Currently Reading - Mar 2017

Foreigner – C J Cherryh.

I’ve been a fan of Cherryh since the early 80s, but hadn’t really been reading much of hers lately. But when my rearranged home-office put Foreigner on the bookshelf next to my elbow, it was clearly time to take another look at what may be my favourite series of hers. I had eight if the first nine books to hand, two of which I turned out never to have read (probably because I didn’t have book seven). I’ve now re-read/read those three trilogies, and as I didn’t review them as I went, which was my initial intention, I decided to re-read again specifically for review purposes, which interestingly threw up some clear evidence that Cherryh was reworking her world-building as her ideas developed.

Foreigner is book 1 of the series, and spends its first 60 pages establishing backstory – how the starship Phoenix, carrying a human colony expedition, complete with orbital station, had an incident in jump space and came out so far from home that they couldn’t even map their position via pulsars. Desperate efforts brought them to a habitable world, which turned out to have its own steam age native species, the Atevi. The crew, or rather the all-powerful Pilot’s Guild*, wanted to deploy the station only to refit the ship and then move on, while the colonists, who were being used as expendable labour, forced the issue when they fabricated drop capsules and sent a mission to the planet’s surface.

200 years later Phoenix is long gone, the station long abandoned, and Bren Cameron is Paidhi-Aiji, the sole human allowed off the human enclave on the island of Mospheira. Humans and the very humanoid Atevi (a head taller than a tall human, with jet black skin and hair and golden eyes) get on well together on the surface, but they just don’t understand each other, and that led to a war which could have wiped the humans out. The treaty that stopped the war permanently separated the two species and established the post of Paidhi – translator to the ruling Aiji of the Western Association, responsible for handing over human technology in an orderly fashion, the price for continued human existence, and for advising the Atevi government on how to avoid any economic or ecological disasters that might result.

Bren’s in his mid-twenties, and won his position as Paidhi because he’s the person most fluent in the Atevi language, which doesn’t come easily to humans. He’s only a couple of years into his position, rather similar to Tabini, the Aiji, who is rumoured to have assassinated the previous Aiji, his father, that being one of the points on which humans and Atevi fail to understand each other. The Assassin’s Guild serves the Atevi, or at least the Ragi Atevi of the Western Association, as police**, lawyers, and security for the Aijiin, the Atevi nobility. And as assassins for anyone who can hire them and demonstrate a serious enough grievance (though on the whole they would much rather people settled things amicably).

Bren thinks of himself as a technical translator, but he’s clearly much more than that, he sits in ministerial level meetings and has a power of veto, although that can be overridden by the full Atevi parliament. Bren gets on well with most Atevi, it’s a polite culture, and rather likes Tabini-Aiji. And that’s a problem, because Atevi brains aren’t wired to like people – ‘like is for salads’. Atevi brains are wired to follow their man’chi – duty - to their aiji. Follow the leader is wired into every animal species on the planet, but man’chi can be fuzzy around the edges, and the moment when an unrealised man’chi becomes clear is a staple of the Atevi’s machimi dramas. Only the Aijiin lack man’chi, and they compete and scheme ruthlessly with each other, and the use of assassins is considered a perfectly normal part of that competition – Bren reflects that the Atevi language has 14 words for betrayal, and one doubles for doing the obvious.

Before the first page of his story is out, Bren has shot and wounded an intruder creeping into his bedroom, using a pistol the Treaty forbids him from owning, a pistol Tabini just gave him and told him to keep close. Bren might sleep next door to the cook, but the hue and cry brings out the other two Atevi he can’t keep himself from liking; Banichi and Jago, two of Tabini’s senior assassins. Banichi’s older and occasionally given to wry humour, Jago is younger, female, and very earnest, as interested in understanding Bren as Bren is in understanding the Atevi. Banichi quickly takes charge of the pistol, supplying Bren with his own, and insisting that Bren is to tell everyone that Banichi shot the intruder. Jago, meanwhile, reports blood on the terrace, and that the intruder has escaped in the storm.

