C. J. Cherryh: the ties that bind.

ABSTRACTS

In Destroyer (2005) and Pretender (2006) C. J. Cherryh continues her exploration of loyalty, family ties, feudal devotion, and personal friendship. Further recurrent themes include the community cut off from broader human culture, and the solitary human who takes on alien characteristics so as to serve as the human interface with otherness. The large, empathetic companion animal, the professional judge/assassin, constant travel, and the shifting environment of jump space are other familiar images. The special emphasis here is on the ties that bind in Cherryh's social and physical universe. The essay argues in particular that the author's aim is to contrast a modern conception of friendship, founded in friendly feeling, with a more classical conception, philia, and that her environmental consciousness has developed over the years.

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Carolyn Janice Cherry, born in 1942, has been publishing science fiction and fantasy since the mid-1970s, when DAW Books, under Donald A. Wollheim, accepted three completed works in succession--Gate of Ivrel (1976), Brothers of Earth (1976), and Hunter of Worlds (1977)--and gave her an advance to work on a three-volume novel The Faded Sun (1978-79). The name 'C. J. Cherryh' was chosen by her editor, apparently (and oddly) to disguise her gender and make her seem exotic. She was a classical scholar by training, at Oklahoma and Johns Hopkins universities, and has been a high-school teacher in Oklahoma. Although her literary output includes short stories, (1) she has usually preferred a larger canvas.

Apart from a parahistorical pastiche, The Paladin (1988), set in a kind of medieval Japan but with no pretence at historical accuracy, Cherryh's work is divided between hard science fiction and fantasy, though some of her books, overtly given a medieval or primitive setting, are actually placed within a more solidly science-fictional universe. My own tastes lie with the SF (even if her fantasy is more thoughtful and original than almost anything else written recently in that genre), and it is this, and particularly the Foreigner sequence, that I shall discuss in the present article. Much of that SF is linked, often very loosely, with a detailed Future History in which colonists and the crews of interstellar spacecraft create new societies at odds with each other, with a variety of non-human species, and with their distant home world, Earth. The 'Company War', in progress or in retrospect, dominates many of these stories, in an internal chronology from Hellburner (1992) to Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983).

The most famous of C. J. Cherryh's novels, two with Hugo Awards, are Down-below Station (1981, written to provide the back story to Merchanter's Luck, 1982), Port Eternity (1982), and Cyteen (1988), but many others also have their staunch admirers: on the SF side, The Faded Sun (1978-79), Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983), the Chanur sequence (1982, 1984-86, 2000), Rimrunners (1989), Heavy Time (1991), Hellburner (1992), Tripoint (1994), Finity's End (1997), Rider at the Gate (1995), and Cloud's Rider (1996), and even the most recent Gene Wars sequence, although its first volume, Hammerfall (2001), strikes many readers as unendurably slow as its heroes trek backwards and forwards across a vermin-infested desert; on the fantasy side, Ealdwood (1981, 1983), Rusalka (1989-91), Faery in Shadow (1994), and the Fortress sequence (1995-2006); the Morgaine sequence, which includes her earliest published work, is fantasy against the background of a wholly unearthly science (1976, 1978, 1979, 1988). Her earliest work (The Faded Sun and the Morgaine sequences aside) had to be compressed within the boundaries of single short books: Hunter of Worlds (1977), Serpent's Reach (1980), Wave without a Shore (1981), Port Eternity (1982), Merchanter's Luck (1982), Voyager in Night (1984), and Cuckoo's Egg (1985). (2)

As the appetite for larger explorations of created worlds has grown more obvious, and publishers' confidence along with it, Cherryh has usually preferred much longer works, often mistakenly called 'trilogies' rather than 'three-volume novels'. Sometimes these longer works evoke a little too much the tedium of months-long voyages backwards and forwards through the dark or across the sands, and explore a little too lovingly the tortuous reasonings of whatever character she has chosen as her chief viewpoint on the world. Even the longueurs, in retrospect, will usually prove significant. At any rate, the shortest novels (such as Voyager in Night, Serpent's Reach, Hunter of Worlds) are ones that many readers would gladly see extended, although there are doubtless even denser worlds and stories lying in wait that Cherryh will prefer to develop. Maybe she will instead make the earlier ones available as 'shared worlds' (like the Merovingen medievalist SF stemming from Angel with the Sword (1985), or the fantasy Hells dreamt up in collaboration with Janet Morris and others).

Cherryh's alien species, like Poul Anderson's, have social and ethical systems founded in alien biologies, and thereby help to highlight features of our own biological and cultural natures. The oxygen-breathing aliens are mostly, for good biological reasons as well as dramatic ones, humanoid, though with very different ancestries. (3) The only exceptions are the hive intelligences of Serpent's Reach and the lizards of Forty Thousand in Gehenna, both of which communicate without words. Methane-breathers seem to have no common form, except that they are almost wholly incomprehensible to oxygen-breathing humanoids.

