Rider at the Gate The Faded Sun Hunter of Worlds
Finity's End Invader and Foreigner Serpent's Reach
The Rider Books
C.J. Cherryh is well-known as a fantasy author who constructs complex ecologies, cultures, languages and paradigms. I truly feel that the Rider books are among the best she's ever written.
Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider are set on a distant planet that was colonised by humanity some centuries before the time of the books' narratives. The colonisation was accomplished before it was realised that the entire ecology of the planet was highly telempathic; spook bears and goblin cats on the one hand, and smaller creatures like nightbabies and various small vermin, are alike highly dangerous to any creature that has no telepathic defences. Humans and their cattle cannot survive alone in the Wild, with hungry creatures beguiling their minds and making them unaware of their true surroundings, leading them to their death.
Humanity's only defense are Nighthorses, carnivorous, three-toed black shadows that are the most dangerous of all the Wild's creatures. Fortunately, they love the ordered sequenced thoughts of human beings, the images and patterns that hold to specific, logical goals. Nighthorses, then, come down from the High Wild to find human minds, and choose riders to be their thinkers and planners, giving humans the opportunity to travel the dangerous and impossible outback without being killed.
It was not always thus; people spread throughout the high mountain ranges, forming little mining towns and supply enclaves that would communicate by radio. But during the first winter, the animals were drawn by the radio signals, turning each little haven into an inchoate hell of dark images that drove the inhabitants mad until they opened the gates and let in the Wild - and their deaths. Now, no one uses radio, and each little town has its rider camp outside the wall. The nighthorses protect against the animals with imaging of their own, but the townspeople fear and loathe the horses, and their strange, twisted religion apostrophises the horses as evil beasts and their riders as hell-bent. But without the riders, the cattle would be unable to graze in the fields, and the people would be unable to live or travel. So the Riders stay, despite the hatred of those they protect.
The greatest danger in the Wild, however, is not a goblin cat or a spook bear, but a nighthorse gone rogue. Its rider dead, its mind in chaos, it becomes a terrifying force for destruction and death as it seeks out company, looking for the rider it has lost. Its thoughts contaminate other nighthorses, and its powerful sendings can completely take over the town. Once the gates are opened, the wild comes in, and nothing can save the townspeople from the compulsion to kill, or to stand helpless to be killed. Not even other nighthorses can defeat a rogue unless their riders are smart enough to outwit it.
The very word "rogue" is enough to terrify the whole of Shamesey town, and the huge nighthorse camp that surrounds it completely. And thanks to a rogue, a woman is dead in the High Wild. Her partner, Guil, is on the run, trying to find out what happened in spite of the fact that he's being hunted by two groups of riders, one of which has taken along Danny, a young kid from Shamesey, and his horse Cloud, a young nighthorse from the High Wild. They must track Guil and his horse, Burn, straight to the place where the rogue killed Aby Dale and her mare, Moon. But the rogue could be anywhere, lurking in the forests of the high passes with winter on the way, and the tiny upland villages helpless before it. And then, a party of riders that doesn't have anyone's best interests at heart but their own is chasing after them, with murder in mind.
Cherryh delivers a tour de force so brimming with tension that one feels the need for a Valium and a good night's sleep; the action is intense, the ecology brilliantly crafted, and the intricacies of human relationships manages to be the most important factor even in a world where crawling rodents can beguile the unwary to walk over a cliff and thus provide a ready meal. The rogue stalks the mountains while the humans and their horses manouevre for position, although no one will say what the stakes really are, and whether they know more about Aby's death than they are telling.
An utterly brilliant book. I'm trying desperately to get my hands on its sequel, Cloud's Rider, which continues Danny and Cloud's story from where Rider at the Gate left off. I cannot recommend this book more highly; it is a triumph of the fantasy genre, and it keeps you guessing right till the end. The intense spookiness, coupled with the apocalyptic preaching of the native religionists and the strange machinations of the townsfolk (even until their fiery deaths, in some cases) gives the whole narrative a feeling of strange immediacy, even though it is set lightyears away in the far future.
Hunter of Worlds is one of the author's earliest books, but for all that it is stunningly crafted. Set in a distant group of stars, far in the future, it centres around four races: Kallia, Amaut, Iduve and Human.
