Golden Queen - Chapter 18
Mar. 22nd, 2023 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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i_read_whatMy week off went a little longer than planned, thanks to a fortuitous headcold. (Karma for being lazy, probably.)
Back now, and up for more boggling at Wolverton.
So last time, Orick's girlfriend died, and Everynne got a tiny tiny scar that actually might be a big fucking deal.
We rejoin our heroes in the inn. They're about to leave, but Veriasse wants to wait a few moments for Everynne to be "dressed appropriately." This leads to three entire paragraphs of description of her beauty and outfit...
Veriasse let his fingers play over the robe. It seemed somehow appropriate that Everynne should wear it this day. She truly was golden, the human equivalent of the dronon's great queen. He had seen it in people's eyes a thousand times: they would look at Everynne and respond with adoration. And though there were physiological reasons for their devotion, something in his bones whispered to Veriasse that mere science could not explain Everynne's power over him. Everynne was sublime. Some said that she was perfect in figure, that the proportions of each bone in her body were designed to conform to some racial dream, an image of perfection shared by all. Others claimed that it was only a combination of scents that she exuded, a carefully selected range of pheromones that turned men into mindless creatures, willing to sacrifice themselves at her feet.
But Everynne's beauty seemed to him to be more than perfect. When she touched him, he shivered in ecstasy. When she spoke, something in her voice demanded attention, so that the softest words whispered in a noisy room would hold him riveted. Everynne transcended the hopes of the scientists who had created her, and in his weaker moments, Veriasse would have admitted that he believed she was supernatural. There was something mystical in the way she moved him, something holy in the way she could transform a man.
And so, today she would wear gold, an appropriate color for the last Tharrin alive on the conquered worlds, the sole child of a race dead in this sector of the galaxy. When all was ready, he left the room. Everynne dressed quickly in her golden robes, boots, and gloves, then put on her mantle of golden ringlets. Though she was a woman, and fully as beautiful as any of her previous incarnations, Veriasse looked at her and thought that there was something special about this incarnation of Semarritte. Perhaps it was only her youthfulness. By having been force grown in the vats, she had attained the appearance of being twenty years old by the time she was two. Perhaps that was part of it: there was an innocence, a freshness to this incarnation that had been missing in the previous generations.
We get it, she's beautiful.
And what the fuck, Wolverton?? Why are you doing this? Veriasse is her FATHER. YES, she looks like her mother. YES, she's inhumanly beautiful. But the whole "shivering in ecstacy" when she touches him???
HE IS HER FATHER.
And it's even grosser the way he's going on about her "freshness" and "innocence" and how MAYBE being ACTUALLY TWO YEARS OLD IS PART OF IT. HE THINKS SHE IS SEXIER BECAUSE SHE IS CHRONOLOGICALLY A TODDLER!!!
I'm seriously about to vomit here.
Look, I was largely okay with the whole Everynne and Gallen thing because even though Everynne told him her chronological age, it didn't seem to matter to her or him. She looks like an adult. She acts like an adult. She has decision making capacity as an adult. When Gallen is the viewpoint character and he observes and interacts with Everynne, he describes her as an adult woman. I can deal with that. It's sci-fi squicky, but manageable.
BUT THIS IS NOT OKAY.
And WHY? What does this give to the plot? What does it possibly add to the story to have this character who is a fairly stock older mentor/father figure/noble survivor archetype also be disgusting when the storyline clearly intends him to still be read as someone primarily heroic?
This skeeves me too. Remember how at the start of the book, Everynne and Veriasse were calling each other father and daughter?
Everynne nodded. Veriasse himself had great doubts about this plan. “You will do well today, my love,” Veriasse assured her. “Never has there been a woman more worthy to represent the human species in such a contest. I can only hope that I shall be as worthy.
Everynne took his hand, looked into his eyes. “I trust you,” she said. “If your devotion for me can grant you power, then I know you cannot be beaten today.”
Veriasse kissed her hand, then they went outside to meet the others.
That's apparently changed. Entirely off screen, of course.
But see, Gallen's finally come to his senses and chosen the right girl in this grand morality play. He's chosen the honest, forthright girl next door who knows him deep down to his soul. The fact that she's "too young" is now completely irrelevant of course! Not because she aged, but because Gallen just randomly realizes that he's in love with her anyway!
So that means Everynne and Veriasse need to pair off too? I guess? So that Everynne is no longer tempting Gallen with her grace and beauty?
I don't care that much about the Maggie-Gallen age difference to be honest. I'm not all that squicked out by a nineteen year old and a sixteen year old. They're both kids in my brain. My annoyance is that Gallen's own concern about it has abruptly disappeared rather than ever being genuinely addressed.
But this is significantly grosser!!! And look, I'm not a prude and I'm not particularly hardcore about age differences. I was fine with Rune and Talaysen in Bardic Voices. I could deal with Alec and Seregil in Nightrunner. I was grossed out by F'nor and Brekke and Robinton and Menolly but that was more about the behavior of the men and the dynamic presented, not the age difference per se. I've read books where the girl falls in love with her father figure and been fine with them (the very first McCaffrey book I ever read was Damia, actually, because twelve year old me was intrigued by the locus quote about "kids, cats and telepaths").