Foreigners

The Foreigner sequence buds off from Cherryh's mainline Future History and is never likely to be woven back into it. We are to suppose that a near-future Earth, unable after 'the Company War' concluded in Downbelow Station to control any of the starships and remote colonies founded out towards Tau Ceti and beyond (and also unable to penetrate the worlds of the non-human Compact described in the Chanur novels), is sending out a colony ship in another, unnamed direction. Something goes wrong in hyperspace, and the colonists eventually find themselves entirely elsewhere, in orbit around an inhabited, alien world, and seriously at odds with the long-term crew of the starship that has transported them. It is with the relations between colonists, crew, and the alien atevi that the sequence is concerned, as we see them through the eyes and memory of Bren Cameron, appointed as ambassador and interpreter (paidhi) between human colonists and those native to the world they have--not quite accidentally--invaded: the atevi, tall, black-skinned, golden-eyed. (4)

Some features of the imagined world are echoes of Cherryh's earlier visions; some modify that vision. In the earlier novels passing through hyperspace (Cherryh's preferred SF technique for avoiding generation-long passage times between her scattered colonies) was either instantaneous, or else a period of madness that humans (but not the hani, the lion-like aliens of Chanur) needed drugs to endure. Over time, the passage-time has become the entry to a profounder world, one in which some species thrive, and all may catch some glimpse of hidden pathways or the thoughts of distant friends (Port Eternity, Chanur's Legacy, Tripoint). In the Foreigner sequence it is a much more ordinary affair, slowing thought and perhaps changing the laws of motion just a little, but allowing no respite from the tedium of travel.

Travel is itself so common a feature of Cherryh's novels as to require some explanation: her characters are always in motion, from here to there and often back again. Anyone not in motion soon loses touch with what is happening. On the world of the atevi, as in earlier novels, there are large, loyal beasts who live alongside the central, sapient aliens: in The Faded Sun these are empaths; in Rider at the Gate they are the 'nighthorses', who, like other creatures of that world, can radiate illusions and safeguard their riders from them; in Hammerfall and The Forge of Heaven they are nano-engineered beshti; in Foreigner and its fellows mechieti are a smaller presence, (5) retaining that same combination of comfort and extreme danger, and helping Cameron to a better understanding of the species that he must deal with.

Cameron is the most developed version of a theme yet more important in Cherryh's work: the solitary human surrendered, by chance or by appointment, to be the working interface with aliens. (6) It may be that this theme reflects her own sense of herself, as a storyteller set at the fringes of human society, to examine strangeness--a self-description used in her collection Visible Light (1986), where she creates herself as a character aboard a starship, telling her own stories to amuse a fellow passenger. In her first published novel, Gate of Ivrel (the first of the Morgaine sequence), Vanye is a dishonoured, disowned clansman who becomes the servant and eventually the lover of Morgaine, the sole and barely human survivor of an expedition to close down all the Gates, which will otherwise throw worlds and histories into chaos. In Cuckoo's Egg, Thorn, the clone of a dead human invader, is reared to act as a necessary link between the natives of that world and an expected human invasion. In The Faded Sun, Sten Duncan, an orphan and low-ranking soldier, is changed into a sort of mri, an adopted member of the warrior caste of an almost extinct species. In Forty Thousand in Gehenna, Elizabeth McGee, an anthropologist set to observe the behaviour of a long-lost colony, must herself take a step over into the nonhuman if she is ever to understand those colonists and the native-born intelligences. In Serpent's Reach, Raen, the sole survivor of a murdered clan, is adopted into a hive intelligence in pursuit of her revenge and the continued safety of mere humans. In Chanur, the low-ranking crewman who helps prevent catastrophe, for humans and the Compact sapients, must stay in exile among the lion-like hani, never to go home.

In all these cases, it seems, the price of understanding aliens is to lose human contact, a loss only possible for someone already alienated from their home culture. So Cameron, despite being at first an official of the colonists' own government, is reckoned a traitor to his species because he understands and appreciates the atevi. His diplomatic skills, we are to understand, were originally developed to defend himself against his 'loving' but ignorant and manipulative mother. His constant baths and showers (sometimes he hardly seems to have time to do his job in the intervals between showering) may be taken as a signal of the stresses involved in seemingly betraying his species. Pyanfar Chanur, in the Chanur sequence, is also constantly shedding fur and showering (as a result of the stress of hyperspatial travel). Or maybe Cherryh is defeating writer's block by incorporating her own strategies of evasion into her writing! (7)

Like other SF writers, then, Cherryh is concerned with the interface between the human and the radically Other. In almost all her novels it is the humans who are the invaders, and the humans who must supply the sacrificial piece, namely, the one who must lose her home and culture in order to understand and interpret the others. An early exception is Hunter of Worlds, in which there is indeed an orphaned, alienated human to play a major part in moving the story on, but in which it is another sort of (humanoid) alien who is the chief interface between more ordinary species and the supremely competent, unconquerable iduve, whose empathy is strictly restricted to their own species, and who regard a good turn done to them as equivalent to a bad (since both put them at a 'disadvantage').

The humans of the Foreigner sequence are isolated for ever from the mainstream of human history. In this too they are much like other human colonies in Cherryh's work. In Forty Thousand in Gehenna, Union (the more distant political unit, both astronomically and culturally) has deliberately abandoned its colonists on a world that may eventually be part of Alliance territory, in order to present its enemies with an ongoing problem. The survivors have no knowledge of human history, and must make up their own societies on the basis of the minimal instructions programmed into them (on which Cyteen has more to say). In Serpent's Reach the hive intelligences that rule the region require that only one family (and its servants and hangers-on) can live among them. In the Gene Wars sequence no one infected by a dangerous nanotechnology is allowed away from the planet and its orbiting station (in other words, all visitors are for ever). Even the crews of her starships, although they keep abreast of what is happening on planets and star stations, must develop their own codes and customs in an absolute isolation. Whole communities, that is, are sacrificial pieces in human exploration of a universe for ever alien and mysterious.

Foreigners and foreignness require careful and unassuming diplomats. The Compact of the Chanur sequence always looked miraculous: how ever did anyone make a start at formulating minimal conditions of fair trade even between the oxygen-breathing species, let alone incomprehensible methane-breathers like the multi-brained, matrix-organized tca, or the acknowledged masters of the region, the knnn (whose idea of trade is to take what they wish, and leave whatever they please in its place)?

