My name’s Andrea Cort. I hate heights, I hate being helpless, and I hate creatures bigger than I am.
It was almost exactly twenty years ago that I picked up a copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and read “The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes”. The story – set on the planet Vlhan – was a sequel to one I hadn’t read yet, but it still absolutely knocked my socks off, so much so that I immediately tracked down “The Funeral March of the Marionettes” and any other Adam-Troy Castro story I could get my hands on.
Several of those stories, including two novels, involved Andrea Cort, Counselor of the Hom.Sap Diplomatic Corps and all-around force of nature. I reviewed Emissaries From The Dead in May of 2014, and The Third Claw of God a few months later, and adored both of them. Unfortunately the third Andrea Cort novel was only available at the time in audiobook format or in German.
This February the print version was released in the US for War of the Marionettes, the novel where the lives of the Dance Pilgrims of Vlhan and Andrea Cort finally intersect. I wanted more than anything to find out what the annual dance of the Vlhani was actually about, and believe it or not we absolutely get that explanation. It’s bigger than any of my theories, it results in misery for every character, and it’s surrounded by an unbelievable amount of violence and pain. I couldn’t be happier, this book was pretty much exactly what I wanted.
I don’t think there are any collections in print with the two previous stories Castro has written about the Vlhani. And that’s a shame, but I don’t think they’re essential to understand the plot. For a quick background, the natives of Vlhani have a language that’s so complex it’s taken decades for scientists to learn just a few simple phrases. (Bob Eggelton’s illustration for the July 1997 issue is probably my favorite depiction of a Vlhani.) They also have an annual ritual where thousands of Vlhani dance themselves to death, literally dance until they lose control and carve themselves and their fellow dancers into bloody pieces. The rest of the universe was happy to study and sell videos of the ritual, until individual humans – some of them not much older than children – started having themselves modified so they could join in on the mass suicides. And the Vlhani slaughtered most of a human outpost just for trying to stop one human from doing so. At the time of this novel there are over a million dance pilgrims on Vlhan waiting for their chance to die horribly.
Andrea Cort, meanwhile, is the bad-ass, beautiful, startlingly intelligent, unbelievably damaged representative of the Diplomatic Corps who’s secretly working for the galaxy-spanning intelligence known as the AIsource. Andrea agreed to work with the AIsource when they asked for help with their current project: finding a way for them to die. She’s more than happy to participate, since she’s certain that a rogue subset of the AIsource – who Andrea privately refers to as the Unseen Demons – are responsible for the out-of-nowhere explosion of violence that killed her family and everyone else she loved and branded her a war criminal. At eight years old. Like I said, damaged.
She’s at least found a fragile kind of happiness with her lovers, the Porrinyards. (Oscin and Skye, former lovers who are now cy-linked, one blended soul in two bodies…look you really should read the other two novels to get all the intriguing details about how that works.) Part of Andrea’s secret job involves the three (two? The English language hasn’t quite caught up with the concept of cy-linked pairs) of them traveling to various parts of the galaxy in response to vague statements from the AIsource. Except this time the AIsource’s statements are anything but vague, at least as far as the outcome, if not the actual cause.
And then there was that one terrible spectre looming over everything.
The real reason I was here, bigger than all of it.
The threatened extinction of the human race.
To date I’ve read six Andrea Cort stories and two novels (three now), and I never get tired of this character. “Formidable” is an excellent word to describe her. Also “bitter”, “disrespectful” (at least as far as anyone who thinks they have authority over her), “suspicious” (at least as far as anyone who tries to reach her emotionally), and, I can’t say it enough, “damaged”. Castro writes Andrea with a very pleasing combination of pissed-off confidence and self-awareness. She knows she acts like a cold, angry bitch who sometimes bulldozes her way through human interactions, and who insists on using her superior intellect and her skill at pushing buttons to infuriate prominent people into doing things her way. It’s just that there have been so few people in her life willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on anything, so she’s turned into someone who will invariably do what she thinks is right, instead of worrying about what’s easy.
“I never saw anybody be rude to the AIsource before.”
