Port Eternity by CJ Cherryh

This horror novel by CJ Cherryh deals with the crew and owner of a spaceship getting drawn into a parallel dimension unexpectedly. There, they face a new reality outside their context, and attempt to come to terms with both it and themselves. But this situation makes extreme this daily need to fit into new situations. Partly inspired by Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, in the Arthurian tradition of English literature, Cherryh shows humans both choosing and being forced to overcome their nature. The setting is a 50-50 blend of science fiction and fantasy, with the ship and its inhabitants forced by the ship-owner’s fancy to rely upon swords and spears for defense, but all while wearing a spacesuit and worrying about their life support.

The thing out there in the dark, the chaos waiting whenever we might grow confused enough to let our senses slip back into the old way of seeing⁠—this living with death so close to us, was that different than our lives ever were? And didn't born-men themselves live that way, when they deliberately took chances?

Cherryh establishes the horror tone through three methods: the context of the environment, the situation the ship finds itself in, and the reactions of the characters. The unfamiliarity of the environment, where time and space is distorted, sets up the mind-states of the characters. Their usual modes of reference and perception do not apply here, and that understandably makes them edgy and unsure and scared. Especially for the Azi characters—all but two on the spaceship. But even the born-men, Dela and Griffin, are unable to integrate these new experiences using past experiences, so they too are off-kilter. Second, as soon as they arrive, their technology doesn’t work, and something starts banging on the walls, trying to get in. What a great horror setup—a small group of people trapped in a spaceship outside of time and place, and something is trying to get in. But the reactions of the characters seals the tone of the story by their fright. They react to every new impetus with surety that all is bad. They gather decorative swords and spears for the coming battle. They plan defensive tactics. And the situation, from their perception, keeps going from bad to worse. Unexpected entrance into an FTL jump state, trapped against a huge object in same space, key technologies not working in same space, knowing they will die once they run out of food or air, something trying to get in, then trying harder to get in. And their personal struggles also go from bad to worse as the Azi tape-training frays and their psych-sets—the blueprints for an Azi’s reactions and priorities—shift out of whack. While the overall plot shows people trapped in the unknown with the unknown trying to break in, the chapter-by-chapter scenes show the characters unravelling through rivalries, thefts, conflicts, and misunderstandings.

If this was death, I kept thinking, remembering my lady's mad hypothesis, if this was death, I could wish we had not tangled some other creature up in our dying dream. But I believed now it was no dream, because I could never have imagined that sound out of my direst nightmares.

Cherryh doesn’t use traditional horror language though, or does so very sparingly. And that strong technique does two things: it gives those words power when they do come, and it doesn't show the monster, it let’s the readers themselves come to grips with the tone, let’s them create the worst possible situation from the sketchy context that Cherryh’s brilliant, narrow, third person voice achieves. Cherryh only mentions what the characters see, know, and imagine, instead of letting the narrator fill in some blanks. This serves to keep the mystery fresh and intense, and gives the reader plenty of room to imagine for themselves. This doesn’t read like Lovecraft, where I sometimes feel like he’s talking directly to the reader trying to convince them that what he is writing is really horror—Lovecraft seems to tell way more than he shows, and he’s not the greatest at telling. Rather, Cherryh shows the characters’ mind-states and let’s the reader draw their own conclusions.

Terror had acquired a kind of mundanity, had become an atmosphere, a medium in which we just went on functioning, and did what we were supposed to do until somehow our Death would get to us. I reckoned that tired as I was it might not even hurt much.

But two things intrude on this effective horror tone: Cherryh’s other works, and the title. The title implies that there is some port, some space station, known to somebody as Port Eternity. It turns out in the book that this is more Flying Dutchman or Avalon than Port Mahon or Port Angeles. So, the whole time that the characters are struggling to come to grips with their new location snugged up against this giant torus stuck in jump-space, I’m thinking, “This must be Port Eternity.” And it is. So, the tone is subverted somewhat by the title. But also, Cherryh’s other works always contain some optimism. As she says herself about her own writing, “I am an overall optimist. I believe that if there’s something broke, we can fix it, we just have to apply ourselves to that problem. And that is the attitude behind my writing.” So, while the writing seemed to try and convince me that everybody was going to die, I thought that Cherryh wasn’t likely to do that. Rather than waiting to see if some of the characters were going to survive, I was waiting to see how they would. And that’s a big difference.

Old was not a territory I had mapped out for myself.

The Azi: these Cyteen-produced humans are second class slaves in Cherryh’s universe, killed at 40 as their personalities start to fray. And the common conception of their soullessness keeps the novel firmly in the realm of science fiction. Their struggles to adapt are made more poignant by the context of their built-men status, instead of being born. Most of the ship are Azi and are made for one specific purpose—friendly encouragement, sex, accounting, and ship’s crew. When the ship stops working, and the mistress takes a lover, and they’re stuck in a place where accounts no longer matter, these Azi are stripped of their purpose. And the book is from the point of view of one of the Azi, her voice guides the reader throughout. Elaine is the focus. So their struggle lies front and center of the narrative. I’ve wanted an Azi-centric book since reading Cyteen, but by reading the Merchanter books first, I missed out on this one and regret that. This book gives me understanding about them, but transcends fan-service by the deep discussion of the theme of this book—humans overcome and adapt.