In the Foreigner sequence there is more hope that ordinary linguistic gifts may serve. Bren Cameron grows from a naive, linguistically (and mathematically) gifted minor bureaucrat to an integral part of the atevi government, an acknowledged feudal lord with only occasional, nostalgic links to his human past and to the island where the human colonists are confined, for their own and the world's good. Over the sequence he has managed to negotiate peace between the atevi and a human government momentarily dominated by xenophobes, between both these parties and the original starship, lately returned after nearly two centuries' absence, and at last with another alien species, the kyo, who might easily have launched a genocidal war against their neighbours. He has good reason to be faintly smug, but is then cast down, in Destroyer, by the discovery that while he has been light years absent aboard the starship Phoenix dealing with old human enemies and suspicious aliens, the atevi government (that is, the aiji, lifetime President of the principal atevi association, the aishidi'tat) has fallen, perhaps partly by his fault. The third Big Book of the Foreigner sequence has to do with restoring proper order and preparing to deal with yet another species, the probable reason that the kyo are so suspicious of intruders. How many other loose ends will be gathered up maybe not even Cherryh knows.

Friendship, 'Philia', and Association

In Cherryh's universe, to understand and appreciate the foreign is to become a foreigner, a necessary sacrificial piece. By the same token, it is often to be stripped of bourgeois sentiments, of any wish to be merely comfortable and self-deceived. Here again, the atevi are designed to make a fairly familiar point: if not quite as robustly alien as the kif of Chanur's Compact (who eat their own kind and do not feel guilt), they share the kif 's incomprehension of such terms as 'friendship', or at least they do not feel those friendly impulses.

Critical commentary on the atevi has sometimes been confined to the simpleminded (indeed, wholly inaccurate) claim that they have no concept of emotion, as though they were unfeeling automata, without goals, attachments, irritants, or pleasures. The obvious truth is that they are just as emotional as any other animal species. They are irritated or annoyed by insults or embarrassing occasions. They greatly admire wild landscapes and the wild things of their world. They ride their giant beasts exultingly, take pride in their achievements, tease each other, look forward to the season of their favourite meats, are enraged by unacceptable changes, admire, for example, the courage and great good will displayed under traumatic pressure by Bren Cameron, and are profoundly moved by the moment when man'chi ('the one association that defined a specific individual') (8) is discovered or created.

The problem for the interface is not that they have no concept of emotion, but that their emotions are not what humans feel, and that they prefer not to display those emotions openly, on their faces. Instead of friendship they have man'chi, experienced as a bond of loyalty and attention to particular leaders or particular places. In the first novel, Bren's bodyguards are baffled and outraged that he puts himself at risk to assist one of their number whom they would have willingly, though regretfully, let die. (9) And in the background of the whole sequence is the sudden, world-threatening war that broke out between the human colonists and the atevi after twenty years of seemingly 'friendly' intercourse. It is that war that led to establishing the office of the paidhi, the diplomat and translator who is the only human allowed by law to leave the island where humans must now live, and to work with the atevi (a law that is gradually weakened over the sequence). It arose because of just this confusion, between friendship and man'chi, the impulse that drives mechieti to follow their leader and atevi to band together, or experience sudden, world-shattering reversals of their basic loyalties.

But if it is foolish to suggest that atevi are unemotional, is it not also somewhat odd to say--as Cherryh and not just a foolish critic does--that they have no concept of friendship? What is that concept, and how does it differ from the network of associations, admirations, even affections that they obviously have? There may be no way for Bren to say he 'likes' his bodyguard (who is competent, courteous, humorous, courageous, and attentive), since the closest word in Ragi (the language of the dominant atevi culture) for 'liking' is reserved for things like salads; but that same bodyguard, Banichi, by any overt test, comes to think well of Bren, and enjoys teasing him, as well as having an impulse to protect him (as being the property of Banichi's feudal lord). What more is involved in 'liking'? Ilisidi, the aiji's grandmother and herself a considerable power, lies outside her grandson's man'chi, and so also outside Bren's, but gives unmistakable signs (after initial suspicion and very rough treatment) of admiring and being amused by Bren and of wishing him well, not only as a loyal instrument, or, as she declares in Destroyer, 'our true lode-stone of virtue'. (10) The kif, more obviously, do not like anyone, although they may enjoy them: they are absolute egotists, even if they can make bargains, and finally learn to keep them. For them, 'friend' at best means only 'ally-of-convenience'. 'Potential rival, rather. Or poor fool.' (11)

The atevi are not egotists, except, in a sense, for their leaders, who feel no duty to anyone above them, or any compunction about using those below. In human terms these are psychopaths (12)--but the sensible ones among them still have responsibilities and strict manners, with every incentive to maintain their followers' prosperity. There are occasional rogues, 'born with the emotional makeup to lead, but not able to persuade followers to join [them]', (13) and leaders who turn out to be really stupid and so lose man'chi, but most have as good a reason as a Hobbesian monarch to be sensible. (14) What is it that neither ordinary atevi nor their aiji'in do?