Oscin said, “That’s the Counselor. I’ve seen her be rude to the weather.”
Andrea’s lovers Oscin and Skye are still a hell of a lot of fun to read. Andrea’s not intimidated by anyone, and Oscin and Skye aren’t intimidated by Andrea. It provides a nice contrast to Andrea’s general attitude of impatience to have Oscin and Skye’s dry sense of humor and occasional smart-aleck comment, which Andrea tolerates because she loves and more importantly trusts them entirely. The Porrinyard’s are devoted to her, although there’s a little tension now because she still hasn’t given them an answer to a question they asked two books ago, and they’re starting to wonder if she ever will.
It’s a distraction Andrea really can’t afford, especially when the Vlhani start behaving the way they did years before at the massacre of the Hom.Sap outpost. Only this time it’s much, much worse, and nobody can figure out why they’re doing this, much less how to make it stop.
…the Vlhani took a single dainty step over the wreckage, straddling it, its big black head reflecting the glow of the internal lights in a curve that to my eyes resembled the gleam of a predator’s smile…
The first Andrea Cort book was a murder mystery set in an artificial world of impossible heights and acid oceans. Book two involved a corporation that sells weapons of mass destruction, and an assassination with a weapon that literally dissolves the victim from the inside. So it really means something when I say that Book 3 is much darker, and the body count is much, much higher. By thousands. Once things get started they don’t ever really let up, and there are quite a few nail-biting scenes of close escapes, nightmarish images, overwhelming violence (it’s already been made clear in previous stories that Vlhani whips can chop people in half, but there’s at least one reference to people being turned into “froth”), and all the horrifying nastiness you can get from weapons that burn an image into someone’s brain, or technology that can literally take someone to pieces and reassemble them while they’re still alive.
It’s not just the brutality though, it’s the betrayal. Levels and levels of it. I’d be sure I’d already figured out who was responsible, and then the story would take a step back and the reader could see just how much bigger the scope of it really was. Some of the manipulation and betrayal are on a personal level, much more is on a galactic scale, a lot of it is made so much worse by the eternal excuse of fuck-ups: good intentions.
Like the other two novels, the story is a mystery, with tangential mysteries bound up in the main one. In addition to figuring out how something on one planet could lead to the genocide of the human race, you’ve got a wealthy magnate who’s trying to find his Dance Pilgrim daughter. Then there’s the Vlhani, and what’s making them turn on the most important element of their lives, the Dance. And finally there’s the meaning of the Dance itself, who stands to benefit, and how have the Dance Pilgrims been able to get through a blockade and have themselves modified to participate (both of which are VERY ILLEGAL). And the answer to pretty much every mystery is one more reason for Andrea Cort to lose little more of her faith in humanity, maybe even in sentient life altogether. This story breaks Andrea.
For all its bleakness, this book has just so much of what fascinates me about Adam-Troy Castro’s writing. Nothing is simple; it’s all an interconnected mess of every imaginable planet and their races, each one with their own history and technology and biological needs and ways of interacting with every other race. And there’s always people making horrendous decisions which make no sense to anyone on the outside but which are completely logical inside their own heads, which is why you’ll end up with things like a Dance Pilgrim who’s reduced herself to a head and torso surrounded by metallic tentacles, arguing with a furious human ambassador who gave up wearing clothes years ago in a large part because it makes everyone around him uncomfortable.
Speaking of horrendous decisions, Andrea has to make a lot of those in this story. It’s part of what breaks her. She makes them for survival, for the human race, as the resolution to a mystery that I honestly hadn’t considered even though the signs were right there all along. In another instance of me thinking I had a handle on what was going to happen, she surprises me by making a decision at one point that is either a good choice for terrible reasons, or a terrible one for perfectly understandable reasons. Everything’s going to change from here.
Andrea’s next story is “Hiding Place”, which I really do need to get my hands on since apparently it’s going to be the last Andrea Cort story, chronologically at least. In the meantime I’m going to go get digital copies of the previous two books in the series, just so I can have them handy any time I want to re-read. And I highly recommend you go out and get them as well; all three are available for 2.99 for the whole month of July.