James Nicoll Reviews

C. J. Cherryh’s Port Eternity is a stand-alone science fiction novel set in her Alliance/Union milieu. Port Eternity is also an Arthurian novel… in a sense.

Wealthy beyond reason, Lady Dela Kirn whimsically travels from world to world in her lavish starship Maid of Astolat. A luxury craft demands a crew of exceptional quality. Thus, the Lady Dela Kern purchased azi¹ servants designed and conditioned to serve faithfully. These she named after characters in her favourite tales: Elaine, Gawain, Lancelot, Lynette, Mordred, Percivale, and Vivien.

Having seen Lady Dela Kern through many passing love affairs, the crew believes they know the path Lady Dela’s current infatuation will take. But the azi are wrong. They have no idea that the Maid​’s next voyage will be its last.

This is the only Cherryh I can recall with a personal luxury starship.

Lady Dela Kern may be whimsical, but she is also extremely predictable. Each new love affair is doomed the moment it begins. Eventually, Lady Dela Kern becomes bored or dissatisfied with her current beau. She discards the now unwanted lover and returns to the arms of faithful sex slave Lancelot for as long as it takes to find her next paramour.

This familiar pattern is disrupted when Lady Dela Kern takes up with Griffin. Lady Dela Kern shows no sign of tiring of Griffin. Worse, Lady Dela Kern talks of merging her vast business interests with Griffin’s.

This is an alarming development for the azi. Lady Dela Kern might abandon her peripatetic ways. If she does, she might sell the Maid. The crew would be sold as well, save for Lancelot. The crew would be reconditioned into new people, with the exception of Lancelot, who, being nearly forty, would be euthanized.

A deep-space encounter renders azi concerns irrelevant. The Maid is caught in the wake of a passing anomaly. Dragged out of familiar time and space, the Maid and its inhabitants are marooned in an unfamiliar realm. They will never return home.

Alarmingly, they realize they are adjacent to a vast alien structure. Far more alarmingly, the knocking sounds on the hull show someone or something wants in.

~oOo~[1]

I cannot be the only person who read this novel and thought ​“Wait, are those knnn?”

There’s an odd-seeming detail early on. Lady Dela Kern began longevity treatments when she was still young. Sterility is a side-effect of Rejuv. Therefore, Lady Dela Kern will never have children… except this setting has biotech in spades. Why not roll out whatever Union calls uterine replicators to crank out as many heirs as Lady Dela Kern needs?

The answer may involve azi². No oligarch would want their children to be confused with their commodified, expendable slaves. Therefore, even though the technology exists to circumvent Rejuv sterility, no naturally born person would use it.

Port Eternity is unusual in that the entire story is told from Elaine’s perspective, which is to say from the azi point of view. Elaine (or 68767−876−998, which she considers her true name) paints a vivid portrait of how awful life is for the azi: raised and conditioned on farms, sold at sixteen, put to whatever purpose their owner sees fit, and euthanized at forty. Their creators take pains to ensure their obedience, but not happiness with their lot. Azi spend their short lives stressed and afraid.

Fucking Ariane Emory. She was Union’s answer to Thomas Midgley Jr., someone whose highly profitable technological innovations produced spectacular misery³. It would be nice to think that Union is fated to be graced with a Sherman marching through Georgia moment, but I think the established continuity rules that out.

Some sources call this a romance, which it is in the sense of being ​“a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents”⁴. In the sense of a tale of affection between two people, that’s not so clear. Can people like Lady Dela Kern and Griffin feel genuine affection? Does azi conditioning render attraction meaningless?

One can make a much stronger case for the novel being horror. Not the scenes with things knocking on the hull. Rather, the miserable lives doled out to azi, and the futility of hope for anyone born azi. That’s most definitely horrific. Getting eaten by space monsters might be an improvement.

Port Eternity is available as part of the Alternate Realities omnibus here (DAW), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

I did not find Alternate Realities at Bookshop UK or Words Worth Books.

The omnibus includes commentary on the three novels. Notable: the freedom Donald Wollheim gave Cherryh to flex her creativity, to write novels that might not be overwhelmingly successful in purely commercial terms, but which were successful in other ways.

1: The word azi appears nowhere in the book, but anyone familiar with Cherryh will recognize azi when they see azi.

2: Not to mention the disappointing discovery that clones are only as similar to their originals as are identical twins. That is to say, there are differences.

3: USA delenda est.

4: Sir Walter Scott, Essay on Romance, 1824.