Resurgence by C. J. Cherryh
Cover art by Todd Lockwood
Published by DAW Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
After the kyo departed for their own region of space and their own problems, the atevi aiji Tabini decided that the issue of the station could no longer be postponed. By treaty, it was to be occupied by an equal number of humans and atevi. However, the removal of the humans of Reunion Station to atevi space, a necessary part of making peace with the kyo, had thrown that balance in favor of the humans.
Originally the leaders of the Reunioners had wanted to build a brand new station at Maudit, the next planet out from the atevi Earth's primary. However, given how little space presence the atevi home system possessed, it was soon deemed impractical. Perhaps in a generation or two, as humans and atevi working together become able to start mining asteroidal material, it might be possible -- and even wise, given the possibility that the enemy on the far side of kyo space might take an interest in them -- but not nearly soon enough to resolve humanity's treaty obligation with the atevi.
For much the same reason, it was not possible to expand the atevi side of the station to bring its population back into balance. As a result, the only feasible solution was to take the Reunioners down to Mospheria, the island mini-continent ceded by treaty to humanity. However, neither Mospherians nor Reunioners had forgotten the quarrels that had divided their ancestors in those first years after an accident had caused the spaceship Phoenix to become lost in hyperspace and stumble upon the Earth of the atevi, unable to find their way back to the human Earth.
In the last two books, Convergence and Emergence, Bren has struggled to set up an arrangement for bringing down the Reunioners that will not ignite a civil war. He has succeeded in bringing down the four young human associates of the atevi heir Cajeiri, along with their families, and installed them in a building provided by the University. Because of their ties to Cajeiri, the atevi Assassin's Guild is helping to arrange their security -- which creates more than a little awkwardness, given the cultural memory of the War of the Landing, during that first period when neither human nor atevi realized just how different the other really was, largely because of the superficial similarity of their physiology.
But Bren has achieved a reasonably stable situation on Mospheria, and a framework for integrating the rest of the Reunioners into Mospherian society. He has paid especial attention to making sure that no ghettos develop in which Reunioners remain apart, stigmatized, resented and resentful.
Now Bren is returning to the mainland, to report to Tabini. It's interesting to see how the office of paidhi has developed over the course of twenty books. Back in the beginning, it was translated as "interpreter" with a fair degree of confidence, leaving us with the impression that Bren's job focused primarily on translation of Ragi, the principal atevi language, which encodes some very fundamental psychological drives that are completely alien to humans, with a side dish of diplomacy between the two species. However, this translation of the word was a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of humans of the atevi requirement after the War of the Landing that they appoint a paidhi to speak for humanity.
For it turns out that neither "interpreter" nor "ambassador" precisely translates paidhi as an atevi office. Perhaps "middleman" or "go-between" might translate the word better, since the role of a paidhi is to represent each side's position in turn to the other, fairly and completely. All along, the atevi were expecting humanity's paidhi to represent the aiji of the Western Association to the human government of Mospheria, as well as facilitate communication between the two species and deliver requests of the human government to the Bujavid in Shejidan. Only Bren, who had dared to speak Ragi after generations of absolute prohibition on conversational fluency, was able to discover this peculiarity of atevi thought on the matter.
Travel by sea, aboard his brother Toby's ship, has given Bren an opportunity to decompress, to rest and compose his mind after the tumultuous events of the past few days, including an act of terrorism on the part of a group that violently opposes the settlement of the Reunioners on Mospherian soil. And then he arrives at his coastal estate of Najida to discover Ilisidi, the aiji-dowager, in residence, waiting for him to arrive.
Bren knows only the broadest strokes of events on the mainland while he was dealing with the question of the Reunioners. He is aware that there has been trouble, but not the details or the extent of matters. Much of it deals with the problematic clan of Ajuri, to which Damiri, the aiji-consort and mother of the heir-designate, belongs. The most recent clan lord of Ajuri was assassinated some time earlier, and since then its headship has been very much up for grabs. There has been talk of seating Damiri as clan lord, or even her infant daughter, with all the perils of a regency. Now one particularly troublesome claimant (or pretender, depending on how one looks at the matter), has been assassinated, but irregularly, illegally, rather than through a proper Filing of Intent via the Assassins' Guild. And another claimant has emerged, a scion of a cadet branch, a man who spent many years masquerading as an ordinary railroad worker in the Transportation Guild, keeping his head down and using the freedom of movement his posting offered to keep in contact with the rest of the scattered members of the clan lord's lineage.