The iduve are a terrible and fierce race of spacefarers, uber-predators who care only about their freedom to roam, engaging in dangerous games of one-upmanship (called vaikka) with each other. They are immensely strong, and their technology incredibly advanced; apart from this, they are empaths who operate in a group-consciousness and each iduve can mind-link directly to their complex machinery, opening doors or even flying spacecraft with just their minds.
Approximately seven thousand years ago, the iduve snatched the kallia and amaut from their pre-space cultures and took them as servant-races aboard their massive ships. In return, they gave both cultures space technology beyond their respective wildest dreams. This enabled the metrosi to be built; the civilised worlds and massive space stations that comprised colonised space. And then the iduve disappeared - it was thought forever.
The metrosi exhaled in relief, and continued with the business of space-based economic growth. But just as suddenly as they disappeared, the iduve return, playing out their complex games with little interest as to how they affect others.
Ashanome is the oldest and most powerful iduve mega-ship; her ruler, Chimele, is descended from the oldest and strongest of the old-world noble families. Chimele is searching for a renegade iduve, a fugitive of Ashanome, and this search has led her far into metrosi space. What Chimele wants, she will have; iduve do not bluff. And so the lesser races do her bidding, as she will not hesitate to destroy an entire colony if it defies her. The hunt is everything, and vaikka must be satisfied.
It is because iduve are so powerful and so conscious of their standing, that they are so careful to enmesh their conflicts in solid rules; they are a highly logical and thoughtful race, and yet their tempers are incredible, and they are capable of wild emotion and terrible violence. And yet they do not war - knowing that they could destroy themselves if they did.
According to complex rules of vaikka, Chimele's feud against the fugitive iduve must play out before the watchful eyes of impartial witnesses, and the ship against whom the original vaikka was carried out. So two ships follow in Ashanome's wake, divorced from any action, but observing Chimele's conduct constantly. Time for Chimele is running out; she must capture her quarry within the two-years-and-three-days time span granted her, or forgo revenge forever, with accompanying loss of prestige. But Chimele hasn't played all her gambits just yet; she takes a Kallia from outside Ashanome, a human from where Tejef is thought to be hiding, and an Ashanome Kallia and mind-links them, using this combination to project Tejef's whereabouts, with little thought as to what human and Kallia ethics and culture will do to the mores and ways of Ashanome herself. The strange human way of doing things, and a Kallia who has no idea about how servants (noi kame) are supposed to behave, has a bizarre effect on the consciousness of the ship and leads the iduve to be a lot less comfortable with themselves.
The Merchanter universe is set about a thousand or so years in Earth's future; there are colonies in space, and stations throughout the solar system. There are distant planets like Pell, a station orbiting a planet that supports the only other sentient life forms in the known universe, the Downers (see DownbelowStation), and Cyteen, a planet occupied by humans who have totally converted to cloning and bio-engineering to populate their colonies, and who have little sympathy for Earth and her people (see Cyteen).
The connection between Earth and all her stations between herself and Pell is maintained by the Merchanters, traders in family-run ships who have fought for and won sovereignty on their own decks. Fiercely independent, they have been involved in a terrible war against Earth's renegade Fleet for decades, but at last the War is starting to be won. There is just one problem: Cyteen, which was the original enemy of Earth (and why the Fleet was created in the first place) is starting to intrude on the trading prerogatives of the merchanters, and the smuggling activities of the merchanters themselves is starting to help Mazian and his Fleet obtain supplies. It is in these cicumstances, then, that Captain James Robert Neihart, First Captain of the famous merchanter ship Finity's End, returns his ship to trade after decades of being in the forefront of the War. Honest trade; only the famous Old Man, head of the most famous and beloved merchanter ship of them all, has a chance of renewing the Alliance and persuading the merchanter captains to cease their smuggling activities in return for negotiating a cheaper tax settlement with the stations and protection for the smaller merchant ships, families almost pushed out of the market by Cyteen's "merchant-warriors" and bigger merchant ships' greater cost-effectiveness.