But you have to make it work! You have to put in effort! You have to show us HOW the relationship changed from not-quite parent and child to a more equal partnership! Ideally, we see female character become more confident and assertive, to balance her more subordinate role, and to start taking more of a proactive and independent role. We should see the attraction grow and be mutual.
There's been NONE of that here! This relationship went from father-daughter -> Everynne explaining her situation to Gallen and basically saying, with fear and trepidation that she expects to get replaced essentially by her dead mom and that Veriasse is waiting for that -> "my love" and hand kissing.
NO. THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS. THIS IS ONLY ACCEPTABLE IF VERIASSE IS MEANT TO BE DISGUSTING.
Anyway, they drive off on airbikes. Not sure how that's supposed to work with Everynne's outfit, but fine. They soar over an empty highway, passing signs of battle, and then the dronon fliers start coming after them. The Jaggets are maintaining defense, but the group ends up having to veer off road. We're also told that Veriasse is the only one who knows where the gate actually is. And actually...this is interesting:
Veriasse alone knew where the gate to Dronon lay. He wondered if he should tell the others its location. Two hundred years ago, he had ordered his men to build the gate. In trying to plant the destination markers at Dronon, he had lost three complete technical crews. Afterward, Semarritte had forbade him from trying to put more gates on Dronon, just as she had always forbade him from building a gate that would lead to her omni-mind. She said some risks were not worth taking. But unlike the gates of old, constructed in simpler times, this one was hidden. He had built it into the arch of a small bridge that spanned the river.
I'd be far more interested in Veriasse's backstory if he were a pervert. He sends the location to Gallen as well. Okay. Why not send it to everyone?
Things get dicier when the dronon start using "atomics" - specifically atomic weaponry. They're ten kilometers from the gate, and the bombs are going to be blasting radioactive dust that will kill them all. There are vanquishers ahead. Veriasse pushes them faster, and there's a point where Everynne pulls ahead of him. And hey, apparently, Everynne actually has a talent beyond beauty:
Time and again she flirted with death, weaving through the rocky gorge, taking corners so fast that she was only a hair's breadth from destruction. For eight more minutes they raced, and whenever they reached a straight portion of the river, Veriasse would glance back, each time hoping anew that the others had negotiated the last turn. Maggie's bike was both slow and dangerously unstable with the bear on it. Jagget stayed at the far end of the train, bringing up the rear.
Dumb question, but why put the bear with the least experienced rider? Why not get a different kind of vehicle that could suit bears? Orick's girlfriend had one...
They make it to the bridge that houses the gate, which gives Primary Jagget a chance for a noble last stand:
Three vanquishers in aircars whipped down the river channel, negotiating the tight turn.
Primary Jagget fired his rifle, and pure white light shot down the river. A vanquisher burst into flame, and his burning car screamed toward Jagget.
Another vanquisher swerved to avoid the explosion, and his car erupted into a fireball as it smashed against the canyon walls. The last in line killed his throttle, and his car slowed and bogged down in the water.
Jagget did not have time to avoid the burning car that hurtled toward him. In less than a heartbeat, his body transformed into a swarm of butterflies that lifted above the collision.
Bye Jagget. You were kind of skeevy, but Veriasse is worse now, so...there we go.
Anyway, with nuclear winds roaring toward them, the group plunges through the gate. Woo.
And so we get our first look at Dronon:
When his vision cleared, a drab plain sprawled before them, filled with pockmarks and covered with rocks. Thin clouds made the sky a dim reddish gray. The air was hot and sticky. He could see no buildings, no roads or any other signs of habitation—only desolation.
A soft wind sighed over the ground, and Veriasse began to recognize that there was some plant life around, a deep gray-brown fungus that grew in tight knots like rosebuds. Things that he'd first taken to be pale rocks also proved to be fat, fanlike plants of palest blue, and the pockmarks in the ground were so numerous that they could not have been formed by any natural means that he knew of. They could only have been formed by the walking hive fortresses of the dronon.
They head magnetic north, looking for signs of a hive. This all makes me think it might have been better to have Everynne wait to dress up? How on earth is her outfit not ruined?
There's some not terrible imagery here:
They hit the thrusters, let the airbikes carry them over the gloomy terrain. They saw only a few animals-often things that looked like a conglomeration of sticks could be seen sunning themselves or dragging pieces of vegetable matter to their burrows.
Once they came to a cloud of round, slightly opaque gray leaves that fluttered slowly over the landscape; it wasn't until the leaves splattered against the windscreen of his bike that Veriasse saw that they were some kind of winged insect, with tiny red heads attached to a single wing. He could not imagine how the creature sustained flight.
After two hours, Dronon's sun set, rolling quickly, a dull shield dropping before the onslaught of darkness. In the distance ahead, they spotted a huge black saucer. Massive legs rose in the air around the saucer like hinged towers.
They drove to it, found a deserted hive city with gaping rust holes in it. The armor was pitted from incendiary fire. The city provided the best shelter they had seen all day, so they stopped to camp. They laid out a few blankets beneath the crook of one towering leg, built a cooking fire, and began heating some food bags.
Dronon definitely seems like a dying or dead world.
So they settle in:
This bit annoys me.