Before Bren quite knows what is happening, Tabini has filed Intent against persons unknown on his behalf, the prelude to unleashing his own Licensed Assassins, and has assigned Banichi and Jago to keep Bren safe. Which for the assassins means wiring his rooms with lethal countermeasures and replacing his familiar servants with two new ones, Tano and glum Algini***, whom Bren soon comes to realise are actually junior security.

Bren knows something is off, his mail has stopped arriving and Banichi is being less than frank about what is happening, or why, while Jago professes ignorance of quite what Banichi is up to. Bren isn’t certain whether to call the Mospheiran Foreign Office and warn them that he may be in trouble, he doesn’t want to be pulled out, but then Tabini decides he is safer off out of the Bu-javid, the Atevi seat of government/capital residence for the Aijiin, and before he quite knows what’s happening he’s bundled onto a plane, despatched to somewhere no human has been before – Malguri, seat of Ilisidi, the Aiji-Dowager.

Ilisidi isn’t Tabini’s mother, she’s his grandmother, and the other candidate for assassinating the previous Aiji, her son. Ilisidi is the arch-conservative of Atevi politics, passed over twice for the position of Aiji of the Western Association, because the other Aijiin feared for their lives under her rule. Bren first takes her for senile, but she is anything but, quickly proving even more challenging than Machiavellian Tabini.

Malguri is a house of contrasts, part historical monument (the toilet arrangements fill Bren with horror), staffed by quietly efficient servants who live to serve the house and its guests, and part residence of one of the most powerful Atevi living, but one who rejects Tabini’s modernism to live a traditional, kabui**** life, surrounded by her ‘young men’, who all wear Assassin’s black and answer to Cenedi, her somewhat older version of Banichi. Ilisidi is tiny, frail – she walks with a cane, and as hard as steel. Regardless of her physical limitations she remains a champion equestrienne, riding the mecheiti, the Atevi horse equivalent - part camel, part wild boar, and with the temper of both.

Bren’s first encounter with Ilisidi goes somewhat amiss, when he is accidentally poisoned (Cenedi swears it was accidental – and the use of alkaloids in Atevi cuisine makes it a minefield for humans, so he may even be telling the truth), but after that the days settle into a pattern. Breakfast on the terrace with Ilisidi with a main course of challenging questions about Mospheira’s real agenda leads inevitably to a challenge of a different kind as Ilisidi insists Bren join her for a cross-country ride cum hunt on the mecheiti herd she keeps, with the mecheiti and their hierarchy and competition within it serving as an insight into Atevi society for Bren. Which leads to an afternoon spent soaking out the aches and pains in a hot bath, followed by an evening of reading and security alarums and excursions, which Banichi swears are mostly down to Malguri’s ancient infrastructure.

But the threat remains, and a visit by tourists ends with a Licensed Assassin dead on the gravel in front of the main door - a shocking breach of protocol as no one has filed Intent on Bren - and to Bren beginning to doubt even Banichi and Jago, although Jago swears she will never betray him.

And then Cenedi invites Bren for a cup of tea.

( Cut for fundamental spoilers )

Cherryh has a very definite fictional style. She rarely writes stories from the viewpoint of the true protagonists of her novels, instead we see the story through the eyes of someone caught in their orbit, rarely fully informed as to plans and situations, and often of an entirely different culture, with a slow lead in and a sudden, sharp climax. With Foreigner, and the other books of the Foreigner series, she has created an entire society shaped to suit her style, as man’chi clash and true loyalties manifest at the critical moment – novel as machimi drama.

* It’s not outright stated, but the presence of the Pilot’s Guild implies that the expedition originated from Cherryh’s Alliance/Union Merchanter background.

** Foreigner has a few references to an actual police force, but that isn’t carried through into the rest of the series, which makes it clear that with the exception of village constables the Assassins are the functional law-enforcement.

*** There are some elements of Tano and Algini’s portrayal here that are slightly at odds with facts that emerge in the third trilogy. But on the other hand, everyone is lying to Bren anyway.

**** Imagine kosher and feng-shui had a love child