Inheritor by CJ Cherryh

This third book in the Foreigner series closes the first trilogy’s arc. It shows why Bren has been promoted and promoted by Tabini. It concludes the conflict between Bren and the Human Heritage group, as well as between Tabini and the atevi aiming to take him out. It starts six months after the landing of the two humans from the spaceship Pheonix, and unfortunately the start is rough. Cherryh spends two full chapters rehashing what came before, filling in the reader on the six past months. And this intro-info-dump detracts from the novel to me. I’m feeling that this series should have books that build on each other, not stand-alone novels, and that she's torn between the two strategies. But, once Cherryh gets into the story, some real magic happens.

You couldn’t say that human word ‘border,’ either, to limit off the land passing under them. An atevi map didn’t really have boundaries. It had land ownership—sort of. It had townships, but their edges were fuzzy. You said ‘province,’ and that was close to lines on a map, and it definitely had a geographical context, but it didn’t mean what you thought it did if you were a hard-headed human official trying to force mainland terms into Mospheiran boxes. So whatever he had experienced down there, it didn’t have edges, as the land didn’t have edges, as overlapping associations didn’t have edges.

One of the strengths of this book is that Bren and Jase have a touchy relationship. Bren’s optimism at having Jase around turns sour when Jase doesn’t offer friendship or bring a good attitude—understandable to a human raised on a spaceship coming to a planet for the first time this late in life, but necessarily quite frustrating to his teacher. Everything is offputting to him: scheduling conflicts, the food, movement, weather, a horizon. Add ontop that Jase is learning a complex culture and language, and Jase is way out of his depth and unsure what is happening around him. He takes plans made on inadequate information to be Bren breaking his trust, and this mutual distrust guides much of the novel. The central question to this thread could be paraphrased, “how to repair a relationship with a power differential that got off to a bad start.”

The stirrings of affection that good actions made in a human heart.

As Cherryh tends to do, this engaging theme plays out across the backdrop of the whole novel—almost every single scene ends up informing, progressing, frustrating, or affecting this theme. I enjoy writers who take a complex situation and change it over the course of a book. If done well, readers will follow. Cherryh does it well by making it more complex. Jase and Bren have breakthroughs, setbacks, distractions, misunderstandings—and the more the reader sees, the more complex in their mind the situation is. Sometimes a key piece of information—like Jase's father's death's fictionality—is left as a mystery to the reader until much later in the novel, when everything suddenly falls into place. Also, the other parts of this novel, the other major threads running through it, inform the stakes of their relationship, inform the state of it as effectively as the two humans do. Everything informs everything else in Cherryh’s novels, and I couldn’t be more happy to read her work.

Let Jase see the historic origins of the atevi, let him experience the same sort of things that had opened the atevi world to his imagination. That was the plan. It was, though he hadn’t thought so then, the best thing that had ever happened to him in terms of his understanding of the world he lived in, a textured, full of smells and colors world that could fill up his senses and appeal to him on such a basic level that something in his human heart responded to this atevi place and taught him what the species had in common.

A second theme, and one that Jase and Bren share, is distance from family leading to reprioritizing familial connections. Their jobs keep them away from family. When Jase’s father dies—though that ends up being a codeword for Yolanda needing an escape from Mospheira—Bren struggles to comfort him, as Bren’s family is currently going through death threats and midnight phone call annoyances. Neither Jase nor Bren can do anything about either situation. This powerlessness forces both to face the possibility that something else is more important in their lives, and that’s an uncomfortable place to be. Bren believes in the greater good of broad peace. Jase believes in his own excession-ship emergency. For both, it’s a matter of do the job and give their families the best chance possible, or don’t do the job and everybody could die, including their families.

In such moments he asked himself what potentially disastrous and crazy idea he’d given his life to serve.

And that’s one thing this novel does well: tie up threads leftover from earlier books. Why did the ship come back? We now know because there is a threat within twenty light years. Will Bren and Jago ever sex? Yes. As awkward as human-alien intercourse inherently seems, after three books building it up, and a scant couple of paragraphs of sex-scene, it’s at least understandable, at least been foreshadowed enough, at least contextualized enough after the fact to not be seen as wish fulfillment. Will Human Heritage get control of all human government? No, but that’s the plot of this novel and becomes a close-run-thing. Will Tabini be able to gather enough allies to his side and overcome threats to his throne? Yes, but it requires the help of unexpected allies and personal danger to many.

“We suspect everything.” They had reached the doors. “We act on what we know.”