One clue is given in the first novel, where another bodyguard (who will eventually be Bren's lover) suddenly grasps that humans are something close to heretics, atevi who believe that they may or must make associations with just anyone they encounter (15) (oddly, something like that claim turns up as a species imperative in the kyo). (16) Friendly feelings, compounded of pleasure in another's company, and an easy assumption that that other shares one's goals and attitudes, seem to arise in human beings from mere proximity. Even if the other is actively hostile or unpleasant, there may be an impulse to conciliate, to grab the other's attention, to be generally, even if not intelligently, helpful. Any move to 'informality' is interpreted as a growth of 'friendship'. These feelings, although they are 'subject to whimsy and change by the hour', (17) may also encourage humans to promise or seem to promise more than they may actually intend, and to expect support. To 'like' someone is to make excuses for them. To 'dislike' them is to think the worse of them, irrespective of loyalty or common sense. Humans, so Cameron tells his bodyguard, desperately need to like someone (and to be liked). (18) He might plausibly add that we like disliking too.

Atevi loyalties are not determined by such feelings, although this does not mean that they are entirely rational. On the contrary, no one can tell where the associations will re-form, when the person hitherto central to their concerns has died or has otherwise lost hold, or where they will first form. In the seventh volume, two young atevi give their first, post-parental loyalty to the still younger son of the aiji, by the mere chance of meeting at a crucial moment in their lives. The dramas that atevi prefer are often about betrayal, when some seeming association dissolves to reveal the real structure of the protagonist's loyalties (which may have nothing to do with pre-existent ties). But although these associations may form unexpectedly, they are better ordered, or at least more hierarchically ordered, and more enduring than are human friendly feelings, owe much less to any need to be approved of or consoled, and are more easily distinguished from mere courtesy. 'Atevi children clung to their parents, but it wasn't love that made them do that. Go to the leader. Always go to the leader when the bullets start to fly: rally to the leader.' (19) And parental leadership passes. Quite what parents feel for their children remains a puzzle to Cameron throughout, although child-rearing practices do not seem entirely alien--certainly much less alien than the attitudes of the regul, in The Faded Sun, whose worship is given entirely to mature, immobile adults, and whose young are lucky to survive adult anger, disappointment, or mere strategy. But it is the fact that atevi and humans do not seem entirely alien that creates the problem. Atevi do not feel that they owe any special duty to chance acquaintance, sometime colleagues, lovers, or even family members, even if they have enjoyed their company. 'Assassinate someone of the same man'chi, the same hierarchical loyalty? That was shocking. Assassinate a relative? That was possibly a rational solution.' (20) Humans who show such feelings, or even act on them, are baffling, or else easy prey: 'the longer you knew them, the greater fools they became, and the more trusting, and the easier to get things from'. (21)

A similar pattern emerges in another novel, Heavy Time (1991), where a young asteroid miner, reared by the Company, is intelligent and even likeable. At any rate, his partner, his bedfellow, and even old acquaintances think well of him, and, on the assumption of a profitable return, they help him. To them, he displays a similar connection; but the notion that the miner should care about, or care for, another human being rescued from a damaged ship merely because he is indeed another human being in distress is sheerly incomprehensible. Those who seem to want him to do so are, for him, displaying a worrying lack of basic sanity or loyalty. Unexpectedly, the rescued miner himself eventually comes to rely more on this very limited young man, simply because he knows where he stands with him.

Consider also another of Cherryh's frequent themes: the character types (in Rimrunners and in Tripoint) who find ordinary human association bafflingly ambiguous, changeful, and unreliable, and prefer instead the clear rules and lines of command to be found in the militarized Company ships. So also her azi, vat-born, creche-reared clones, who are bred and brainwashed into absolute acceptance of their designated roles and rulers (in Cyteen, Downbelow Station, Forty Thousand in Gehenna, Port Eternity). (22) In Cyteen especially, the azi mindset is reckoned not to be inferior but merely different from the shifting, easily subverted attitudes of 'born-men'. The atevi have more flexibility, more autonomy than either the born soldiers or the azi, but all see the world in fewer and more stable colours than more ordinary humans do. They are all to be relied on, in ways that people who trust to friendly feelings or shifting patterns of emotion or unarticulated visions of the good are not. 'Excited born-men go to alternate programming sets. Every born-man', including Bren Cameron, 'is a schiz', (23) their values, memories, and plans in constant flux. Cameron's particular errors, as he comes to see them, mostly turn on his having encouraged friendly feelings in himself, even to those he recognizes as political enemies, and on his having trusted that mere social courtesies could be translated into solid associations. He believes too much of what such people tell him, and hopes too eagerly for a 'civilized' resolution of conflict. In the seventh and eighth novels he regrets that he had persuaded the aiji to spare the lives of a rebel's family, who have responded to this mercy, in obedience to their own man'chi, by rebelling in their turn. Wanting the atevi to be 'civilized' in the style preferred by humans, or to feel 'gratitude', is a presumptuous error.

But is all this enough to say that atevi have no concept of friendship? They are more sparing of their 'friendships', maybe, but for that reason these may be more real. Complete trust that others entirely share our values and that we have common goals is something a lot rarer than we might hope. 'Friendship' as our own forebears reckoned it rests on more than friendly feeling. Or perhaps, since Cherryh trained and taught as a classical scholar before she chose to turn to writing, it would be better to consider what Aristotle thought of philia, which we now easily and perhaps misleadingly translate as 'friendship'.

