Emergence by C. J. Cherryh
Cover art by Todd Lockwood
Published by DAW Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
In Convergence, both Bren Cameron and the atevi heir-designate Cajeiri were dealing with the the aftermath of their diplomatic negotiations with the kyo. After the peak experience of working out enough of the kyo language to be able to discuss abstractions and thus hammer out an agreement for them to be good neighbors, if not close neighbors, it is now necessary to "come down from the mountain" and deal with more prosaic political problems of the Earth of the atevi. And deal with them they have: Bren beginning the process of getting the Reunioners settled on Mospheria even in the face of deep historical memory, and Cajeiri becoming entangled in the question of the heirship of Ajuri, his mother's clan, which has been dysfunctional for generations.
This volume pretty much takes up right where Convergence left off. While the first few novels were still complete unto themselves, the series is becoming increasingly a roman fleuve, a novel that flows, and each volume contributes another segment of a far larger story. It enables the author to tell stories that are much larger than what can fit between the covers of a single book, but it also means that it's much trickier to onboard new readers. However, Cherryh provides a reasonably amount of background in the beginning of this volume, without bogging down the story in "housekeeping," which has been a problem with a number of other authors of long-running series.
This volume starts with both Bren Cameron and Cajeiri in sticky situations, thanks to events in the previous volume. Bren Cameron was in the interesting situation of going to his native Mospheria as the representative of Tabini-aiji, which could very well lead him to be viewed as a traitor by many humans. As it turned out, the Mospherian government and linguists have majorly misunderstood the atevi concept of a paidhi, translating the term as "interpreter," and understanding it as someone who would primarily translate communications between the two species on humanity's behalf, with some ambassadorial duties. In fact, paidhi is better translated as "go-between" or "arbitrator." The job of a paidhi is to represent each side in turn to the other, faithfully and impartially. And right now Bren's job is to represent Tabini-aiji to to the Mospherian government, both in relation to the agreement with the kyo and in relation to the issue of the Reunioners and the imbalance their presence on Alpha Station causes, which must be resolved with all possible speed.
However, that may well be easier said than done. To Tabini-aiji, humans are humans. He doesn't really grasp the depth of the division between Mospehrians and Reunioners, the bitterness as powerful as any of the long-standing feuds between atevi clans. And because humans form social connections in a different way, and thus respond to stress differently and use violence in different ways, trying to force the matter may have very different consequences than what happens when a deeply entrenched feud between clans suddenly goes kinetic.
The obvious source of resistance is the Human Heritage Party and its leader, the hidebound Woodenhouse, who is visibly hostile to any atevi influence on human culture. But at the fringes of his group are a large number of loose-cannon types who are quite willing to become violent about things if they don't think the politicians are getting them what they want. And while humans find the existence and activities of the Assassins' Guild among atevi intensely disturbing, it's likely that atevi would find the human form of terrorism to be even more abhorrent, given how it is far less targeted on leadership, and far more likely to hit innocent bystanders in an effort to create a shift of opinions.
Meanwhile, Bren is trying to put together a team of people to help the Reunioners adjust. He wants some specialists, but he also wants some young, flexible people who'll have enough in common with the kids that they can interact on a peer-to-peer basis, rather than child to Adult Authority. He's found it in a number of students at the University -- but discovered that they're members of a semi-secret club that watches machimi plays and drink tea in the atevi style. This ateviphilia is disturbing to Bren because it brings back the history of the time right before the War of the Landing, when humans became enamored of the culture of their hosts and tried to be atevi, with disastrous consequences, due to the fundamental differences in the two species' neurological hardwiring in the areas dealing with social function.
Even a few years earlier, they would've been criminals -- it was literally illegal for any human to speak Ragi, or to study it without formal permission from the University as part of the the program to support the paidhi and train future
paidhiin. Those laws have been relaxed (it sounds like they may have been regulatory law, which would be easier to alter than formal legislation, but a lot of the functioning of the government of Mospheria is pretty much assumed to be US-style, since they have a President with real power, who is both head of state and of government), and it is no longer something that can get a person into legal trouble. Yet their fascination with atevi culture could still count against them in the necessary background checks they will have to pass to be cleared for this work.
