Destroyer by CJ Cherryh

This book begins the third trilogy of the Foreigner series. This book surprised me, as all of these books have in different ways. After settling some things with the Kyo and Reunion Station in the last book, here Bren and friends head back towards the atevi world. Upon arrival, they find that Tabini was overthrown eight months ago. This step surprised me. I took for granted Tabini’s hold on power. Yet it makes sense that he loses power—Cherryh pulls no punches, and after six books saying that too much technology too fast will break a culture, she follows through and breaks the atevi culture. Moves like this prove Cherryh’s strengths as a storyteller.

He didn’t believe in the impossible as wildly, as passionately as he once had. Knowing had gotten in the way of that. And what he knew depended on an experience that included betrayals, and his own significant failures to pursue personal relationships across very difficult boundaries of distance and profession.

At the same time, the characters worry that Tabini might be dead—nobody takes it too seriously except Bren in his deepest funks, but the rumor does run around a bit. And though Tabini shows up in the final pages, it got me thinking about these characters and this world and focusing a bit more on the heir—I question what will happen when Tabini will die. And this refocusing on Cajeiri, the heir, turns out to be a part of what this whole sub-trilogy is about. Again, strong storytelling.

He hadn’t asked himself, in those fast-moving days when the space program had been his only focus, why humans felt guilty if they didn’t spare their enemies, but, more importantly, he hadn’t asked himself why atevi had generally felt extremely guilty if they did.

The theme here combines two thoughts into one: faulty assumptions leading to poor actions on the part of the main characters and the usurper, and that home doesn’t exist. One thing Bren mentions a few times in the series is that home to the atevi is where their staff are, their servants and family and security. He starts to feel this way too. And this poignant theme rings true—I remember returning from college and things had changed. Here Bren has had no contact with atevi for two years, and the home he left differs from the home he returns to—both because of his assumptions proving false, and because he has changed. Yet his associations remain, and even though he doesn’t understand certain things as easily as he once did, his comfort still depends on his associations or friends being near.

“Goes without saying,” Gin said, “any of you or yours, in my little digs in the city. This whole scummy group will keep in touch.” Best of intentions. Best of hopes. In his experience, people didn’t ever quite get around to it . . . didn’t visit him, at least, maybe because he didn’t find the time to visit them, either. Something always intervened. Whatever direction he planned, events shoved him some other way. Some emergency came up. Ties grew fainter and fewer, especially to humans on Mospheira. Even his own family.

That slow start in space sets the stage for the second two thirds of the story, when the plot begins to rely upon Bren’s nascent counter-revolution. But it sets the stage in more subtle ways. Peace was kept on the ship through informing the newcomers from Reunion of the political stability and fresh-food paradise of the atevi planet and its station. Immediately upon dropping out of space, this assumption proves untrue. And Bren feels that he has failed those people by promising stability. Upon learning the revolution’s details, this feeling of personal failure colors his perception of events. The setup provides a strong foundation for this story.

“So what’s a letter between brothers more or less? Is the news out there that bad?”
“It may be good, or bad, or the usual scary mix of things. It’ll still touch off the crazies.”
“Oh, God, everything touches off the crazies. That’s why they’re crazy."

In all, this is a good, good book. But something keeps me from thinking it is great. Probably my own misunderstanding of the role Cajeiri later plays in events—he was kind of a secondary character until now, and I probably assumed he would continue to be and so I didn’t grasp immediately what Cherryh was doing with this story. But well worth reading and the following two books do a better job of putting Cajeiri at the fore.

He found a grin of his own in reply, thinking, damn, if we die, we die moving, don’t we, not sitting still and letting our lives fade out?

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No one had yet uttered a word about their destination, which might be here, or days off, but likely all this hurry was to meant put distance between them and the bus, and any likelihood of the opposition tracking Ilisidi and the boy.

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But he found something morally refreshing, being sore in very inconvenient places, sitting on a rock beside a gurgling spring.

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They started off, the young people planted firmly in the center of the column, with the dowager, and with him. For a while he listened to Nawari instructing the young people, advising the new arrivals what to do and what contingencies to consider if they should come under fire. And the dowager sternly advising Cajeiri that if he picked shelter, he should now adjust his thinking and pick shelter wide enough for three. Hell of a thing, he said to himself. Hell of a thing for three kids to have to think of. The older generation had a few things to answer for.

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Only over his own dead body . . . granted numerous people would happily arrange that. God, there was so much water under the bridge. Planets were so complicated, compared to the steel worlds he’d lived in the last few years.

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Curious how the brain wore the body out, and how it didn’t work the other way around.

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Damn the situation. Damn the Kadigidi. He passionately hated gunfire. It always meant someone like him hadn’t done his job. And there was far too much evidence of that all around him.

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Power-seeking. Political games. The old, old reason. Hell of a mess, was what it was.

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But where was the clue to his problems? Lurking, as always, in the dictionary, right where he’d begun.

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But there was no room for second thoughts. Gravity had them.

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There had been a danger point, if he’d only seen it. But he hadn’t read the winds. He had committed the oldest mistake of joint civilization on the planet—getting distracted by one issue, modernizing too fast, worst of all ignoring atevi hardwiring and ignoring the point that what humans might call barbarism was part and parcel of atevi problem-solving.

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And what could a human do to mend the damage, when the human in question had made the critical mistakes in the first place, and given his atevi superiors bad advice?

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But self-blame was a state of indulgence he could not afford. Until Ilisidi did, for well-thought reasons, tell him go to hell, he had to get his wits working and do something constructive, if he could only figure what that was. Dry bite of tasteless sandwich. One after the other.

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For a moment the paidhi stood in the vacuum-eye of a hurricane, in a low availability of information surrounded by total upheaval, and didn’t know what direction to turn first.

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The baji-naji emblem, that portrayal of the motive principles of the universe, chance and fortune, still decorated the bulkhead of the shuttle, still reminded them the universe, always in delicate balance, had its odd moments and was subject to forces no one could restrain—that the most secure situation and the most impossible alike could fall suddenly into chaos . . . but must exit that chaos into order, the eternal swing between the two states.