Veriasse felt disappointed at not having found a hive, and after he checked the back of Everynne's neck to see how the wound was healing, Everynne lay down on her blanket just staring up, as if deep in thought. Orick grumbled about the inconvenience of always finding dronon where you didn't want them, but not being able to find them on their own home world, then lay down protectively beside Everynne. The poor bear had been listless all day, and his stab wound, although slight, had cost him much. He fell asleep within minutes.
Does he HAVE to make Everynne SO FUCKING PASSIVE? We can't even tell if she's willingly allowing Veriasse to check her neck or if she's disassociating. At least the scar is healing up.
Meanwhile, Maggie and Gallen explore a little bit. And Veriasse and Everynne talk and...ugh..
He had thought Everynne slept, but she said softly, "Well, here we are."
"At last," Veriasse said, trying to sound hopeful.
Everynne laughed, not the musical sound of joy, but a derisive chuckle. "At last."
"Do you regret having come?" Veriasse asked.
It was an unfair question, he knew, but Everynne answered, "This is the planet where I will die, one way or another. I guess I'm disappointed that it is taking so long. I had myself braced for a battle today."
"I know that you think you will lose something if I win this battle," Veriasse said, "but I promise you-when your consciousness is subsumed into that of Semarritte's, it will not be a death for you. Instead, it will be a wonderful awakening. I have seen it happen with clones before. It will be such a powerful experience that it will overwhelm you, and you will fall asleep for a few moments. But you will awaken a much wiser and more powerful being. Trust me, my daughter, trust me."
So, do the clones get to keep their original, and by that I mean the actual CLONE's personality or not? It seems like that would be an easy thing to reassure her about. If you've seen clone Jimmy download his parent's mind but still be clone Jimmy at heart, you could TELL her that.
Also, I'm now more weirded out by the return to "daughter" and "father". Not after that fucking "ecstacy" talk, Wolverton.
Or this:
Veriasse took her hand, caressed it, but Everynne did not turn to him. Instead, she laughed coldly and said, "Father, if I turned around and walked away from here, would you hate me?"
No hand caressing while she calls you father, dude. I am glad to see that Everynne doesn't seem to suddenly return Veriasse's feeling, but that doesn't make this less creepy.
I will give Veriasse credit for his response: Instead, he only spoke the truth. "I would love you, even if you turned away. You are as much a daughter as I have ever had, and I've watched you learn and grow these past three years with great joy and a great deal of pride."
But that's not really the elephant of the room, and...okay, Wolverton. At least you're actually having this come to the surface.
"But you will love me more when Semarritte fills me, won't you?" she said bitterly. "I'll bet you can't wait until she succeeds me. How long do you think it will take before you bed her?"
Veriasse had rarely seen Everynne angry. Never had he heard her say an unkind word, yet he had to remind himself that emotionally she was still a child, and he had to make allowances for that. "Everynne, don't torture yourself this way. No good will come of it."
"I'm not torturing myself," she said. "You're torturing me. You're killing me! " She rolled away from him and began weeping.
Fucking THANK YOU.
Veriasse basically tells her that if she wants to leave, he'll take her out of there and they'll raise armies, open the gates and have a good old fashioned war. It's a nice speech spoiled by what they both already know: a war would have immeasurable losses and doom the already captured worlds to dronon destruction. Everynne knows that too, she just asks her father to hold her.
I'd be more comfortable with this if Veriasse ever, at one point, said "No, of course I'm not going to fuck you. You're my DAUGHTER."
But he's not going to do that because he's disgusting.
He wonders what Maggie and Gallen are doing right now, before he sleeps. And we switch over to Maggie and Gallen.
Maggie's our viewpoint here, and her reaction is interesting.
Maggie rushed through the dead dronon hive city, feeling wild and free. Her nerves jangled in anticipation, and Gallen ran behind her. They would meet the dronon soon, and she fully expected to die, but for the moment, the mantle she wore wanted images of this city. It drove her forward in a mad rush through the beast, gleaning images of an engine room where monstrously large hydraulics assemblies had once driven the massive legs. She studied the power system and the exhaust nacelles.
Though the city was dead and much of the equipment had been scavenged, the dronon took great care of their equipment; they had even protected the abandoned machinery by coating it with oil.
The heavy odor of rusting iron and dust filled the city. The corridors were dark. Wind whistled through the hallways high overhead.
For an hour Maggie and Gallen studied the engine rooms, then found what could only have been egg warmers in a huge nursery. But Maggie's mantle drove her on, ever curious. It fed its discoveries to her in a constant barrage, so that she felt as if she would burst at the wonder of it all.
I'm glad Maggie is getting some joy out of exploration, but it raises the constant question, how much of this is her joy or the mantle's. How much more genuine would her curiosity and interest and thirst for knowledge feel if she and Gallen didn't get everything they needed to know dumped into their heads?
But they do find a lot of cool stuff including what appears to be a spaceship built for Maggie. One interesting thing I note is that Maggie seems to have a lot more general/scientific/technical knowledge than Gallen does. In some ways that makes sense, Gallen is getting all the combat training after all. But I wish the plot actually DID something with the different information they're getting. But I've wished a lot of things.
Gallen looks at her, perplexed, noting that he's never seen her so happy or free. Maggie admits that she's never BEEN happy or free before.