This tying up of threads reveals things that recast aspects of the first two novels. A mystery throughout was why Bren kept getting more and more political power. Well, this book finally explains it. Bren’s actions have directly led to Tabini gaining more allies. Ilsidi came to Tabini’s side through Bren’s explanations, actions, willingness to be tested, and forgiveness of his broken arm from the kidnapped interrogation. Geigi came to Tabini through Bren’s actions, even though those actions were largely accidental, his instincts led him to the right place. The island of Dur. The atevi public. The Assassin’s Guild. These things didn’t necessarily make sense to Bren or the reader throughout either, but by the end of this book, they do—again, Cherryh's tightly focused, third person narrative relies on the main character gaining understanding for the reader to.

Go to the leader. Always go to the leader when the bullets start to fly: rally to the leader.

And this recasting of earlier actions and motivations helps Cherryh resolve the book, gives closure. Sometimes it’s a character explaining things to Bren, sometimes it’s Bren taking those explanations and extrapolating what he learned about atevi from them into other mysteries. And sometimes it’s new information, like Jase’s end-of-book reveal about a potential rival in space. In her earlier works, Cherryh would often rehash circumstances through interior monologue, to explain to the reader what new information meant to older actions. Here she does the same, but spread across three books instead of just one. It’s a tactic that keeps me reading Cherryh, even though it sometimes manifests as a horrid intro-info-dump.

And in that one simple example he saw why humans could become so disruptive of atevi society in so short a time, just by existing, and dragging into their liking persons who really, never, ever should be associated with them in the atevi sense. Humans had created havoc without knowing the social destruction they were wreaking on the foundations of society where people could be badly bent out of their comfortable associations.

At the end of this book, I was thrilled with the series so far. But those first two chapters did detract from this book. The pacing was strange because of them. Usually there’s some action to grab the reader’s attention right off, followed by a slow rise in comprehension and tension, then an explosion of action to end the book. Here there’s just the slow rise to explosion, and it doesn’t work as well for me. Maybe she thought that because this is the third in a trilogy, the action at the end of the last book sufficed to draw the reader into this third book. And it did for me. But it also means that this book isn’t great. It’s good, but not great. Even after three books, the characters still grow, and the aliens still feel alien. Brilliant writing. In the way that everything is interconnected, this is a complex book of political conspiracies and personal relationships—just what I want.

So if their languages didn’t say quite the same thing and their bodies didn’t quite match and the niches they made that said this person satisfies enough requirements to make me happy were just a little different-shaped in their psyches, the center of that design might match, leaving just the edges hanging off. But didn’t his relationship with Barb have unmatched edges? Didn’t every close relationship?

One last thing to note here is that Cherryh seems to have grown comfortable with her world. Instead of constantly saying that some numbers are good and others are bad to the atevi, here she starts to give examples: three is good, four and two are bad. This also comes out in her word choices, as she starts to let some really beautiful sentences inhabit the novel. For example, near the end she writes, "The vast dish passed behind them, the dusk deepened to near dark, and the company stayed close around the dowager as they rode." That’s a really well written sentence, hinting at the context in ways understandable to the reader: the vastness of the central communication station on the planet looking out to the vastness of space, the timing of their arrival at dusk, the priorities and associations of the people who surround the dowager. And yet the sounds it creates are pleasing to my ear, despite being a summarized list of sorts, setting a scene, closing another scene. All that consonance will grab my attention every time.

That office building out there, the Maganuri Building, built to house the study committees proposed by the legislators opposed to the growth of government, was beginning to be plagued by sewer and electrical problems. The opposition blamed sabotage by Tabini’s agents, or by the old aristocracy, a wide range of conspiracy indeed, and no few of the commons avoided it and wouldn’t attend committee meetings there because of the reputed bad numbers.

A couple more quotes I wrote down while reading:

It was a risk. Their whole lives were a risk. But you limited them where you could.

A written mistake might fall into the hands of news services interested in catching the paidhi in such an infelicity. The press daren’t take on the aiji, mustn’t, in fact; but a lord of the Association was a fair target; and in less than a year he’d become such a person—protected, still, in certain ways, but increasingly fair game if he made a blunder that saw print.

As a minor court official, again, he’d been immune from such public relations assassinations. As a major player in affairs of state, he, like the aiji, was a target of such manipulators, and his strike in return was a standing order for commendations to any clerical who by handwriting, postal mark, or other clues, identified one of these nuisances by name, handwriting, and residence and posted them to others in the pool.