sun may well be in strictly narrative terms more far-reaching, though nothing could be more fully realized. Cherryh's creations are sometimes worlds having no contact with or awareness of humans; more often, as in The Faded Sun, alien and human are obliged, by differing blind circumstances, to closely and vitally interact. In this case, though not invariably in Cherryh's work, the interaction is not only exceedingly violent but involves humans and aliens, each in their own ways, in powerful, dangerous, often fatal attractions to one side or the other. Fascinatingly, these are not necessarily the sides into which they were born.
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