It’s springtime, politics are still an absolute dumpster fire, and several world leaders are using the version of diplomacy best summed up as “Oh Yeah? Come Over HERE And Say That.” Time for some more escapism via a thirty-year-old sci-fi fantasy epic.
The Orpheus Machine is the final book in Ray Aldridge’s Emancipator trilogy. And first thing’s first, the blurb that you’ll see on any promotional materials for this book is pitifully inaccurate. The whole story about the “alien-sponsored death cult that lures humans into suicide”? Yeah, that’s maybe the first twenty pages of the book. Traveling with the death cult is the cover for Ruiz Aw to try – ONCE AGAIN – to get off the planet Sook with his band of former slaves, one of whom has been mind-controlled into being a traitor. He just doesn’t know which one.
“I must tell you, Ruiz Aw…I think we have a monster among us.”
To fully understand Ruiz’s predicament, you have to understand just what an abomination Gencha mind-control is. We’re not just talking about brainwashing, or even a little light lobotomy. Someone who’s been “deconstructed” by the Gencha doesn’t have a will anymore, not really, just the remains of their personality wrapped around whatever they’ve been commanded to do. Forever. Most people – Ruiz included – don’t even consider Genched persons as human beings. So it’s a great big problem that this has been done to one of his three companions, all of whom he likes and one of whom is the love of his life. Ruiz can’t even let on that he suspects, because everything he says or does will get back to Corean, the slaver who hired the Gencha to alter one of his friends and who’s been after him for revenge since the first book in the trilogy.
“What, if I may ask, did you do to earn Corean’s enmity?”
Ruiz answered distractedly. “I stole her slaves and her airboat, killed several of her people, ruined her business, stranded her in SeaStack…maybe got her killed, though that’s probably too much to hope for. This and that.”
Ruiz has been collecting enemies throughout the trilogy, and Corean isn’t the most dangerous, not even close. (Corean’s sections were actually fun to read; she’s lost so much on her ridiculous vendetta, and she’s so hilariously clueless about how outmatched she is that you know it’s only a matter of time before she ticks off the wrong person.) Every book the antagonists get more deadly, and Aldridge has saved the best (worst) for last: the Roderigans. Think slave-trading, hostage-taking mafia crime family, but with access to the best cloning technology and not one trace of human empathy. And they’re practically untouchable. Imagine an organization that can keep committing atrocities, year after year, even when they’re hated by everyone and the richest families in the galaxy spend their entire fortunes failing to wipe them out.
Falling into the hands of the Roderigans is the worst possible outcome, because they don’t just want to kill Ruiz and feed him to their high-paying cannibal customers, they want to break him.
This book is dark, definitely the grimmest of the trilogy. What the Roderigans do to Ruiz, what they make him do, it’s incredibly bleak. It’s the kind of sustained trauma that makes Ruiz doubt, not just his own humanity, but whether there’s any real goodness in the entire universe. There’s no doubt that they could reduce him to either a zombie or a corpse, but the truth is that they need Ruiz’s resourcefulness and survival instincts intact. The Roderigans plan to travel with him to a distant outpost on Sook and interface with a computer in order to get information from an extinct race about The Orpheus Machine, something that’s so sought-after that every single pirate on the planet is ripping each other to pieces just to confirm a rumor that it’s hidden in SeaStack…
If all of that sounds like a lot, well, it is. I had to double-check the page count for the novel; there’s way more going on here than you’d think would fit into a 300-something page book. The journey through the extinct civilization is something that could have been a novel all on its own, a bittersweet past with several different flavors of heartbreak, where every building, every room, every item of furniture, is an artwork of almost impossible beauty.
Meanwhile the Roderigans are terrifying monsters who haven’t so much lost their humanity as thrown it away. Their masters and servants have a symbiotic relationship, something that turns at least one member into a killing machine who chases after vengeance long after it’s lost any meaning (many parallels between this and Corean, as you can imagine). They have access to the best technology in the world, and at the same time they have the simplest and most primitive mindset, basically “people are meat”.
It almost feels like Aldridge knew this was his last novel, so he put in as much worldbuilding as he possibly could, along with violence and revenge and tragedy and weird, weird machinery and biology. The climax of the story pours on all the nightmarish imagery, with poisonous air making it impossible to tell if the slaves modified with collars of living fingers and gaping mouths on their knees, or the surreal “living” Orpheus Machine, is real or just another hallucination.
The cheekbones were a knotty mass of arms, the muscles clenching nervously. The forehead was a horizontal striation of long smooth feminine legs. The eyes were a pointillist design made of thousands of real eyes, – pale blue eyes for the sclera and black for the pupils – and each blinking eyeball glowed with a disorienting awareness.
Since this is probably the last Ruiz Aw story, the question is, did Aldridge stick the landing? I think so. It feels odd for a series called “Emancipator” to end with Ruiz’s quests ended and the galaxy-spanning Art League still in power. But it’s helpful to remember that Ruiz’s quest to end slavery was over before the first book started. Ruiz spent his whole life spent tilting at that particular windmill, casting himself the hero so he could do what was necessary for his grand crusade. And that ended with him in survival mode, justifying his job with the biggest slave-ring in the galaxy by saying he can do more good from inside (spoilers, he can’t). Ruiz spends most of the trilogy wondering if the horrible things he’s done make him less of a monster if he did them for the right reasons, or if he at least feels bad about them afterward. The series wasn’t about freeing the universe, it was about freeing Ruiz. And for better or worse, that’s over now.
Someone else could probably tell more stories in the Art League universe, but without Aldridge’s unique blend of speculative fiction, epic world-building, Conan-the-Barbarian princesses throwing themselves at the space-age super-agent, and violence, it wouldn’t feel the same. I’m happy to let the series end with Ruiz forever beyond the reach of both slavers and anti-slaver crusades.