And yep, romance in the air:
"Your smile looks good on you," Gallen said. He swung his leg over the saddle, sat facing her, his legs wrapped around hers. He lay back with his arms folded behind his head. His half-closed eyes looked tired, and the flames from the torch flickered, showing only half of his face. She felt electric, wanted to kiss him now, make love, but Gallen only studied her a moment.
Maggie's mantle whispered for her to get up, look deeper into the storage chambers. She took it off and held it in one hand, not wanting to be distracted by its insistent promptings.
Gallen leaned forward, stroked her jawbone tenderly with his fingers, and kissed her. It was an odd kiss, she thought. It wasn't insistent with desire, nor was it one of the guilty little pecks that Gallen had given her back home. It was slower than dripping honey and tasted just as sweet. It spoke to her, saying, "I love you just as you are, and right now I am content with that."
They held each other and kissed for a few minutes, then Gallen leaned back again, pillowing his head with his hands.
"Damn you, Gallen O'Day," Maggie said. "It took you long enough."
"I suppose it did," Gallen smiled, self-satisfied. "When we get back to Tihrglas, will you marry me?"
Sorry, it's a longer segment, but there we go.
It would have been nice if we actually got to see the point where Gallen's feelings for Maggie changed. Maybe he could tell us why Maggie's age suddenly doesn't matter. Maybe it was seeing her reaction to his sleeping with Everynne that made him realize she actually is a grown woman by their society's standards and she's been an equal partner, suffering beside him all along. Maybe he was attracted to her all along but had been suppressing it, but now can't suppress it any longer. Now that he's been with Everynne, he understands that Everynne can't really give him what he's really looking for in a relationship.
Any of those things could work! But we didn't get any of that. It's annoying.
Maggie is on board with marriage, but she doesn't actually want to go back to Tihrglas. And you know, that's fair.
"Why would I want to go back? What's for me there? You said it yourself not a moment ago. In all my life, you've never seen me so happy. Gallen, how can I begin to explain this-right now, I want to tear this city apart," she said, waving toward the ship and the dronon city around her, "and discover exactly how it works. Like those little dronon message pods. Until two hundred years ago, that was the only form of communication the dronon used. They hadn't discovered radio waves at all, until we showed them. The pods have miniature antigravity drives in them, and no technician that I've ever heard of has disassembled one of the buggers and figured out how it worked. Gallen, I've got a pocket full of dronon technology, and right now I feel as rich as can be. It's amazement and discovery. Here I'm free to learn and grow. I can't get that on Tihrglas. Pick any other world we've been to. I don't care which. I could go back and be happy, but you'll never see me smile again on Tihrglas."
Maggie annoys me in this book, fairly often, but I appreciate how she's always allowed to be ambitious and forthright and want things. Everynne really isn't.
To give Wolverton credit, I do think some of that is intentional. Everynne's been raised since a very recent birth with a very specific goal in mind that ends, in some way, in her self-sacrifice. She doesn't get to have desires or ambitions, and she can't possibly risk herself or threaten the entire endeavor. I just wish I thought she'd get a better climax or resolution. But...I have my doubts.
But here's an interesting point of conflict, as Gallen has always assumed they'd go home. He can't protect her here. Maggie points out that she doesn't want protection. He asked to be husband, not bodyguard.
But Maggie suddenly is blessed with an understanding of people that she's never remotely shown before and of course, we get some heroic Gallen shilling in the process:
Her flippant words didn't answer his real concerns, she realized. He was a bodyguard. It came naturally to him. Part of him cried out that at all costs he had to protect those around him, maintain a semblance of order. But in these past few days, they had staggered through so many worlds that he was left confused, overwhelmed. He had not been able to discern the underlying order in the worlds around him, simply because the human societies they had visited were all experimenting and growing, twisting away from any predefined shapes.
You know, that would actually be a good character beat if we ever saw Gallen confused or overwhelmed. But honestly, the guy's seemed pretty comfortable everywhere they went. He's had an idyllic trip really, especially in comparison with Maggie, who seems inclined to get captured and tortured everywhere.
It's kind of weird that that isn't coming up in this discussion, but why should Maggie show trauma?
Anyway, she thinks the mantle is probably encouraging these instincts, trying to turn him into Veriasse, or a "frustrated fanatic like Jagget". She thinks about how Jagget was unable to adapt to his changed world, and while he calls Wechaus "his world", the people themselves have become strangers to him.
And suddenly Maggie understood. In his way, Gallen already was a Lord Protector. Back in Tihrglas, he'd planned to run for sheriff of County Morgan, and in a few years he'd have become the Lord Sheriff of all the counties. He'd been born to become the Lord Protector of Tihrglas.
Oh brother.
Also, since when. There were hints that Gallen had grander ambitions but they were never laid out. The Gallen we met was a bounty hunter. I mean, it makes sense, but I think more work could have been done to establish this.
That said, I do like how Gallen and Maggie decide that they'll find a world they can both live with, together.
It's a good moment, so of course this means we go back to pervert Veriasse's dreams. He's riding his airbike with Everynne beside him. They're desperate, but eventually he sees the white sun which fills him with hope. He wakes up.
Gallen and Maggie are calling. Gallen had fired his incendiary rifle in the air, hence the sun that Veriasse felt. And then, in another nice bit of gross imagery:
In the distance, something massive and black moved in the darkness, crawling over the plains, heaving its bloated body along like a gigantic tick. Veriasse could only see it by the lights at its battle stations, lights that glowed in the night like immense red eyes.
