…arguing over what could be causing such irregular, constant, chaotic transmissions. All of us dancing about the question of Life, could it be life? A whole civilization with their radios turned up to top volume, down there in the dark…
Like Tchaikovsky’s book Alien Clay, the main character of Shroud and all her colleagues are under the thumb of a repressive government – here known as The Concern. In this case though, the main goal of the government is the same as most of humanity: Expansion. Keep finding more planets to harvest in order to have the resources to find more planets to harvest. Keep the human race from stagnating now that Earth and most of the solar system is dead.
Most of the destruction happened in a series of incidents known as the Bottleneck, as if the shape of the universe was what made humanity run out of resources, rather than the usual things like war, overpopulation, and an obsessive need to harvest anything of value and then be surprised when it all runs out. Almost all of humanity grows up in orbital Habitat tanks, packed shoulder to shoulder with everyone else until they prove that they’re worthy a job working anywhere else. Which would explain why so many people are okay with working endless shifts on the Garveneer, drugged into wakefulness and desperately trying to prove that they’re useful enough to the expedition that they don’t have to be “shelved” back into the hibernation pods to be woken up at the next planet weeks later. Or years. Or maybe never.
The latest moon they’ve found could be the next step in humanity’s attempt to move outward world-by-world, like a freeclimber clawing for the next handhold on the sheer face of a cliff. But it’s going to take a lot to figure out what’s on the moon at all, seeing as how it’s completely lightless, filled with crushing pressure and toxic gasses, and, for some reason, screaming.
The actual sound of Shroud, even with the volume dialed all the way down for human comfort, was like every single percussion instrument ever invented being played by frenetic maniacs, all at once.
This book, like several of Tchaikovsky’s other novels, falls squarely in the category of Hard Sci-Fi, and he goes into great detail about the workings of the Special Projects team (our narrator Juna Ceelander, and five other people ranging from exobiologists, exogeologists, engineers, and whatever degree Bartokh got to put him in charge), and their attempts to get any data from a moon that crushes equipment in minutes, shows nothing except dark, and drowns out any attempt at a signal with its all-frequency cacophony of electromagnetic noise. The briefest footage from a surviving drone with a strong light source shows that there is some kind of life that’s purposely moving down there. All sorts of plans are put into place: the thinnest space elevator possible, more drones, oh, and an experimental type of pod that could allow humans to take a quick look at the surface. No one’s really taking that last idea seriously of course, ha ha, too dangerous, not worth the cost and the risk of instantaneous death if something goes wrong.
As you’ve probably guessed, an impossible-to-predict disaster results in Juna being one of the humans who finds themselves in a tiny pod, in total darkness, trapped on the surface of the moon. And this is the point where we find out that the life on Shroud is very interested in the crew of the Garveneer.
The sections of the books from Juna’s point of view are harrowing, and not just because they make me think of a certain deep-sea submersible and how quickly death can happen when the hull fails. This is an impossible situation to be in, cut off from the ship, surrounded by a darkness made up of toxic atmosphere and crushing pressure that’s trying to kill them all the time, with an entire planet in between the pod and the one place to maybe send a signal back to the ship. There’s no way to make this work. And then they just keep going, having no other option but to fine-tune whatever technology is on hand and then crawl through a terrain made up of ice and caves and other living things that Tchaikovsky describes in terrifying detail. There are several yikes moments as things like a gigantic face on what’s basically a living windsock appears in the struggling light from the pod, or the moon’s residents find new ways to pounce.
The chapters told from the point of view of the alien life on Shroud are harrowing in a completely different way. It becomes clearer as we get further into the story that the aliens (nicknamed The Shrouded) don’t just “see” differently in the constant dark of the moon. They see memories differently, they see identity differently. They’re fascinated by this Stranger who appeared in their home, but what they know about the Stranger changes as the pod moves along. And since humanity and the Shrouded have completely different ideas about consciousness and transmitting information, there are a lot of misunderstandings and several near-misses.
By now I am starting to make plans to butcher it as an exploratory exercise, feeling it has exhausted its stock of novel behaviors.
The character of Jana, by her own admission, is someone who isn’t the best at biology or engineering. She’s an assistant to the project leader because she’s someone who can understand the science, and has the personality to get people with wildly different backgrounds and personalities to work together. And she knows exactly how screwed they are. She’s the perfect person to bring the science down to the level of the reader and convey all the desperation, lightbulb moments, taking turns freaking out, inappropriate gossip, trying not to be the first person to say “well this is it, we’re all going to die”, or everyone getting giggly from too many emergency drugs while doing something as ridiculous as pulling a heist on an alien race. We get to experience the ways people form a relationship when the looming shadow of the hibernation tanks is an incentive to not to have a relationship with someone who might not be there next week. And the entire time they’re puzzling out a race that is also trying to puzzle out them.
The voyage across the moon takes up most of the book, so you might think that’s the main point of the story. But there’s something bigger at play, one that leads up to an absolute ka-pow of a final line. You’ve got an alien that by its very nature can’t see humans as sentient creatures. And meanwhile you also have a government that is laser focused on “the good of humanity”, when it can’t even see its own citizens as sentient creatures, much less the lifeforms that’s currently inhabiting the next source of resources to be exploited. And you have to wonder the entire time how badly that eventual meeting is going to go.