Back on the mainland, Cajeiri is at Tirnamardi, the estate of his Uncle Tataseigi, lord of the Atageini clan, and has become unwillingly embroiled in the struggle for the lordship of the neighboring Ajuri clan. There are two major claimants, one utterly unacceptable and the other deeply problematic. The peace of this very traditional household has been repeatedly disrupted by incursions, which means that even the claimant who has a substantial following of loyalists who've been in hiding during the Shadow Guild era is less than welcome.
And then there is trouble: amidst a storm, Tirnamardi's resident mecheiti herd gets loose in the middle of a storm. It is particularly dangerous because the hierarchy of the herd is at contest, with Cajeiri's own high-spirited Jeidicho wanting to challenge the current herd-leader for supremacy. This has the potential to make it very dangerous to get these elephant-sized riding beasts corralled and back in their paddock. But they cannot be allowed to run wild, so the expert riders go out, including Uncle Tataseigi, in spite of his age, as well as the original members of Cajeiri's aishid, who belong to the Taibeni clan, which are practically born in the saddle.
It's interesting to see in this scene so many significant elements of atevi culture, particularly the way in which man'chi and responsibility work together in a way that is very different from the reciprocal ties of human social connection. But we also see a great deal of just how mecheiti and their behavior are different from horses and other terrestrial riding beasts, with some strong hints that man'chi has deep evolutionary roots in the mammal-equivalent of the Earth of the atevi, and it is very likely that it operates in very primitive parts of the atevi brain, far deeper than their equivalent of the neocortex.
It's the sort of world building that makes this series so fascinating -- the author has systematically thought through everything, right down to the evolutionary biology behind the behavior of the species with whom her human characters must interact. And she's done it so well that, although Cajeiri's point of view may seem superficially human, every now and then we get a flash of something that reminds us that no, he is a member of a very different species, with very different neurological hardwiring.
As if the escape of the mecheiti and consequent damage isn't bad enough, Cajeiri's mother arrives. She is a possible claimant for both Ajuri and Ategeini, and is known to be a difficult person, particularly given her history of flitting back and forth between each of her parents' ancestral mansions, even after her marriage to Tabini. In theory she could be named lord of Ajuri or heir-designate to Atageini (since Tataseigi has no heir of his body), but both would be politically touchy as a result of her marriage to the aiji of the Western Association. Unlike many lords, Taibini had insisted upon a permanent marriage, not a series temporary contracts for the purpose of bearing children for the lines of one clan or the other.
So we have electric tensions on both sides of the straits, and a sense that things are about to blow. On the mainland, that happens when the Tirnamardri bus tries to take several of the injured to the nearby town to make a visit to the medical clinic there. On the way, the bus is attacked by Shadow Guild. Meanwhile, on Mospheria, human discontents erupt in that human way that we've become so familiar with here in the Primary World, right as Cajeiri's young associates and their families arrive at the Mospherian spaceport, to meet the Mospherian President in a formal ceremony of welcome. This act of terrorism is the basis of the fiercely dramatic cover, which shows Bren starkly visible in the white of the paidhi among his more darkly-clad conspecifics and his barely-visible atevi bodyguards.
Yet each incident in its own way has an effect of being like the storm that clears the air, albeit with terrible damage in the process. It becomes clear that the fundamental problems have to be addressed, and cannot be simply papered over or kicked down the road, however much it might create a temporary illusion of concord. The people of Mospheria have to come to terms that their estranged fellow humans will be settling among them, in small numbers and scattered about the island's various communities so that they will integrate and not form ghettoized communities. And on the mainland, Ajuri must have a recognized lord, and become a reasonably stable part of the heartland of the Western Association, rather than a notorious clan that "swallows honor," as the atevi put it.
C. J. Cherryh has always been known for her masterful portrayal of aliens, going all the way back to her Faded Sun trilogy, which also featured a human having to live among aliens and learn their mindset, and a second POV from one of the aliens, the mri. There too humans had to learn to understand the other species' way of coming to a solution for a problem, although in those novels it seems she was somewhat more optimistic about the flexibility of human neurological hardwiring.
One of the neatest things about the atevi is how clan lordship can go to either a male or female heir, without any discrimination. One of the Lords of the Marid is a woman, and when Cajeiri's little sister Seimi grows up to inherit the Atageini lordship, she will have the same authority as her great-uncle holds, and if she chooses a permanent marriage rather than a series of mating contracts, her husband will be her consort.
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Review posted January 1, 2021