When I thought of it, I couldn't answer why we tried. For our born-men, that was very simple, and not so simple, if there was no hope. It was not in our tapes⁠—to fight. But here was even Vivien, clutching a spear across her knees, when I knew her tapes were hardly set that way. They made us out of born-man material, and perhaps, the thought occurred to me, that somewhere at base they and we were not so different⁠—that born-men would do things because it leapt into their minds to do them, like instincts inherent in the flesh. Or the tapes we had stolen had muddled us beyond recall.

The theme here explores whether the Azi are human or not, and it comes down firmly on the side of human. All of the characters, but especially the Azi, are pushed and prodded out of their comfort zones, are forced to change, are forced to grow. Vivien, the one who has the most pride in her work, is the last to grow, but even she does. The Azi and the born-men both overcome their natures. And this is something that is relatable—the Azi were created for specific purposes, yet their new situation subverts some of those purposes. From being drug- and tape-addicted, stable humans, they grow into an independence that the reader watches happen, with all the awkward growing pains of adolescence along the way. Some of these changes they choose—love, fighting, new tasks to complete. And some are forced on them—creativity, tactical thinking, the natures of the people they were named after from Arthurian legend, and desperate struggles for life and death. To some extent, that’s an explanation of life—a series of changes to our psychology, some forced on us and some chosen. In the end, these Azi subvert their tape-training, their psych-sets, and start identifying themselves as human. The born-men also overcome their natures, but due to the focus of both the novel and Cherryh’s voice being on the Azi, the two born-men characters’ changes occur on the outskirts of the story.

She struggled to be more than she was and narrow as she was, it threatened her sanity.

One thing she does brilliantly here is bait and double hook. For instance, the crisis of Mordred is baited when all the other Azi react to learning the Arthurian legends they are based off of, but Mordred seems not to. When he sends communications to the outsiders, expressly against orders, like he’s been asking to do for the whole book up to that point, this causes conflict on the ship. So I was baited and hooked. But wait, there’s more, says Cherryh as the crisis of the unknown trying to gain entry comes to a head at the same moment. This rapid shift in focus works better than a cliffhanger when done well, and Cherryh does it well here.

In one part of my mind⁠—I think it was listening to the wrong kind of tapes⁠—I was glad of a chance like that, that we might do some terrible damage to our attackers and maybe put a hole in the side of the wheel that they would remember, all those scaly bodies going hurtling out among our fragments. But in the saner part of my mind I did not want to die. And oh, if they should get their hands on us. Hands. If they had hands at all. If they thought anything close to what we thought. If, if, and if. Bang. Thump.

Cherryh’s effective foreshadowing shows another strength here. Sticking with the same crisis of Mordred, the existence of the tape shows the possibility well before he views it. The changes evident in the other Azi who viewed it show that change in him is likely. Then his insistence on attempting communication throughout shows the possibility of his going off the rails in that way. Foreshadowing allows his actions to be unsurprising—I mean, it’s surprising that he sends the message against orders, but it’s not a surprise from completely outside the realm of possibility. Then, his beliefs about the unknown outsiders are hinted at throughout the novel, so when the outsiders show up and some are not the horrific beasts the characters have been dreading, it doesn’t come off like a deus ex machina, rather it comes off like a misunderstanding. This is brilliantly summed up by Griffin, the warhawk, turning to Mordred, who advocated for communication and diplomacy throughout, and simply stating, “You were right.” That statement, supported by Cherryh showing that the actions of the unknown invaders do not line up with pirates bent on murder, allows the whole switch at the end from horror to happily-ever-after epilogue to be read as well within the realm of possibility. This isn’t deus ex machina, just a long-term misunderstanding on the part of stressed-out characters taken well outside their comfort zones with no means to immediately communicate to the unknown outsiders.

I knew my lady Dela, that she had high purposes, and she meant to be good, but as with her lovers and her hopes, sometimes she and her high purposes had fallings-out.

So is this a great book? Yes and no. It certainly shows Cherryh effectively trying something new in her writing—horror—and has a deep applicable theme that I appreciate immensely. But at the same time, Cherryh’s tendency to have the context affect and be affected by the characters of her story shows up mostly at the end, and the setting of this cut-off society out in an alternate universe seals this whole story up into a sort of not mattering. Maybe it’s that I didn’t care about these characters as much as some others, but I’m left thinking that this was a fun experiment, successful at what it tried to do, but I appreciate Cherryh’s writing more when she’s talking more directly about humans in a large society, not this small society of nine people. Is that me or her? I’m not sure. But I’ll keep reading her works and try to find out.