For the classical Greeks philia is a vital part of human well-being: no one without philoi could expect to cope, since philoi are all we have to rely on. Some forms of philia, indeed, amount to hardly more than shared enjoyment: drinking, or sleeping, companions. Others are business associations, lasting only as long as there is mutual profit. Yet others seem to us to be civil associations--socially recognized conjunctions such as married couples or fellow citizens. For Aristotle, the clearest and best form of philia, real philia, was that formed between good men, each reckoning the other's life as valuable as his own, each finding in the other his own best image of what men should be (I say 'men' throughout as this is the exacter version of what Aristotle thought: no doubt we would prefer to say 'people'). But though this form of philia, reciprocated love, seems closest to our own ideal of happy intimacy, it remains true that it is reserved for good men rather than for us more ordinary folk, and that both this and the more common forms of philia are founded, as we might say, in sensible self-interest. Philoi have the same goals, but not because they are friends. Perfect philosophical philia is between equals, but most ordinary philiai ('friendships') are between unequals, with the superior receiving greater honour than the other. Philoi belong to each other, because what is philos is one's own. Philoi matter to us because without them we would, often literally, have no life. There are no purely solitary human beings: the point may be more obvious with atevi, for whom one solitary ateva is certainly mad, and maybe dangerous, (24) but the very fact, which Bren insists upon, that humans want to be liked is a reminder that we too are clearly a social species (as, probably, all sapient species are, even the kif). One human is like a solitary piece in a game of chess: without the chessboard and the other pieces it is not 'a piece of chess' at all.

So the claim that atevi have no concept of friendship and make no 'friends' may actually mean only that their associations, their philiai, are formed, almost always, within an existing network of obligation, and do not extend to just any ateva, let alone just any sapient. Where there is no philia, so Aristotle taught, there is no justice: that is, there is no right or wrong outside the sphere of contract, and no obligation to distribute goods to anyone who is not philos, is not 'one of us'. 'If a person isn't in your man'chi, no, you don't care.' (25) To live 'for another', unless for one who already shares your goals, is slavishness. (26) Later philosophers suggested that we might, with an effort, stretch our concern as far as the whole human species, and learn to feel about just any human being, maybe any rational or sapient being, maybe even any sentient being, as we more easily feel about relatives or fellow citizens or our domestic pets. This is one source of that doctrine of moral impartiality or universal humanism to which moralists nowadays pay lip service (another being the biblical injunction 'to love your neighbour as yourself '). More commonly, though, they expected only that 'the wise', united in a particular doctrine about the world and human life, would be each other's and the gods' philoi, sharing their goods and valuing each other as much as their own corporeal being.

In other words, it may be misleading to translate philia as 'friendship', at least without asking what the limits and implications of philia and friendship are. This is not to say that the atevi are really ancient Greeks (who at least acknowledged lifelong filial obligations to their fathers), (27) any more than they are really Japanese (despite sharing some aesthetic and social manners with the Japanese and other island peoples: the facial immobility that alarms the colonists is much more familiar to the English, maybe, than to Americans). Atevi associations seem more like faith communities than cities: one of the human errors leading to the war was a failure to understand that different associations need not be territorially distinct, that the same associations need not be geographically congruent. This, of course, is often a more accurate account of terrestrial human politics: the very same land may often be occupied by quite different, even hostile, communities, and such peace as exists between them is not philia but armed truce. 'Boundaries might exist as an arbitrary approximate line defining provinces--but they were meaningless to individuals whose houses or kinships might lie both sides of the line.' (28) Life becomes difficult when those differing communities have different laws and expectations: either one community exerts its dominance over all others within a given working region, or some more 'secular' bargain must be struck--the very minimal rules that prevent an open war.

For the atevi those minimal rules depend on the Assassins' Guild (another idea found elsewhere in Cherryh's work, in Cuckoo's Egg). Guild members may be set against each other in service to their respective loyalties, but all acknowledge (or most law-abiding assassins acknowledge) that assassinations are to be sanctioned only when there is a reasoned case. This allows a form of warfare directed where, quite plausibly, it should be: at the leaders rather than the rank-and-file. The presence on their world of a whole community, the human colonists, who do not accept that system, was another reason for the war, alongside the obscurity of their chance-formed associations.

'Baji-Naji', Religion, and the Rule of Numbers

Atevi associations are more like faith communities than states or cities, although the level of religious or superstitious compunction varies widely. That is, the web of associations is not linked only by kinship and devotion, man'chi, to particular leaders, but by ideology, with special reference to arithmetical relations. Bren has to be mathematically gifted simply to speak the language, whose forms vary according to the number and kind of people being addressed or spoken of, and according to the atevi sense of auspicious or unlucky numbers. Even numbers are especially awkward, and the human tendency to frame polar opposites grates on atevi nerves. At one level this reads like numerology, giving arbitrary significance to some simple numbers, without any consideration of the role that larger or more complex numbers play in the world at large. But those other, cosmic numbers are also of importance to the atevi, who are deeply affected by any suggestion that the cosmic numbers do not 'add up'. One crisis is caused by their realization that the human starship somehow travels faster than light: an impossibility according to their deepest theories. It is resolved (in Inheritor) by the discovery (the SF trope) of hyperspace, of the possibility of shortcuts through the cosmos. By Pretender that solution has worn thin: the rebellion is ideological, (29) not just economic, not just the efforts of a competing would-be aiji.

So atevi 'religion' comes in at least two flavours: the merely numerological, leading believers to ignore traffic regulations in obedience to their own sense of auspicious numbers; and the intellectual understanding of nature's numbers, which itself breeds differing ideologies. What the difference is between two intellectual camps, 'the Determinists' and 'the Rational Absolutists', with their differing conceptions of numbers and the world, Cherryh has not so far explained, or, indeed, whether these differing conceptions have any effect on atevi conceptions of social relationships. The Determinists, perhaps, are a little more open to the new mathematics--and so the new society. Even the intellectuals are affected at an emotional level by numerology, although they can reason their way to freedom. It does not seem that any school, numerological or scientifically enlightened, draws fully determinist conclusions; on the contrary, chance and fortune, baji-naji, rule, and nothing is ever fully predictable.