The chapter ends here. They've found their enemy.
Back now, and up for more boggling at Wolverton.
So last time, Orick's girlfriend died, and Everynne got a tiny tiny scar that actually might be a big fucking deal.
We rejoin our heroes in the inn. They're about to leave, but Veriasse wants to wait a few moments for Everynne to be "dressed appropriately." This leads to three entire paragraphs of description of her beauty and outfit...
Veriasse let his fingers play over the robe. It seemed somehow appropriate that Everynne should wear it this day. She truly was golden, the human equivalent of the dronon's great queen. He had seen it in people's eyes a thousand times: they would look at Everynne and respond with adoration. And though there were physiological reasons for their devotion, something in his bones whispered to Veriasse that mere science could not explain Everynne's power over him. Everynne was sublime. Some said that she was perfect in figure, that the proportions of each bone in her body were designed to conform to some racial dream, an image of perfection shared by all. Others claimed that it was only a combination of scents that she exuded, a carefully selected range of pheromones that turned men into mindless creatures, willing to sacrifice themselves at her feet.
But Everynne's beauty seemed to him to be more than perfect. When she touched him, he shivered in ecstasy. When she spoke, something in her voice demanded attention, so that the softest words whispered in a noisy room would hold him riveted. Everynne transcended the hopes of the scientists who had created her, and in his weaker moments, Veriasse would have admitted that he believed she was supernatural. There was something mystical in the way she moved him, something holy in the way she could transform a man.
And so, today she would wear gold, an appropriate color for the last Tharrin alive on the conquered worlds, the sole child of a race dead in this sector of the galaxy. When all was ready, he left the room. Everynne dressed quickly in her golden robes, boots, and gloves, then put on her mantle of golden ringlets. Though she was a woman, and fully as beautiful as any of her previous incarnations, Veriasse looked at her and thought that there was something special about this incarnation of Semarritte. Perhaps it was only her youthfulness. By having been force grown in the vats, she had attained the appearance of being twenty years old by the time she was two. Perhaps that was part of it: there was an innocence, a freshness to this incarnation that had been missing in the previous generations.
We get it, she's beautiful.
And what the fuck, Wolverton?? Why are you doing this? Veriasse is her FATHER. YES, she looks like her mother. YES, she's inhumanly beautiful. But the whole "shivering in ecstacy" when she touches him???
HE IS HER FATHER.
And it's even grosser the way he's going on about her "freshness" and "innocence" and how MAYBE being ACTUALLY TWO YEARS OLD IS PART OF IT. HE THINKS SHE IS SEXIER BECAUSE SHE IS CHRONOLOGICALLY A TODDLER!!!
I'm seriously about to vomit here.
Look, I was largely okay with the whole Everynne and Gallen thing because even though Everynne told him her chronological age, it didn't seem to matter to her or him. She looks like an adult. She acts like an adult. She has decision making capacity as an adult. When Gallen is the viewpoint character and he observes and interacts with Everynne, he describes her as an adult woman. I can deal with that. It's sci-fi squicky, but manageable.
BUT THIS IS NOT OKAY.
And WHY? What does this give to the plot? What does it possibly add to the story to have this character who is a fairly stock older mentor/father figure/noble survivor archetype also be disgusting when the storyline clearly intends him to still be read as someone primarily heroic?
This skeeves me too. Remember how at the start of the book, Everynne and Veriasse were calling each other father and daughter?
Everynne nodded. Veriasse himself had great doubts about this plan. “You will do well today, my love,” Veriasse assured her. “Never has there been a woman more worthy to represent the human species in such a contest. I can only hope that I shall be as worthy.
Everynne took his hand, looked into his eyes. “I trust you,” she said. “If your devotion for me can grant you power, then I know you cannot be beaten today.”
Veriasse kissed her hand, then they went outside to meet the others.
That's apparently changed. Entirely off screen, of course.
But see, Gallen's finally come to his senses and chosen the right girl in this grand morality play. He's chosen the honest, forthright girl next door who knows him deep down to his soul. The fact that she's "too young" is now completely irrelevant of course! Not because she aged, but because Gallen just randomly realizes that he's in love with her anyway!
So that means Everynne and Veriasse need to pair off too? I guess? So that Everynne is no longer tempting Gallen with her grace and beauty?
I don't care that much about the Maggie-Gallen age difference to be honest. I'm not all that squicked out by a nineteen year old and a sixteen year old. They're both kids in my brain. My annoyance is that Gallen's own concern about it has abruptly disappeared rather than ever being genuinely addressed.
But this is significantly grosser!!! And look, I'm not a prude and I'm not particularly hardcore about age differences. I was fine with Rune and Talaysen in Bardic Voices. I could deal with Alec and Seregil in Nightrunner. I was grossed out by F'nor and Brekke and Robinton and Menolly but that was more about the behavior of the men and the dynamic presented, not the age difference per se. I've read books where the girl falls in love with her father figure and been fine with them (the very first McCaffrey book I ever read was Damia, actually, because twelve year old me was intrigued by the locus quote about "kids, cats and telepaths").
But you have to make it work! You have to put in effort! You have to show us HOW the relationship changed from not-quite parent and child to a more equal partnership! Ideally, we see female character become more confident and assertive, to balance her more subordinate role, and to start taking more of a proactive and independent role. We should see the attraction grow and be mutual.