Meanwhile, Cajeiri, Tabini's mischievous young heir-designate, is all too aware that his time at his great-uncle's estate of Tirnamardi is coming to an end and he must soon return to Shejidan and the Bujavid, which is both fortress and palace, as well as the meeting place of the legislature. He's enjoyed riding his mecheita, Jeichido, and he's very aware of how fragile his relationship with this massive animal is. In order to maintain that relationship of dominance and trust which is similar to the driving atevi emotion of man'chi, Jeichido must remember him, which means he needs to be sure he imprints himself upon her animal mind. Which means going to on a little irregular excursion to the stables, accompanied only by the two youngest members of his bodyguard detail, to give her some special treats.
As always, the chapters from Cajeiri's point of view provides us a window into the mind of an intelligent being who, in the words of John W. Campbell, "thinks as well as a man, but not like a man." This is a marked contrast to the first eight novels in this series, which were told entirely from Bren's POV, with the minds of the atevi characters effectively black boxes, distant and incomprehensible. This split-POV arrangement began in Deliverer, in which it may well have started as a narrative convenience, a way of showing Cajeiri to be an active participant in his own liberation rather than passively awaiting rescue. But it appears to have been so successful that Ms Cherryh decided to continue it in future books, showing this very alien youth growing up simultaneously in his own very traditional culture and heavily influenced by what he has seen of human culture, something made possible only by his escapades aboard the Phoenix, something impossible, even unthinkable, even a decade earlier, when it was literally a criminal offense for people on each side of the straits to learn the language and culture of the other without explicit legal authorization.
Even as Cajairi is returning to the Bujavid and the heart of atevi politics, Ilisidi is pulling Bren into her various plans for knitting the Western Association more tightly together. She has come to value his diplomatic expertise, and knows that he can get contentious clan lords and business magnates to see the mutual benefit in her various schemes. In particular, she wants to forge new alliances with the isolated and deeply traditional -- and in many ways impoverished, albeit too proud to know it -- clans of the mountains. A journey that will take her and Bren to communities living at the highest altitudes of the vast mega-continent of the atevi Earth.
Typically, the names and culture of the atevi make me think of feudal Japan, although their formal court dress seems more modeled upon that of eighteenth-century France (albeit with trousers rather than breeches). However, the people of the high mountain villages makes me think of the Svan villages of the Republic of Georgia (Sakartvelo) -- they are, compared to the lowlanders, impoverished in material goods, but they are deeply traditional and fiercely proud of their ways, and would be gravely offended by anyone who implies that they are poor.
This is one of the most fascinating things about how the Foreigner series has developed over the course of twenty volumes. Even such richly imagined worldbuilding as Frank Herbert's Dune has the problem of single-climate worlds -- Arrakis is the desert planet, Caladan is the water world, etc. -- and the culture of the Fremen portrayed as pretty much uniform, although they are described as being made up of many tribes. By contrast, even in the original Foreigner there were hints of divisions among the atevi: while the Ragi believed it to be immoral to farm animals for meat or to preserve meat for consumption out of season, other atevi ethnic groups had no such compunctions. And the dowager Ilisidi's Eastern Association was much more traditionalistic and isolationist than the outgoing and forward-looking Western Association of her grandson Tabini.
Over two decades and twenty books our view of the intricacies of atevi culture and politics have only grown. We've learned about the peoples of the Marid, who may or may not be descendants of refugees from the Southern Island, which was overwhelmed and laid waste by a tsunami long before humanity came to this world. Although they, like all atevi, tend to use assassination as a means of resolving political conflicts, thanks to the psychology of man'chi, their assassins and bodyguards have very different traditions from those of the Western Association, and it is clear that in many ways integrating them into the Assassins' Guild is going to be far more difficult than the process of integrating the Assassins of the Eastern Association into the Western Association's Assassins' Guild.