Perhaps for that very reason (that life is not naturally secure) most atevi are also deeply conservative, in the sense that they wish their landscapes to be kept unspoilt, the wild things of their world allowed to live their lives. At least in the aishidi'tat (not further south), cattle reared for slaughter, and especially meat preserved and eaten out of season, are anathema (and another occasion for the war). It is important that the animals they kill have had a genuine opportunity to escape. Even the fish tanks that they use up in station have to be designed to allow the fish some chance of evasion. (30) Once again, not all atevi are equally punctilious, any more than all can ride mechieti. There are 'heretics', who believe in something more like universal charity, and cultures that permit the use of processed meats; whether these heresies have mathematical aspects, we do not know.

The role of overt 'religion' in Cherryh's work is usually marginal. In the Chanur sequence, hani may apostrophize their gods, but without any real conviction. Only one species of the Compact practises 'religiosity' (the mahendo'sat, a species something like bipedal dogs), with multiple revelations that do not prevent the species also being successful and influential. That species shares with the atevi a propensity to look towards individual persons--Personages--rather than to institutions or committees for its rulers. And because these Personages can die (or even lose their grip), the system is full of betrayals; and loyalties are suddenly disowned or reversed, a feature also of atevi drama and real politics.

But there are more serious cases. The mri, of The Faded Sun, seek always to preserve their sense of mri identity but no particular artefacts and no particular world. They too have no gods, but only faith in their eventual destiny, even when the species, seemingly, is reduced to a single brother-sister pair. In Downbelow Station, likewise, there is a species, the natives of Downbelow, who have faith only in the Sun (usually hidden from them by the clouds), as representing life and happiness. Their natural devotion, their aspirations are linked, irrationally enough, to the care of one quadriplegic woman, up aloft in the station, and this devotion counts for more, in the end, than the manufactured loyalties and memories of azi sent to infiltrate the station by its enemies, and more than the mere self-seeking of a treacherous human. Their influence is also apparent in Finity's End.

What do these forms and the stories have in common? In Cherryh's fiction things work out more or less rightly for those loyal to the dream that they may work out rightly. This is not because there are gods who intervene, but simply that the world, in the end, continues working. 'Gods', at least in the sense of unconquerably powerful entities with their own plans and very little concern for lesser things, are only accidentally helpful, if at all, whether they are the unseen aliens of the Gene Wars, the knnn of Compact space, the iduve, or the millennial, psychotic computer intelligence(s) of Voyager in Night. In a merely naturalistic universe there seems no reason why things should end happily, conflicts should be resolved, and the more amiable creatures should win. Atevi may feel (do sometimes feel) devotion, man'chi, to unworthy, stupid, and destructive leaders. The hani home world might easily have been demolished. The Company War might have been genocidal. The repetitious running battles that Cherryh so often depicts, down star routes, in station corridors, deserts, or tangled woods, might easily dissolve in chaos, with all the 'good guys' dead or damaged. In fiction things work out happily in the end, despite disasters, and this may simply be the sort of fiction Cherryh elects to write. We do not need fiction, after all, to know that sometimes things end badly, and few of us spend money to be made unhappy. It may also reflect something of Cherryh's own belief, an unarticulated faith that nature somehow works things out, that it all makes sense in the end, even if there are costs and mysteries on the way. 'Bajinaji, [...] the dice-fall of the universe, the give and take in the design. The design always survived. The pieces might not.' (31)

The universe at least makes mathematical sense. 'Our numbers describe the universe. And how can the universe be unfortunate? We are confused when certain people claim the numbers add in anything but felicitous combination. We can only believe nature.' (32) It is usual nowadays to take that for granted (wrongly), but to suppose that it may not, or even cannot, make much moral sense. Fiction usually has a happy ending: that is how we know it is fiction. In real life, things 'go wrong'. In a naturalistic, neo-Darwinian universe, in which our capacities and emotions are only those that more or less worked to let our ancestors survive and breed in their own particular local circumstances, we have no real reason to expect them to work in a larger setting, or to evade catastrophe. The point is not only that the kindly and fair-minded are not rewarded: even the strong, clever, devious, and well informed are not guaranteed good endings. It does not seem, at least, that any of our values rule the world. The just do not always prosper; and neither do the unjust. Orthodox theists, committed to the view that what we value is, despite appearances, in ultimate control, will usually suggest that we see only a fragment of reality; in the larger picture everything makes sense, and the virtuous are vindicated, although we do not see it at present. An alternative view, and the more common classical opinion, was rather that the vicious genuinely do perish, that 'virtue' should expect to triumph. But what is virtue?

The question asked when Bren Cameron points out the real existence of many stars much like the sun, and the probability of many living worlds, is 'what use are they?'. (33) Bren's judgement is that in general 'atevi didn't have a real interest in understanding the theory of Everything, but in getting the right numbers on their individual circumstances. Philosophers were there to care about larger systems.' In this, at least, atevi are much like ordinary humans. But the larger systems have an effect. The Astronomers' Guild lost status when 'the foreign star', the human starship, turned up in the sky: they had been expected to foresee astronomical changes and their impact on the world. They were wrong in detail, but, it is gradually acknowledged, right in principle. The world is not only for the atevi, and is open to intrusion, whether by the lost human colonists or yet more dangerous invaders. 'Was it [the arrival of the human ship] to the good? No matter asking. It is. What is must be accounted, and only when it is accounted, what is kabiu will suggest itself' (34) (that is, what is harmonious, calming, proper). The universe, in a way, is neither good nor bad; but at least it allows association, and there is always a way of responding that is kabiu, harmonious, as long as we admit that the universe is there, and that successful systems need to flex, not break.