There's been NONE of that here! This relationship went from father-daughter -> Everynne explaining her situation to Gallen and basically saying, with fear and trepidation that she expects to get replaced essentially by her dead mom and that Veriasse is waiting for that -> "my love" and hand kissing.
NO. THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS. THIS IS ONLY ACCEPTABLE IF VERIASSE IS MEANT TO BE DISGUSTING.
Anyway, they drive off on airbikes. Not sure how that's supposed to work with Everynne's outfit, but fine. They soar over an empty highway, passing signs of battle, and then the dronon fliers start coming after them. The Jaggets are maintaining defense, but the group ends up having to veer off road. We're also told that Veriasse is the only one who knows where the gate actually is. And actually...this is interesting:
Veriasse alone knew where the gate to Dronon lay. He wondered if he should tell the others its location. Two hundred years ago, he had ordered his men to build the gate. In trying to plant the destination markers at Dronon, he had lost three complete technical crews. Afterward, Semarritte had forbade him from trying to put more gates on Dronon, just as she had always forbade him from building a gate that would lead to her omni-mind. She said some risks were not worth taking. But unlike the gates of old, constructed in simpler times, this one was hidden. He had built it into the arch of a small bridge that spanned the river.
I'd be far more interested in Veriasse's backstory if he were a pervert. He sends the location to Gallen as well. Okay. Why not send it to everyone?
Things get dicier when the dronon start using "atomics" - specifically atomic weaponry. They're ten kilometers from the gate, and the bombs are going to be blasting radioactive dust that will kill them all. There are vanquishers ahead. Veriasse pushes them faster, and there's a point where Everynne pulls ahead of him. And hey, apparently, Everynne actually has a talent beyond beauty:
Time and again she flirted with death, weaving through the rocky gorge, taking corners so fast that she was only a hair's breadth from destruction. For eight more minutes they raced, and whenever they reached a straight portion of the river, Veriasse would glance back, each time hoping anew that the others had negotiated the last turn. Maggie's bike was both slow and dangerously unstable with the bear on it. Jagget stayed at the far end of the train, bringing up the rear.
Dumb question, but why put the bear with the least experienced rider? Why not get a different kind of vehicle that could suit bears? Orick's girlfriend had one...
They make it to the bridge that houses the gate, which gives Primary Jagget a chance for a noble last stand:
Three vanquishers in aircars whipped down the river channel, negotiating the tight turn.
Primary Jagget fired his rifle, and pure white light shot down the river. A vanquisher burst into flame, and his burning car screamed toward Jagget.
Another vanquisher swerved to avoid the explosion, and his car erupted into a fireball as it smashed against the canyon walls. The last in line killed his throttle, and his car slowed and bogged down in the water.
Jagget did not have time to avoid the burning car that hurtled toward him. In less than a heartbeat, his body transformed into a swarm of butterflies that lifted above the collision.
Bye Jagget. You were kind of skeevy, but Veriasse is worse now, so...there we go.
Anyway, with nuclear winds roaring toward them, the group plunges through the gate. Woo.
And so we get our first look at Dronon:
When his vision cleared, a drab plain sprawled before them, filled with pockmarks and covered with rocks. Thin clouds made the sky a dim reddish gray. The air was hot and sticky. He could see no buildings, no roads or any other signs of habitation—only desolation.
A soft wind sighed over the ground, and Veriasse began to recognize that there was some plant life around, a deep gray-brown fungus that grew in tight knots like rosebuds. Things that he'd first taken to be pale rocks also proved to be fat, fanlike plants of palest blue, and the pockmarks in the ground were so numerous that they could not have been formed by any natural means that he knew of. They could only have been formed by the walking hive fortresses of the dronon.
They head magnetic north, looking for signs of a hive. This all makes me think it might have been better to have Everynne wait to dress up? How on earth is her outfit not ruined?
There's some not terrible imagery here:
They hit the thrusters, let the airbikes carry them over the gloomy terrain. They saw only a few animals-often things that looked like a conglomeration of sticks could be seen sunning themselves or dragging pieces of vegetable matter to their burrows.
Once they came to a cloud of round, slightly opaque gray leaves that fluttered slowly over the landscape; it wasn't until the leaves splattered against the windscreen of his bike that Veriasse saw that they were some kind of winged insect, with tiny red heads attached to a single wing. He could not imagine how the creature sustained flight.
After two hours, Dronon's sun set, rolling quickly, a dull shield dropping before the onslaught of darkness. In the distance ahead, they spotted a huge black saucer. Massive legs rose in the air around the saucer like hinged towers.
They drove to it, found a deserted hive city with gaping rust holes in it. The armor was pitted from incendiary fire. The city provided the best shelter they had seen all day, so they stopped to camp. They laid out a few blankets beneath the crook of one towering leg, built a cooking fire, and began heating some food bags.
Dronon definitely seems like a dying or dead world.
So they settle in:
This bit annoys me.
Veriasse felt disappointed at not having found a hive, and after he checked the back of Everynne's neck to see how the wound was healing, Everynne lay down on her blanket just staring up, as if deep in thought. Orick grumbled about the inconvenience of always finding dronon where you didn't want them, but not being able to find them on their own home world, then lay down protectively beside Everynne. The poor bear had been listless all day, and his stab wound, although slight, had cost him much. He fell asleep within minutes.
