“I’m not accusing anyone, I’m trying to show you that we don’t even know what we don’t know.”
Award-winning author Catherynne Valente gets to play in the Mass Effect sandbox with the latest novel in the Andromeda series. This installment is something of a buddy cop/murder mystery/sci-fi disaster movie. In space.
The Quarian ark Keelah Si’yah – temporary home to 20,000 colonists including drells, batarians, elcors, hanars, and volus – is just thirty years away from the end of a six-century journey to the Andromeda system when the ship’s computer pulls a Sleepwalker team out of cryostasis to investigate a possible emergency. Trace amounts of chemicals in more than four hundred stasis pods proves that the people inside have died, even though computer scans show they’re all still alive. Most of the affected colonists are drells, so either their pods were deliberately sabotaged, or the drells are the victims of a virus. Possibly both.
The death of ten percent of the drell population is bad enough, but then symptoms start showing up in other colonists who’s stasis pods have opened for no reason. The lights start to flicker, the temperature controls start to fail, the ship’s forcefield keeps shutting itself off, and no one aboard can trace the source of the problems because according to the ship’s computer none of this is happening and everything is fine.
I didn’t know anything about the Mass Effect game before reading this book, so I’m impressed with Valente’s ability to deliver an entire galaxy’s worth of information in less than four hundred pages and have enough room left over to tell a murder mystery. There is a lot going on here, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to keep track of which alien is which, and sometimes the pace has to slow down a bit while everyone tries to solve both a medical and a computer problem when a) the ship’s medical bay doesn’t contain much more than band-aids, and b) the ship’s computer can’t diagnose a problem when it can’t even see that the problem exists in the first place.
The result is one of the oddest scavenger hunts I’ve seen, with the characters digging through engine parts and the colonists’ luggage and separating into different teams to find out the What, How, and Who. Namely, What is killing people, How can we fix a ship that isn’t aware it’s broken, and Who is responsible. Of course there’s a lot of infighting about that last one, because there’s no way to know if someone on the Sleepwalker team is the one sabotaging the ship.
Longtime fans of Catherynne Valente will notice a much grittier, less flamboyant tone here than in most of her previous works. Longtime fans of the Mass Effect game will…actually I’m really curious about what fans of the game think. I’m sure most of the sprawling detail on all the different races and their technology comes directly from the game, but everyone’s personal background, the way they interact with each other, and what made each of them sign up for a six hundred year journey, all of it has Valente’s flair for unusual characters.
For instance, even coming from a race that’s notorious for being violent smuggler crime lords, the bactarian Borbala Ferank is one of the brashest, angriest, most in-your-face former crime lord you can imagine. And be darned if she didn’t get most of the best lines, especially since she keeps up a running commentary on all the truly horrible things she’s done. You know where you stand with Borbala. And if you’re smart you’ll stand with your back to a wall when she’s around.
The elcor character Yorrik had some of my favorite chapters. Elcors can only speak in monotone, so they have to preface everything they say with the emotion that’s supposed to go with it: “Helpless laughter,” “Overenthusiastic interruption,” “With mild interspecies prejudice.” Valente has all kinds of fun with this, especially since Yorrik is obsessed with Shakespeare (hence the name) and keeps quoting from Hamlet, complete with the stage direction for what Hamlet would have been feeling at each line.
It’s also a little chilling to imagine Yorrik’s monotone voice putting things like “Urgent scream” in front of his sentences when things start going very, very wrong, or the baffled description of his thoughts when the computer insists on not being helpful.
There is no cadaver in cryopod DL2458. The occupant, Soval Raxios, age thirty-four, shows a slightly elevated blood alcohol level. Turian brandy. She is otherwise in perfect health.
Anax, Senna, and Yorrik blinked. They looked down at the frozen corpse in its canister. Her open mouth in its rictus of death.
“Surprised understatement: She’s really not.”
As someone learning all of this for the first time, the various quirks of all different races were fascinating, and each race has something that lends itself (somehow) to solving the ongoing mystery, or at the very least surviving it. The jellyfish-like hanar refuse do anything so rude as use first-person pronouns. The volus depend on their suits to keep the gasses they breathe from poisoning everyone around them. Quarian’s never take off their spacesuits, even in their own homes (which oddly enough makes them seem capable of being much more intimate than other races; imagine what kind of trust they’d have to show to someone in order to share the same breathing space with them). And Anax the drell…well Anax is an impossible one to figure out. She takes on the role of lead investigator in this murder/sabotage mystery, and it’s very hard to trust her because she lies all the time.
All of the characters are saved from being cookie-cutouts of their species because each one of them is a misfit, someone who doesn’t have much in common with anyone, most of all with people from their own race. They’re religious heretics, failed artists, family rejects, completely ashamed of the fact that they get along so well with computer programs since their race was decimated by rogue AI’s. (Okay, that last one’s just Senna.) And every point of failure in a character is a reason why they bond so ridiculously well with someone from a different species. …Or jump to the conclusion that of course the culprit has got to be the bactarians, throw them out an airlock and let’s get back to sleep.
There are so many lovely touches that are uniquely Valente’s work. There’s the Radial; the place where all six environmental zones of the ship meet at a glass hexagon, so the different races can hold a meeting without having to strap on air filters or take the painkillers they’d need to endure someone else’s gravity. (The garden in the center of the Radial was apparently the cause of an argument that led to a fistfight because people couldn’t agree if a decoration made of plants was important.) Valente also throws in things like a child’s telescope that’s very stressful to use, and a virtual intelligence that needs a smoke and a good stiff drink before they can deal with a technical problem this bad.
All of these fun little details make it sound like one of Valente’s Fairyland stories… if it weren’t for the thousands of people on the ship who are suffering from a fatal virus that practically liquifies organs, and in its final stages makes the victim try to kill everyone around them. The lovely garden at the Radial inevitably starts to look like a carnival fun-house of violence.
They peered down into the hanar section. Several of them were clustered around one preaching. One had open sores on its tentacles, but no one seemed to be moving away from it. The elcor hallways were dark and still. The batarian ones were a riot of accusations and shots fired.
I’ve mentioned in other reviews that one of my favorite short-story tropes is “trouble in the old mine.” You can now add to that the trope of “everyone on the ship is mad.” There’s something so deliciously terrifying about being trapped in space aboard a huge spaceship where all the passengers are losing their minds, especially when you’re in the Mass Effect universe with so many different species crammed together, all of them with their own technology and biology and ways of reacting to an emergency. Valente obviously loves the hell out of this franchise, and she’s done her research to provide a lot of well-thought-out technobabble so she can explain what’s happening, how it’s happening, and why the most obvious solutions to some of the problems won’t work.
After all the digressions about Anex’s ability to tell people what they want to hear, Borbala and her relationship with her family, and Senna’s delightful grandmother, the solution to the mystery arrives with brutal speed. Valente manages to keep the science from going too far over my head, and even when you find out the Who you know that the survivors will never quite be able to understand the particular kind of poisonous reasoning behind the WHY. And it’s odd to be able to say this about a story with bodies stacked in the mess hall or drifting frozen behind the ship in space, but so much of the ending is…beautiful. There are sacrifices, and heartbreaking promises kept, and a series of images that are, I’m not sure how to describe it, like horror poetry. Lyrical and strange in the way that I’m pretty sure only Valente can do.