Even within the Ragi, the ethnic group that form the core of the Western Association, we get a sense of a wide variety of internal arrangements among the various clans, even as they are bound together by the traditions of kabiu, which at first seems rather like kashrut with an overlay of Feng shui, but perhaps could be better translated "propriety," except with an overlay of numerology rooted in the Ragi language's handling of numbers. As the various characters discuss the strengths of the various claimants to Ajuri, there's a sense that we're glimpsing a far larger and deeper history of a troubled and often dysfunctional clan which has festered for generations, even centuries, right on the borders of the wealthy and influential Atageini.
If anything, it can sometimes become overwhelming to keep track of all the different clans, territories, and clan-lords' estates. More than once I really would've liked a map of the atevi Earth and some family trees along the lines of the family trees Tolkien created in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, just to keep track of this vast vista of peoples and their history, which was so critical to understanding that whys and wherefores of the complex negotiations Bren was having to undertake.
Meanwhile, it's also fascinating to watch Cajeiri growing up, assuming adult responsibility for his little household. Back in Convergence, he had decided it was time to find Boji a better home than he could provide. He'd acquired the monkey-like parid'ja when he was first permitted a household of his own, after Murini's rebellion was quashed and the aiji's family returned to the Bujavid. It was a childish lark, the result of discovering an antique cage among the furnishings he was permitted to consider for his apartments.Once he discovered its intended purpose, he wanted an occupant for it, and his bodyguards carried through. But over his recent adventures, he's come to realize that the apartments of a young lord really aren't the ideal environment for such a creature, and he certainly doesn't have the wherewithal to train the little creature to retrieve eggs from nests as was once the practice among the hunters of the forest lands.
So he's had his staff send out cautious feelers in search of a more suitable accommodation for Boji. They've found a possibility in a zoological garden and conservatory, but he wants to make sure that it will be a good fit for the little creature, and that if Boji proves unhappy there, it will be possible to alter the arrangement. In the process, he also comes to realize that handing the parid'ja over to its new keepers will not be the end of his responsibilities toward Boji. Thus he is introduced to the role of a lord as a patron of the arts and sciences.
Meanwhile, the increase in his bodyguard brings other changes in his household. His apartments are being arranged to accommodate them, with additional space for them to stay, and changes in the accesses to the servants' area in order to better protect him. As a result, he receives a note from his father's major domo, discreetly informing him that it is appropriate to increase his domestic staff to better support his larger aishid. So he has to consider how exactly to go about obtaining additional servants without offending the ones he already has by implying that they are in some way inadequate.
It's interesting to see how the impulsive child we met several volumes ago is growing up into a fine young atevi lord, who regards authority and power as a responsibility to those who have man'chi to him. He's learned how to put space between the impulse and the action, to plan things through so he is less likely to get into embarrassing scrapes, and has gained the approval, however grudging, of people much older and more senior than himself.
However, things are becoming steadily more fraught in the mountains. Although Bren is able to get some of the clan lords to see how Ilisidi's plans are to their benefit, it is growing ever more clear that someone or some faction is intensely opposed to the new arrangements. As matters are wont to do among the atevi, things go sideways very rapidly, and suddenly Bren and the dowager Ilisidi are under attack and in desperate straits. Worse, there is evidence that a remnant of the notorious Shadow Guild, so critical in the business with Muriini, may be behind it.
By the time I was finished reading it, I was almost disappointed that it was over. Perhaps it was the effect of it being the third volume that I'd read in rapid succession, but there was also the fact that it ended with a lot still in suspension -- and a lengthy wait before the next book will come out, and then the wait for the library to acquire it, get it cataloged and processed, and get it in my hands.
One thing I really liked about the cover is how it so clearly shows that Bren is no longer the young man who crossed the straits for the first time, full of theoretical knowledge but with no meaningful experience, thanks to the strict rules under which the paidhi operated at that time. These novels are so fast-paced that it's easy to forget that months or even years are going by over the course of them -- which may well be why they're so addictive.
Buy Resurgence from Amazon.com
Review posted February 6, 2021
