Finally, she composed her resignation, encrypted her voice print into the message and sent it to Admiral Dilan.
Moving slowly, she packed her camping gear and left the Academy grounds, crossed Low Town and headed for the desert. She did not plan to return until after the graduation ceremony.
Every day she hiked deeper into the emptiness. Every night, she camped facing south to see the beacon lights of the shuttle port.
Freighter captains sometimes hired Academy-trained cadets, though rarely ones who did not graduate. Still, she might find a berth on a freighter and work her way outsystem. She might eventually end up on a private research vessel, one searching for abandoned worlds. There was a market for archaeological finds.
The thought was distasteful.
On the fifth night, a grav car came out of the south, from Nemeal. It circled her camp once, then settled a respectful distance away. A small cloud of sand rose to obscure the car as the exhaust system expelled spent air.
Jhyoti stood up and brushed sand from her pants. When the cloud settled, a door opened in the grav car, spilling light. A uniformed man jumped nimbly out and headed toward her.
It took a moment for her to realize that he was not wearing a Guard uniform but that of an Alliance security officer. A meter away, he stopped. For a moment, Jhyoti thought he was about to salute.
"Cadet Jhyoti. Admiral Dilan requests your presence."
"You have been misinformed, Lieutenant. I am no longer an Alliance Cadet."
The security officer's expression did not change. “Perhaps so, ma'am, but my orders are to escort you to the Admiral."
Jhyoti's first thought was an uncharitable one and she did not voice it. She closed her eyes. She had thought the Admiral above revenge.
* * * *
The security officer escorted Jhyoti through the deserted Headquarters building to the Admiral's waiting room. He then stood before the ident plate and announced, “Cadet Chandar, sir."
"Bring her in,” said an unfamiliar voice as the door slid open. Jhyoti took a deep breath and entered.
A Guard stood by the far window, away from the three other occupants. His body language—stiff and slightly turned away—told her he was not happy. He stared at her, his face unreadable. A man and a woman in Alliance uniforms—a captain and a general—stood up as she entered. A moment later, Admiral Dilan did, as well.
Jhyoti took three steps and came smartly to attention. True, she was not in uniform, but it seemed the prudent course.
"Cadet Chandar.” The Admiral's gaze swept over her desert clothes but he contented himself with a frown. “This is Captain Pettis of the Solar Wind and General Mohammed of Alliance Command. And Guards Captain Sansjil."
Jhyoti remained at attention while acknowledging each introduction with a nod. The two Alliance officers returned her nod but Guards Captain Sansjil deliberately looked away from her. Sansjil ... Before she left for the desert, the Guards Captain had been an Attines. Brother to Hojjasta, cousin to the Admiral.
For the first time, she realized she had left her gloves somewhere back at her desert camp.
Her gaze settled on the Admiral. The Alliance officers kept their emotions under better control than the Guards Captain or even the Admiral. She could not understand why they were here.
Why was she here?
The Admiral came around the desk to stand before her.
"Cadet Chandar, the Academy regrets that you were forced to miss your graduation ceremony."
She opened her mouth to remind him of her resignation, but he continued without giving her a chance to speak. “However, it was safest to let you disappear when the assassin planted the micro bomb in your room."
The blood drained from Jhyoti's face. The Admiral kept speaking but she could barely hear him through the roaring in her ears. Only his dark gaze, boring into hers, kept her from staggering back. Her mouth parted, not to speak, but because she was having difficulty breathing.
"We have caught the assassin and arrested the man who hired him."
The word escaped on a gasp. “Who?” Who would want to kill her?
The Admiral did not glower at her. The question was acceptable, even expected. “The previous Guards Captain, Mirhan Jedrel san Attines."
It took a massive effort not to look at the new Guards Captain, though she could feel his gaze on her.
"It is now safe to graduate you,” said Admiral Dilan. He reached behind him on the desk and picked up a small, flat box made of real wood. Inside was a green Specialist stripe laid out on dark velvet.
"Cadet Jhyoti Sagura sen Chandar,” continued the Admiral. “You have distinguished yourself by consistently rising above the high standards set by the Academy. Your work has been exemplary and of the highest quality. You have proven yourself capable of accomplishing your mission under trying circumstances. And above all, you have proven yourself honourable."
The Admiral took the Specialist's stripe and placed it on her dusty desert shirt. As he pressed down on the stripe to affix it, his knuckles grazed her chin.
Confusion. Concern turning to alarm. Relief replaced by cold rage, kept under tight control. Pride.
Then the touch was gone, so brief that it could have been her imagination save that the Admiral now stared hard at her, as if to impart a message. The touch had been intentional. He was warning her.
But of what?
"The Alliance Academy is proud to graduate you, Specialist Chandar."
Jhyoti stared at him, at a loss for words. His raised eyebrow jogged her manners.
"Thank you, sir."
Then all three Alliance officers saluted her. A moment later, Jhyoti closed her mouth and returned the salute.
"Our congratulations, Specialist Chandar,” said General Mohammed. “We hope you will serve the Alliance for many decades.” She turned a hard stare on Guards Captain Sansjil.
