I hate gravity.
Haimey Dz is just a humble tugboat operator…in space. She and her fellow crew members – the genetically perfect and utterly charming pilot Connla and the tugboat’s shipmind Singer – are following a lead on a possibly lucrative bit of salvage that could help them get just a little bit more out of debt to the governing body of this universe: the Synarche
The salvage turns out to be a titanic dead alien, and an enormous ghost ship filled with an impossible technology. Haimey barely has time to explore beyond the airlock of the abandoned ship before being infected with some kind of living technology that creates glowing patterns on her skin and allows her to control gravity and fold space, something that comes in handy when the tugboat is suddenly being pursued by Freeporters. Or in other words, pirates. In space.
Having the main character be part of a lowly salvage crew is, for me, the perfect way to introduce a new universe. Keep your galactic police forces and government-funded space exploration teams, give me the hardworking average joe who has to deal with all the nitty-gritty of space travel on a budget. In just the first few chapters you have a spaceship corridor with a garden providing vegetables and oxygen growing along the walls. There’s a list of various pitfalls you want to avoid if you don’t want to become part of a story that starts with “I knew a guy who died in the stupidest way on EVA”. Haimey has had adaptive surgeries to make her feet into an extra pair of hands (the better for moving around in zero-g, but a pain when dealing with gravity). And any ship as small as the tug means learning to accept everyone’s personality quirks so two humans and a shipmind can comfortably share a cramped space with pets.
(The pets in this case are two cats, both of whom are well-adapted to a living in a weightless environment. Haimey adores them; if there’s a dangerous situation going on that might affect the cats, then Haimey will be obsessively worrying about the cats, and I absolutely approve of those kinds of priorities).
We get a few tidbits about Connla and Singer’s backstory, but mostly the author focuses on Haimey, who grew up in a female-only clade of people who were voluntarily brainwashed to have everyone be in total agreement, all the time. We don’t know her full story at first, but her history becomes more ominous the more we learn.
The universe that the author has created here has it’s own unique technology, and in many cases you have to figure out what all of it is on the fly. “White Space” is the faster-than-light travel method. An “ayatana”, is a type of mechanical implant that allows people to save all their memories and review them later. A person’s “fox” is possibly the control system for the ayatana, and it allows people to communicate telepathically via “senso”, but it’s also a means to tweak personal chemistry and emotions. This is also something which is used for “rightminding”, the method for tweaking the personalities of less-mentally-healthy people so they’ll be better members of society…
..aaaand this is of course the basis for a lot of the moral conflict in the book. Remember Haimey’s clade? When I say they were brainwashed to be in total agreement, that means that mentally everyone was psychically “tuned” so that no one ever even thought about a conflicting opinion. The fact that Haimey “escaped” her clade is considered perfectly reasonable, and yet it’s accepted by Synarche society that it’s acceptable for anyone with criminal or anti-social impulses to be rightminded so they’ll work better with others. And that sounds like an utterly horrible idea…except that on the other end of the spectrum is the idea that we just shrug when someone randomly decides that their freedom = your pain. So where the heck do we draw the line?
Are you going to argue we should leave psychopaths untuned in order to let them prey on the rest of us because our species somehow evolved to have a certain number of self-eating monsters in it?
The other stories that I’ve read by Elizabeth Bear so far involved a lot of soul-searching and interior narration by the main character. It’s the same thing here, but with so much to explain about the unfamiliar universe (and technology, and history) it feels magnified by a million. Haimey has to digress constantly to cover what her internal conflict is at the moment, or drop in an apropos-of-nothing snippet about her personal history or her crewmembers or explain – without really explaining in some cases – how the White Drive of their ship works or what exactly she’s doing with the parasitic technology that’s letting her control gravity.
That last bit is what I found the most frustrating about this book. There were many, many times when I had to just coast along and hope the technology would make more sense later. It’s unfortunately not very satisfying to have the characters reach a solution that went right over my head, especially when I didn’t fully understand what the problem was in the first place.
At over five hundred pages, the constant back and forth of action/introspection/info dump felt like a bit of a slog. Then OUT OF NOWHERE the tone of the book changes to something completely different, and suddenly Haimey is trapped in a huge alien spaceship along with a ruthless pirate who has no problem with killing her if it’s convenient, but who also for some reason wants to “save” Haimey from a loyalty to the Synarche that the pirate is convinced is based on nothing but brainwashing and lies.
The transition is just that fast. Sure, there’s still a lot of interior monologue and information dumps, but it’s set against the backdrop of impossible technology and a cat-and-mouse game with a sexy space pirate. Bear also does clever things with memory, and history ,and identity. Haimey is dealing with technology that can edit out inconvenient emotions (and the reasons for them) and a society that very quietly forgets the parts of history that are embarrassing. And then there’s the cheerfully amoral pirate who cares only about herself and lies all the time, with the exception of when she’s talking about other people’s lies. Maybe.
If you can get used to Bear’s unique style of pacing, then this is a pretty enjoyable book. I liked so many of the interactions between Haimey and her easily-distracted-by-politics crewmembers (“You’re encouraging him,” I said. “Fly the tug so we don’t die.”) and she creates some appealing and sometimes stunning images; titanic aliens who look like spectral sea-horses, ships with names like I’ll Explain It To You Slowly, a footrace outside a spaceship, and a pleasant stroll though a space-station garden with a police officer who also happens to be a gigantic alien praying mantis.
The philosophical questions that run throughout the entire story will make you stop to think for a bit about what exactly are we okay with society doing (or not doing). I’m reminded of a quote from Doctor Who, “Sometimes all the choices are bad. But you still have to choose,” since Bear offers exactly zero easy answers when it comes to the impossible task of getting millions of individual beings to live together without giving the worst of them the freedom to just take whatever they want from whoever isn’t strong enough to stop them.