Does he HAVE to make Everynne SO FUCKING PASSIVE? We can't even tell if she's willingly allowing Veriasse to check her neck or if she's disassociating. At least the scar is healing up.
Meanwhile, Maggie and Gallen explore a little bit. And Veriasse and Everynne talk and...ugh..
He had thought Everynne slept, but she said softly, "Well, here we are."
"At last," Veriasse said, trying to sound hopeful.
Everynne laughed, not the musical sound of joy, but a derisive chuckle. "At last."
"Do you regret having come?" Veriasse asked.
It was an unfair question, he knew, but Everynne answered, "This is the planet where I will die, one way or another. I guess I'm disappointed that it is taking so long. I had myself braced for a battle today."
"I know that you think you will lose something if I win this battle," Veriasse said, "but I promise you-when your consciousness is subsumed into that of Semarritte's, it will not be a death for you. Instead, it will be a wonderful awakening. I have seen it happen with clones before. It will be such a powerful experience that it will overwhelm you, and you will fall asleep for a few moments. But you will awaken a much wiser and more powerful being. Trust me, my daughter, trust me."
So, do the clones get to keep their original, and by that I mean the actual CLONE's personality or not? It seems like that would be an easy thing to reassure her about. If you've seen clone Jimmy download his parent's mind but still be clone Jimmy at heart, you could TELL her that.
Also, I'm now more weirded out by the return to "daughter" and "father". Not after that fucking "ecstacy" talk, Wolverton.
Or this:
Veriasse took her hand, caressed it, but Everynne did not turn to him. Instead, she laughed coldly and said, "Father, if I turned around and walked away from here, would you hate me?"
No hand caressing while she calls you father, dude. I am glad to see that Everynne doesn't seem to suddenly return Veriasse's feeling, but that doesn't make this less creepy.
I will give Veriasse credit for his response: Instead, he only spoke the truth. "I would love you, even if you turned away. You are as much a daughter as I have ever had, and I've watched you learn and grow these past three years with great joy and a great deal of pride."
But that's not really the elephant of the room, and...okay, Wolverton. At least you're actually having this come to the surface.
"But you will love me more when Semarritte fills me, won't you?" she said bitterly. "I'll bet you can't wait until she succeeds me. How long do you think it will take before you bed her?"
Veriasse had rarely seen Everynne angry. Never had he heard her say an unkind word, yet he had to remind himself that emotionally she was still a child, and he had to make allowances for that. "Everynne, don't torture yourself this way. No good will come of it."
"I'm not torturing myself," she said. "You're torturing me. You're killing me! " She rolled away from him and began weeping.
Fucking THANK YOU.
Veriasse basically tells her that if she wants to leave, he'll take her out of there and they'll raise armies, open the gates and have a good old fashioned war. It's a nice speech spoiled by what they both already know: a war would have immeasurable losses and doom the already captured worlds to dronon destruction. Everynne knows that too, she just asks her father to hold her.
I'd be more comfortable with this if Veriasse ever, at one point, said "No, of course I'm not going to fuck you. You're my DAUGHTER."
But he's not going to do that because he's disgusting.
He wonders what Maggie and Gallen are doing right now, before he sleeps. And we switch over to Maggie and Gallen.
Maggie's our viewpoint here, and her reaction is interesting.
Maggie rushed through the dead dronon hive city, feeling wild and free. Her nerves jangled in anticipation, and Gallen ran behind her. They would meet the dronon soon, and she fully expected to die, but for the moment, the mantle she wore wanted images of this city. It drove her forward in a mad rush through the beast, gleaning images of an engine room where monstrously large hydraulics assemblies had once driven the massive legs. She studied the power system and the exhaust nacelles.
Though the city was dead and much of the equipment had been scavenged, the dronon took great care of their equipment; they had even protected the abandoned machinery by coating it with oil.
The heavy odor of rusting iron and dust filled the city. The corridors were dark. Wind whistled through the hallways high overhead.
For an hour Maggie and Gallen studied the engine rooms, then found what could only have been egg warmers in a huge nursery. But Maggie's mantle drove her on, ever curious. It fed its discoveries to her in a constant barrage, so that she felt as if she would burst at the wonder of it all.
I'm glad Maggie is getting some joy out of exploration, but it raises the constant question, how much of this is her joy or the mantle's. How much more genuine would her curiosity and interest and thirst for knowledge feel if she and Gallen didn't get everything they needed to know dumped into their heads?
But they do find a lot of cool stuff including what appears to be a spaceship built for Maggie. One interesting thing I note is that Maggie seems to have a lot more general/scientific/technical knowledge than Gallen does. In some ways that makes sense, Gallen is getting all the combat training after all. But I wish the plot actually DID something with the different information they're getting. But I've wished a lot of things.
Gallen looks at her, perplexed, noting that he's never seen her so happy or free. Maggie admits that she's never BEEN happy or free before.
And yep, romance in the air:
"Your smile looks good on you," Gallen said. He swung his leg over the saddle, sat facing her, his legs wrapped around hers. He lay back with his arms folded behind his head. His half-closed eyes looked tired, and the flames from the torch flickered, showing only half of his face. She felt electric, wanted to kiss him now, make love, but Gallen only studied her a moment.