In the midst of these events we meet Fletcher Neihart, left with his mother on Pell during the War (she was pregnant with him at the time). A few years later she committed suicide, leaving him to the mercies of Pell's judicial system, which refused to return him to Finity during the War, but could not allow him to be adopted by a Pell family because his citizenship was on Finity, giving Pell no jurisdiction over him. He became a marginalised foster-child, passed from family to family, unwanted and bitter. But while he was still young and rebellious, hiding out in Pell's service tunnels whenever the system grew too much for him, Fletcher met two Downers, Melody and Patch, who 'adopted' him and gave him the unconditional love he'd needed so badly as a child with a drug-addict mother. They gave him a sense of purpose; he'd gotten out of trouble, improved his grades and started studying planetology, and applied for the Downbelow programme. On Pell's beautiful planet he'd blossomed, finding something he could at last be part of.
But then Finity returns, demanding the return of their ship-kin, and as he's still a minor Fletcher cannot argue; he is snatched from the cloud-swathed surface of Downbelow to the Upabove, and bundled onto the ship seconds before her departure on a year-long trading voyage through the outer space-stations towards Cyteen, while the Old Man draws together the strands of a new Alliance of Merchanters and Mazian's cronies do all they can to halt procedings.
An excellent book; the best Cherryh's written so far. It keeps you glued to the pages with breathless impatience, while the tension wrings you out like washing and the plot-threads keep you guessing. As ever, it is the personal relationships that are highlighted more than everthing else - the nature of family, and the fellowship of the human race as it puts its first feelers into space.
It is a terrible thing when a spaceship ends up in a distant solar-system without the means of returning home; it is worse when there are divisions in the crew and some are abandoned by the ship at a newly-built spacestation orbiting an already-inhabited planet. But consider the ramifications of abandoning the station and falling into the motherwell to the planet's surface when the station resources start to run out - especially when a full-grown human is childsized among the aliens. Aliens who have no ability to feel emotion in the human sense. Aliens whose idea of loyalty is a homing-instinct under fire. Aliens who have no concept of geographical boundaries.
The result was war. Human roads, railways, and hamlets began to disrupt the balance of Atevi loyalties. Atevi who seemed friendly enough, but whose man'chi, affinities, were upset by human needs and interactions. In a society where assassination is a legal recourse, and a Guild controls the Assassins, people interact in ways carefully governed by ritual. They follow the orders of their lords, who have no man'chi, and cannot deviate from their hard-wired instinct. The humans nearly lost; they didn't understand why they were summarily attacked, and almost overwhelmed. Only their superior technology saved them.
The humans and the major atevi association drew up a treaty after those early fiascos; because humans and aliens were so different, at such a deep level, interaction on a large scale was acknowledged to be impossible. The humans withdrew to the island of Mospheira, cleared of its native inhabitants and far enough from the mainland to be insular. The two main governments established communication through one institution: the paidhi, language interpreter between Mosphei' and Ragi, and mediator of the treaty. No one else can interpret or travel between the island or mainland for any reason - and the paidhi spends years being trained, in atevi language, culture and mathematics, and learning on the job that the aliens cannot, biologically, have affection toward anyone. They are driven only by man'chi, the instinct to associate with strength, or the urge to mate. Love isn't possible, and neither is liking. And the one interface, the human charged with keeping the treaty (which atevi are biologically incapable of breaking), is a pawn between powerful, aggressive forces.
Humans on Mospheira fear the atevi for their size, their emotionlessness and their unpredictability; but atevi fear human technology (slowly being portioned out to their mainland fellows), human lack of proper man'chi, human ability to break treaties - not written agreements in atevi minds, but a homing instinct under fire. So on both sides there are divisions of conservative and liberal, and an ultra-conservative cabal in the human State Department that wants total human self-sufficiency and dominance over the atevi that would in theory be impossible. It is this carefully balanced steady state between the two races that is suddenly and irrevocably set on edge by the sudden arrival of the original ship which abandoned the station and its crew so many centuries before. Now the space-race is on with a vengeance, and the most valuable piece in the game is suddenly the paidhi; the erstwhile-overlooked and unimportant civil servant in an office in a political backwater somewhere becoming vital to interspecies interaction and position-seeking, while both sides try to deal independently of each other with the ship.
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