Only then did Jhyoti understand. The Alliance officers were there as witnesses, and as a warning to the Guards Captain. The Alliance could not be certain that Guards Captain Sansjil had been involved in the plot to kill Jhyoti or they would have arrested him. But obviously they had their suspicions. They were serving notice that Jhyoti was under their protection.
Her shoulders relaxed for the first time since she arrived.
With a nod to her and the Admiral, General Mohammed headed for the door.
"A pleasure to meet you, Specialist Chandar,” said Captain Pettis. “The Admiral tells me you're a bit of an expert on the Davidovich Drive."
Jhyoti looked at the Admiral in astonishment, but his expression did not change.
Captain Pettis grinned at the Admiral and left.
Guards Captain Sansjil left also, his colour high. He spared her a furious glance as he passed.
Then she was alone with the Admiral. Jhyoti plucked the first coherent thought she could find and voiced it.
"I had resigned."
"Your resignation never reached me.” The familiar challenge was back in his eyes. Jhyoti could no longer tell if what she felt was amusement or frustration.
"Perhaps not, but I did not turn in my final assignment."
Admiral Dilan's mouth quirked. “You may thank the yighsilchi. She insisted I accept your report from her hand instead of yours."
Jhyoti smiled. Suri sen could be very persuasive. Then the smile left her face. The bashravi would pay a price in lost status—and donations—as a result of the yighsilchi's decision.
"Was anyone hurt in the blast?"
A shadow crossed the Admiral's face and this time Jhyoti had no trouble reading his expression. “No, but it was a long time before we determined that you had not been killed."
Once he realized she had not been killed, the Admiral had searched for her and found her in the desert, where he left her until the assassin and his employer were arrested.
"What now?” she asked.
The Admiral shrugged. “Kallista is no longer safe for you. You may still resign, if you wish, but you have wor
ked very hard. Why turn away when the stars are within reach?"
* * * *
"You will be leaving soon,” said Suri sen.
Jhyoti nodded and kept painting. The grave post was a bright shade of yellow, with painted flower garlands twining around it. Green and blue lettering spelled out Dhareel's name and her dates. Below that was a simple inscription:
"Sister."
Suri sen climbed to her feet and brushed the dirt from her knees. The flowers she had planted were small but they would grow and bloom every year.
"I am also told that you will have a berth on the Solar Wind."
This time, Jhyoti could not keep the grin from her face. “I am the junior officer in the exoanth department."
"A high honour.” Suri sen smiled in return.
"Yes.” Of course, the Solar Wind was the first outsystem ship to use the Davidovich Drive. There was still much to be learned about the drive's reaction to deep space. And exploration vessels drew danger pay for very good reasons. Perhaps the Admiral had had an ulterior motive when he assigned her to the Solar Wind.
Jhyoti did not care. She was going to the stars.
* * * *
Marcelle Dubé makes her home in the Yukon at the foot of Mount Lorne, where she shares the land with coyotes, lynx and the occasional bear. Her stories have appeared in Storyteller, Open Space: A Canadian Anthology of Fantastic Fiction and Polaris: A Celebration of Polar Science, among others.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital by James Schellenberg
Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bantam Spectra, 2004, 393 pp.
* * * *
The works of Kim Stanley Robinson have given me some of the greatest reading pleasure, in science fiction or out. I've read most of his books, and while I admire the award-winning Mars series as much as anyone else, I have an especial fondness for the Three Californias trilogy (The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge). In those three books, Robinson kept the story moving at a brisk pace at the most basic level, but provided the reader with a great deal to think about once the higher level pieces were revealed and started to fit together.
A few years after the publication of the Mars trilogy, I heard that Robinson was working on a new trilogy, this time about climate change and specifically from the point of view of scientists working in Washington D.C. to move the levers of power. I confess that I was a bit worried about this setup, a feeling that never went away as the new books came out and I tried to figure out my own decidedly mixed response to them. Robinson has certainly done the scientist shtick before, with great results, but these were in settings, like Mars or Antarctica, where the dry nature of the scientific endeavour was enlivened by the drama of the locale.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all on the side of the scientist and the essentially heroic work of methodically solving problems and making the world a better place. But it's the old problem of the mad scientist: very few real-life scientists are power-mad maniacs bent on world domination by way of some freaky apparatus (that usually goes without saying!), but it makes for a much more dramatic B-movie plot if such is the case. Nuance is important, but let's not forget that science fiction is also a type of entertainment. Again, I'm not saying that we should succumb willy-nilly to the use of stereotypes (and perpetuate scientific illiteracy), but there are ways to do this that are craftier than others.
For example, bringing the readers along on a visit into a scientist's life on Mars or during a trek to Antarctica lets Robinson have it both ways. Doing scientific work on Mars might not be all that different from similar work back on Earth, in a side-by-side comparison of tasks ... but on the other hand, you're on freaking Mars! How awesome is that! Robinson definitely conveyed that in his famous Mars trilogy.