In a truly neutral world there would be as little reason to expect things to make mathematical sense as to make moral sense; either would be a dream devised by sapients seeking comfort. Our maths works here-now, or worked for enough of our ancestors. It would not follow that it has any larger application (and the fact that, as it seems, it does, is really remarkable). (35) On the moral side, there might be literally nothing to do to evade disaster, and literally no way to accommodate all the diverse needs and principles of different species. Perhaps there is no single good for all--not even keeping our distance from each other to allow each other space. But perhaps we had better not believe this. Better believe that the universe makes a sort of moral sense, that there are appropriate, proper ways to respond to it, that peace is possible, as well as a mathematical. 'Knowledge brings to this world the true numbers of the universe, and baji-naji, the universe still orders itself, caring nothing for fools.' (36) Success is a vindication of efforts to understand, negotiate, and look towards the future. We have real and continuing evidence that mathematics works, that the Pythagoreans were right to suppose that 'numbers rule us all', (37) although we cannot get that evidence without already believing that it will be forthcoming. So also may 'good sense'.

So maybe Cherryh is right (if this is more than a fictional necessity) to think that the design survives, and that the design accommodates goods that are more than species-specific. What emerges in all her works is the ecological imperative: the wish that a diversity of creatures play out their lives in beauty, that a proper balance be struck among the interests of such diverse things, and by negotiation rather than oppression or extinction. In the Foreigner sequence especially, the paidhi's principal duty is to ensure that human technology does not pollute or damage the atevi's world, and it is the chief complaint of conservative atevi--at any rate in the dominant culture with which Bren has to do--that damage is still being done.

In the world of Downbelow Station the more amiable humans insist on safeguarding the lives and culture of Downbelow. In Cyteen the existing ecosystems are gradually being eroded and replaced, with some regret, but at least some efforts are being made to preserve genetic resource for a future day (or is it only terrestrial genes that are preserved?). In the world of Rider at the Gate industrial mining is beginning to poison the land, creating a harsh counter to the realm of illusions made by native fauna. In the Morgaine sequence one reason to close down the Gates that permit instantaneous travel between worlds and ages is the environmental damage such invasions always cause. The Foreigner sequence maybe intimates the possibility that human and atevi crops and fauna can be interweaved. Association works (or so we hope).

These latest novels, together with the fantasy Fortress sequence, may indicate a change in Cherryh's attitudes. Back in 1985 she wrote:

planets are a commodity of value at two stages of a humanoid species' existence: either as cradle or as retirement home. Otherwise taken, their value is negligible, and the preponderance of them--taken with moons, moonlets, asteroids, rings and such--might well be classified as navigational hazards rather than prizes of great value. (38)

In those days it may have seemed easy to imagine starships and artificial satellites with 'real dirt, controlled growing seasons and regulated solar input from their star'. Her work has been filled with such artificial habitats, whether in orbit or on trade routes between distant stars, and it is only there that alien species mingle. In the later Foreigner novels, it is clear that all such habitats are still dependent upon living worlds for anything beyond bare subsistence. The spider plants that have flourished on board Phoenix in its journey there and back again 'cured dry air, static, and nosebleeds, that persistent malady aboard', (39) but they also serve to remind the sapients of a living world. If sapients are ever really to live away from planets, they will have to take the whole world with them. Even in 1985 she knew that humankind 'is interdependent not only with its own kind, but also with semisapients and protozoa on its own planet', (40) and for that reason cannot entirely escape its planet, or ever wish to.

In Cyteen only a mild regret is managed for the gradual death of the native ecosystems. In Foreigner and its fellows Ilisidi will not permit destruction, and Bren himself perceives that even the colonists, formed of the very same stuff as atevi, must now depend on and defend their world. They have, as it were, 'a man'chi to this planet'. (41) Even the barren and parochial lives of the starship crew can be sustained only by visits to the larger system. In fiction at least (and probably not in fact) they can more or less survive on yeasts cultivated in tanks that are fuelled from asteroidal debris. But anything more than bare survival needs a world, and a remembered history:

'Understand that the preservation of all life on this planet is of great value, the animals, the plants, all valuable. So is the record of what lies in the past. Accept that this is valuable, not only to the dowager, but to me. Can you imagine that? They're not just old places.' (42)

We need a world, and the larger system still in which such living worlds have time to grow in beauty. And this in turn is the answer to species relativism. It may be true that many of our moral responses are functions of particular biologies, particular evolutionary accommodations to particular worlds. Not all Cherryh's work buys into an absolute genetic determinism: maybe the atevi are hard-wired in such a way as to find 'friendship' of the human sort inconceivable, but the hani, it may be hoped, are not hard-wired to ignore the potential talents of their males, or to see most of them die without issue. That, so the central character of the first four Chanur novels supposes, is a sociocultural delusion, something to be corrected by a clearer view. Even the kif can come to recognize the real advantages of peaceful trade. But even if it were true that some fundamental principles are hard-wired, unamenable to cultural change, it does not follow that there is no overarching ethic.

'Whatever it is you want,' the Exxon advertisement used to say, 'you need more oil.' As a claim about oil, the lifeblood of our present civilization, we may hope that this is only accidentally and temporarily the case (or else our civilization will be falling apart quite soon). But there is a larger claim, already intimated, that indeed is true: whatever our particular ideals and strategies, we need the world to be whole, diverse, decentralized. Maybe we cannot all feel the same imperatives (and maybe that is just as well). We must all know that some imperatives are absolute.