Maggie's mantle whispered for her to get up, look deeper into the storage chambers. She took it off and held it in one hand, not wanting to be distracted by its insistent promptings.
Gallen leaned forward, stroked her jawbone tenderly with his fingers, and kissed her. It was an odd kiss, she thought. It wasn't insistent with desire, nor was it one of the guilty little pecks that Gallen had given her back home. It was slower than dripping honey and tasted just as sweet. It spoke to her, saying, "I love you just as you are, and right now I am content with that."
They held each other and kissed for a few minutes, then Gallen leaned back again, pillowing his head with his hands.
"Damn you, Gallen O'Day," Maggie said. "It took you long enough."
"I suppose it did," Gallen smiled, self-satisfied. "When we get back to Tihrglas, will you marry me?"
Sorry, it's a longer segment, but there we go.
It would have been nice if we actually got to see the point where Gallen's feelings for Maggie changed. Maybe he could tell us why Maggie's age suddenly doesn't matter. Maybe it was seeing her reaction to his sleeping with Everynne that made him realize she actually is a grown woman by their society's standards and she's been an equal partner, suffering beside him all along. Maybe he was attracted to her all along but had been suppressing it, but now can't suppress it any longer. Now that he's been with Everynne, he understands that Everynne can't really give him what he's really looking for in a relationship.
Any of those things could work! But we didn't get any of that. It's annoying.
Maggie is on board with marriage, but she doesn't actually want to go back to Tihrglas. And you know, that's fair.
"Why would I want to go back? What's for me there? You said it yourself not a moment ago. In all my life, you've never seen me so happy. Gallen, how can I begin to explain this-right now, I want to tear this city apart," she said, waving toward the ship and the dronon city around her, "and discover exactly how it works. Like those little dronon message pods. Until two hundred years ago, that was the only form of communication the dronon used. They hadn't discovered radio waves at all, until we showed them. The pods have miniature antigravity drives in them, and no technician that I've ever heard of has disassembled one of the buggers and figured out how it worked. Gallen, I've got a pocket full of dronon technology, and right now I feel as rich as can be. It's amazement and discovery. Here I'm free to learn and grow. I can't get that on Tihrglas. Pick any other world we've been to. I don't care which. I could go back and be happy, but you'll never see me smile again on Tihrglas."
Maggie annoys me in this book, fairly often, but I appreciate how she's always allowed to be ambitious and forthright and want things. Everynne really isn't.
To give Wolverton credit, I do think some of that is intentional. Everynne's been raised since a very recent birth with a very specific goal in mind that ends, in some way, in her self-sacrifice. She doesn't get to have desires or ambitions, and she can't possibly risk herself or threaten the entire endeavor. I just wish I thought she'd get a better climax or resolution. But...I have my doubts.
But here's an interesting point of conflict, as Gallen has always assumed they'd go home. He can't protect her here. Maggie points out that she doesn't want protection. He asked to be husband, not bodyguard.
But Maggie suddenly is blessed with an understanding of people that she's never remotely shown before and of course, we get some heroic Gallen shilling in the process:
Her flippant words didn't answer his real concerns, she realized. He was a bodyguard. It came naturally to him. Part of him cried out that at all costs he had to protect those around him, maintain a semblance of order. But in these past few days, they had staggered through so many worlds that he was left confused, overwhelmed. He had not been able to discern the underlying order in the worlds around him, simply because the human societies they had visited were all experimenting and growing, twisting away from any predefined shapes.
You know, that would actually be a good character beat if we ever saw Gallen confused or overwhelmed. But honestly, the guy's seemed pretty comfortable everywhere they went. He's had an idyllic trip really, especially in comparison with Maggie, who seems inclined to get captured and tortured everywhere.
It's kind of weird that that isn't coming up in this discussion, but why should Maggie show trauma?
Anyway, she thinks the mantle is probably encouraging these instincts, trying to turn him into Veriasse, or a "frustrated fanatic like Jagget". She thinks about how Jagget was unable to adapt to his changed world, and while he calls Wechaus "his world", the people themselves have become strangers to him.
And suddenly Maggie understood. In his way, Gallen already was a Lord Protector. Back in Tihrglas, he'd planned to run for sheriff of County Morgan, and in a few years he'd have become the Lord Sheriff of all the counties. He'd been born to become the Lord Protector of Tihrglas.
Oh brother.
Also, since when. There were hints that Gallen had grander ambitions but they were never laid out. The Gallen we met was a bounty hunter. I mean, it makes sense, but I think more work could have been done to establish this.
That said, I do like how Gallen and Maggie decide that they'll find a world they can both live with, together.
It's a good moment, so of course this means we go back to pervert Veriasse's dreams. He's riding his airbike with Everynne beside him. They're desperate, but eventually he sees the white sun which fills him with hope. He wakes up.
Gallen and Maggie are calling. Gallen had fired his incendiary rifle in the air, hence the sun that Veriasse felt. And then, in another nice bit of gross imagery:
In the distance, something massive and black moved in the darkness, crawling over the plains, heaving its bloated body along like a gigantic tick. Veriasse could only see it by the lights at its battle stations, lights that glowed in the night like immense red eyes.
The chapter ends here. They've found their enemy.