Forty Signs of Rain and its two sequels are set in the near future in a world not that different from our own. In the first book in particular, Robinson focuses on domestic life along with how projects are authorized at the National Science Foundation in Washington D.C. These are all admirable things, but it's also pretty clear that book lost its narrative drive, and its science fiction zing, along the way.
My thoughts are mixed, in other words.
But clearly Robinson has set himself against this challenge deliberately, and on paper it's a good idea as it fills a gap in his utopian vision. In some of his other works, utopia would take place, either far in the future on Mars, or in a third version of California where neither militarism nor consumerism had gotten carried away. Those types of utopias are interesting, and Robinson did much better at dramatizing them than many attempts by other authors. But I stumble on a fairly large obstacle while reading such books: how did the utopians get from here to there? What were the steps? I'm an ordinary, flawed human being—how do I get from point A to point B? If this series were to successfully address this gap, it would be quite an achievement.
In the first book, Forty Signs of Rain, we are very far from utopia; society is not even at a stage where the main problem of the time, climate change, is recognized. That sounds pretty familiar, really.
So here we are: it's the near future in Washington D.C. The ostensible main character, Charlie Quibler, is a science policy writer for a politician named Phil Chase. His wife, Anna, works at the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with a third character, Frank Vanderwal, who is from San Diego.
Charlie's a stay-at-home father, working on policy over the phone when he has a chance, otherwise spending most of his time with his youngest son, Joe. We get a lot of detail about life in a young family. The Quiblers also befriend some Buddhist monks who have opened an embassy in D.C. after their island refuge has been flooded by rising ocean levels. The connection becomes even more entangling after Charlie notices some odd behaviour in Joe and he begins to suspect something supernatural—this is a strange storyline that gets dragged out through all three books.
The book follows Frank through some odd twists and turns as well. He expends considerable energy to try to bend one of the NSF's grants towards a company that he has interest in back in San Diego. When I read this book for the first time, Frank came off as shady and annoying. That's about all I'll say about him at this point.
Forty Signs of Rain has little to do with climate change. Yes, some of the characters discuss it, but there's so much else going on, or rather, so little, that the concepts of the book get entirely diffused. The book has domestic details and information about applying for scientific grants, and then ends with a flood of Washington D.C. The lack of sharp focus or narrative drive is remarkable. There's plenty of worthy material in the various digressions, but they don't necessarily add up to a novel per se. In other words, climate change itself is not the drama; if so, there would perhaps be a danger of resembling a cheesy disaster movie, but the pendulum swings too far in the other direction here.
I'll close with a quotation from about halfway through the book. Charlie is attending a meeting held by the presidential science advisor, someone who is clearly bought off by commercial interests and such:
—blockquote—
Marking such people and assisting in the immediate destruction of their pseudoarguments was important work, which Charlie undertook with fierce indignation; at some point the manipulation of facts became a kind of vast lie, and this was what Charlie felt when he had to confront people like Strengloft: he was combating liars, people who lied about science for money, thus obscuring the clear signs of the destruction of their present world. So that they would end up passing on to all the children a degraded planet, devoid of animals and forests and coral reefs and all the other aspects of a biological support system and home. Liars, cheating their own children, and the many generations to come: this is what Charlie wanted to shout at them, as vehemently as any street-corner nutcase preacher. (193)
—/blockquote—
There's a fine indignation here, and some clear insight. I just wish that sense of urgency and justice was translated into
a storyline that swept up us readers and made us feel that anger and understanding, rather than just pointing us towards it by endless talk.
* * * *
Fifty Degrees Below, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bantam Spectra, 2005, 603 pp.
* * * *
Fifty Degrees Below is a clear improvement over the preceding book, Forty Signs of Rain. The second book picks up exactly where the last one left off: Washington D.C. has been flooded and the city is trying to recover. At the end of the previous book, I wasn't convinced that one flooded city would cause a widespread realization that climate change was on the way, and unfortunately that has been proved rather dramatically since Robinson started writing this series. In fact, the situation is much worse in Fifty Degrees Below, and while it's a sad thing, I think that this book is more realistic: the various scientists have an uphill battle, despite the abundance of evidence on their side.
So the book has shaken off some of the bits and pieces that dragged down the preceding volume—the ideas are clearer and the arguments have shifted from “what is happening” to “what should we do about it.” At least, that's the optimistic interpretation of Fifty Degrees Below.
The ambiguity is encapsulated in Frank Vanderwal, who now firmly takes centre stage as the protagonist. Frank, suddenly no longer a scheming back-stabber, is knee-deep in the NSF's plans to fix things like the stalled Gulf Stream (the resultant weather gives the book its title). The lists that Frank is working on are dense with scientific detail, and provide some fascinating material for thought.
While it's nice to have the characterization a little more centralized, that means that it's Frank's personal concerns that take up the bulk of the book. Near the end of the last book, Frank met a woman and fell in love, but he has not seen her again. She is deeply embedded in the official security/surveillance apparatus of official (and not so official) Washington D.C., and she is getting together with Frank without the knowledge of her husband, who also works in spook circles. So Frank's love life is made up of short jolts of pleasure surrounded by long chapters of tedium.
Challenging Destiny #25 Page 16