Ari Emory, de facto ruler of Cyteen, is conscious that there is very little time left in which all of the human species is immediately to hand before scattering through the universe. There is little time in which, somehow, to encapsulate human culture for them all to carry, lest the future of our species be much like the beginning: 'scattered tribes of humans across an endless plain, in pointless conflict--or isolate stagnation'. (43) But perhaps she need not have been so fearful: any sapient species, at any period of its sapience, must come to understand its dependence and interdependence. Humankind may survive, but only if it does not antagonize or injure its neighbours and the subsapient world from which all grow and flourish. Emory's instructions to the azi who are abandoned on Gehenna (and, by implication, all the azi of Union) were, perhaps, enough: 'You were sent from space to build a new world: discover its rules, live as long as you can, and teach your children all the things that seem important'. (44) The world, of course, is already building. 'Never let us forget what is kabiu, or break the rhythm of the seasons, or of the wild things, or of our own bodies. [...] This observance of true value is what keeps kabiu.' (45) If we are to have space stations and starships, better they be designed by atevi! Atevi are not impartial, any more than any other species, but they can conceive of beauty, and a world that makes both mathematical and a sort of moral sense. (46)

(1) The main collections are Sunfall (1981), Visible Light (1986), and The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004), which includes the 1978 Hugo Award-winning 'Cassandra'.

(2) See Stan Stalewicz, 'Selected Bibliography of C. J. Cherryh', in The Cherryh Odyssey, I. O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature, 25, ed. by Edward Carmien (Rockville, MD: Wildwood, 2004), pp. 213-70. Cherryh's own website is a valuable resource: <http://cherryh.com> [accessed 12 December 2006].

(3) Those reasons are discussed by Simon Conway Morris in Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003).

(4) It is probably mere coincidence that 'Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed' is the title of a famous story by Ray Bradbury in which human colonists gradually turn into Martians (dark, and golden-eyed); the story, written in 1949, is reprinted in The Stories of Ray Bradbury (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 469-80.

(5) Since Precursor (1999) they have usually been called 'mecheiti'.

(6) See J. G. Stinson, 'The Human as Other in the Science Fiction Novels of C. J. Cherryh', in The Cherryh Odyssey, ed. by Carmien, pp. 133-49.

(7) As is playfully suggested in Diana Wynne Jones's affectionate parody 'nad and Dan adn Quaffy', in Digital Dreams, ed. by David V. Barrett (London: NEL, 1990); repr. in Diana Wynne Jones, Everard's Ride (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press 1995), pp. 115-28.

(8) C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner (New York: DAW, 1994), p. 105.

(9) Foreigner, pp. 364-66.

(10) C. J. Cherryh, Destroyer (New York: DAW, 2005), p. 218.

(11) C. J. Cherryh, Chanur's Homecoming (New York: DAW, 1986), p. 30

(12) C. J. Cherryh, Pretender (New York: DAW, 2006), p. 82.

(13) C. J. Cherryh, Explorer (New York: DAW, 2002), p. 313.

(14) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by C. B.Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). A Hobbesian monarch has no obligations to his subjects, but since his prosperity depends on theirs, he has very good reason to look after their interests (more reason, so Hobbes argues, than members of an elected, factional parliament).

(15) Foreigner, p. 192

(16) Explorer, p. 404

(17) C. J. Cherryh, Precursor (New York: DAW, 1999), pp. 252-53.

(18) Foreigner, p. 186; see also C. J. Cherryh, Invader (London: Legend, 1996), p. 350.

(19) C. J. Cherryh, Inheritor (New York: DAW, 1996), p. 190.

(20) Invader, p. 84

(21) After Foreigner, p. 198

(22) A surprising number of commentators refer to these people as 'androids' or even 'robots': this is a grotesque misreading.

(23) C. J. Cherryh, Cyteen (London: NEL, 1989), p. 240; cf. Invader, p. 303.

(24) Precursor, p. 151.

(25) Precursor, p. 18

(26) Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 4.1124b31. The bulk of Aristotle's remarks on philia are to be found in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics.

(27) cf. Inheritor, p. 105.

(28) Foreigner, p. 120.

(29) Pretender, p. 56.

(30) C. J. Cherryh, Defender (New York: DAW, 2001), p. 114.

(31) Destroyer, p. 219; see also Precursor, p. 416.

(32) Foreigner, p. 300: Bren is trying to explain himself to an ateva interrogator.

(33) Invader, p. 209.

(34) Explorer, p. 330.

(35) See Richard Hamming, 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics', American Mathematical Monthly, 87.2 (1980), 81-90.

(36) Pretender, p. 318: Ilisidi, the aiji-dowager, summarizes good sense in a speech to the assembled lords and commons.

(37) Invader, p. 198.

(38) C. J. Cherryh, 'Goodbye Star Wars, Hello Alley-Oop', in Inside Outer Space: Science Fiction Professionals Look at their Craft, ed. by Sharon Jarvis (New York: F. Ungar, 1985), pp. 17-26. That is the view attributed to the Guild, the least trusted of human authorities, in Explorer, p. 99.

(39) Destroyer, p. 2.

(40) Cherryh, 'Goodbye Star Wars', p. 19.

(41) Invader, p. 37; see also p. 112.

(42) Inheritor, p. 314.

(43) Cyteen, p. 472.

(44) Cyteen, p. 455.

(45) Defender, p. 24.

(46) My thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for the grant of a research fellowship to work on the ethics of Plotinus, and so of the time also to complete this paper.

STEPHEN R. L. CLARK

Liverpool University