Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #172, January 2021)1 is set in the same series as the recently reviewed Sun from Both Sides (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019), features the same two characters, Eva and Dee, and takes place before, during, and after that story.
This one starts with a rather confusing prologue where Brother-Adita, Sister-Marcus and an Admiral track down a “shell” (a robot cum AI, I presume) and—when they unexpectedly find it is still active—the Admiral throws the other two out of the cave and brings the roof down on himself and the shell.
The rest of the story consists of three interwoven narrative threads titled “Now”, “Then”, and “Before”. The “Now” thread opens with Eva and Dee at home talking—or rather signing (again, for some reason, they mostly communicate this way even though they can speak and hear)—about a goat they have bought before it is suddenly turned into gore. Dee realises that one of Sister’s drones has tried to kill Eva (Sister is Eva’s AI twin), and the rest of this passage turns into a combat chase with Eva ending up partially injured and hiding on a riverbank. Dee eventually manages to save her, while Sister—who realises she has been hacked—shuts herself down.
After the couple get back to their house, Eva gets a message from her daughter on Kairi and find outs (after they travel to make a secure call now that Sister is disabled) that there has been a Consortium attack on Eva’s people, the Kairi Protectorate, and seven people have been killed. They also learn that this was accomplished by hacking into Sister and using her “kinnec”, a communication system.
The rest of this thread sees Eva travel home to learn that the Consortium has discovered that she destroyed one of their ship AIs (this event is described in the Sun from Both Sides) and that their attack was retaliation. Eva also ends up in a political fight with the rulers of the Protectorate about what should happen to Sister (Eva opposes their plans to reboot her as it is apparently equivalent to death, and something that has already happened to Sister before).
The second thread, “Then”, begins (confusingly as this opens immediately after Sister’s attack in the previous thread) with Eva in a crashed, partially submerged ship (Sister) with someone cutting her out. We later discover that person is Dee, and that this is how the pair met. The rest of this thread mostly focuses on her recovery and their developing relationship. Eva eventually learns (during a long heart-to-heart) that Dee is an exiled Grand Master of Valencia, while Dee learns she is a Primarch of the Kairi Protectorate.
The third “Before” thread is chronologically the earliest of them all, and recounts a previous battle with the Consortium at the Cuffie Protectorate which ended with Sister damaged and Eva executing a (spoiler) “Nightfall Protocol” that wipes Sister and kills a lot of the Consortium AIs.
These three threads eventually merge together as we see, among other things: Eva getting a dispensation to marry Dee; Eva mind-merging with Sister to sort out the virus problem; Eva vetoing war at the Kairi Parliament and opening negotiations with the Consortium; and the repatriation by the Consortium of the minds of the children they kidnapped. One these minds, Xandar, joins Sister in her ship at the end of the story after the AI has been cleared of the virus. Eva and Dee now have a kid.
I didn’t enjoy this story as much as Sun from Both Sides for several reasons: first, there is far too much plot here (see above), which makes it hard to keep up with what is going on—something compounded by having three stories running in different time periods; second, some of the description is unclear (e.g. the opening passage); third, there is no real climax to the story, but what feels like a series of negotiations instead; fourth, some parts of the story feel padded (the family get-togethers and the Eva getting to know Dee scenes dragged on and, while I’m talking about family matters, I’d suggest you don’t have far-future children call their mothers “Mom”, as that colloquialism catapulted this non-American reader right out of the story—as did a later “asshole”); fifth, the sign language is presented as italic text, which makes for a lot of tiring reading (and can also cause difficulties for those with dyslexia); sixth, and following on from the latter, if you are using masses of italics for speech why wouldn’t you use a bold typeface for the Now/Then/Before chapter headings and perhaps number and/or date them? Readers would then have a better idea of where they are in the chronology of events. I’d also add, with respect to chapter headings, that the “Philia”, “Eros”, “Storge”, “Agápe”, and “Pragma” ones seemed completely irrelevant to the story. I still don’t know how they fit in.
So, in conclusion, too (unnecessarily) complicated, too unclear (in places), and probably too long as well. This wasn’t bad but it was a bit of headscratcher and/or slog at times.
** (Average). 21,000 words. Story link.
1. This is a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia
Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019) opens with (for the first few pages anyway) a fairy tale-like beginning where “a woman loved a man, and a man loved a woman”. We see that Eva and Dee live in a forest, and watch their lovey-dovey domestic routine until husband Dee goes missing. Then Eva travels into the nearby town (which has a church belfry) to make enquiries, and sees that it has been largely laid to waste. Eva then learns that Dee has been taken by interplanetary slavers.
At this point the story becomes something else entirely, and we see Eva tap a command on her wrist and summon Sister (her AI “sister” spaceship) and its drones to search for Dee. The rest of the first part sees Eva track down the slavers and then fight a high tech battle with the AI captain of the Consortium ship, which she eventually wins (we learn during this that Eva is a fearsome Kairi Primarch). She retrieves her husband, and they fly home in Sister. Meanwhile, the evidence of the destroyed slaver ship is sent to another solar system.
This first quarter of the story eventually turns out to be a set-up for the remainder of the piece and, while this section is okay action/combat SF, it turns out to be a longer setup than is required for the next part of the story; I’d also add that the first four or so pages (the fairy tale/domestic part) are a little dull, and tonally dissonant when compared with the rest.
The final three-quarters of the story (which takes place some time later) is a different, and much superior, kettle of fish, and begins with a robot, a Valencian Knight, arriving with a summons for Dee. In the conversation that follows there is a lot of information imparted, but the gist of it is that Dee used to be Grandmaster Lucochin on the planet of Valencia, and the new Queen is demanding his presence at the Greatwood there. Although Dee tries to refuse the summons, he and Eva soon have a speck of Corewood implanted in them and fly up to Knight’s ship to travel home via the onboard Vineyard. (Sister covertly follows the pair after dropping them off there, but has to make her own way):
His wife squeezed his fingers to get his attention before signing, “Smells wonderful.”
“It’s the Vineyard,” he explained. “The ship is grown around it to infuse it with the vine’s atoms. It gets into every part of the vessel and flowers. Even when they’re not flowering, the mirror Vineyard on Valencia, or other ships, might be, so ships end up smelling like this all the time.”
They were in the corridors now. Petrified carbon curved under and around them, the same color as his wife’s startlingly light brown eyes, the whorls and rings rippling through the surface a testament to the ship’s advanced age.
This Vineyard was one of the massive fleet his people maintained to trade and lay seedlings in space to create Arbors, so that ships could travel ever further by navigating from one Arbor or Vineyard to another. No matter how far they explored, all other ships, seedlings, and Arbors, remained permanently entangled with Valencia and each other, allowing Valencians to travel vast distances in an instant and trade reliably with many other colonies.
The pair soon pass through the Vineyard portal and arrive on Valencia—almost immediately, Dee discovers that his Lucochin estate and all the people on it have been liquidated rather than taken over by one of the other houses (Dee served the former King, and his attempts to encourage democratic reform saw his lands confiscated and him exiled). The intrigue continues that night when the pair are gassed as they sleep, and Dee awakens to find that Eva has been taken hostage. Then, when Dee is taken to see the Queen, he discovers that she is his ex-wife. The Queen tells him there is a blight causing the Greatwoods and the Vineyards to die and, if he does not cure them, he and Eva will both be handed over to the Consortium slavers from the first section (who have subsequently discovered who destroyed their ship).
The description of the chess-based Valencian society in this part of the story is pretty well done (the ranks appear to go from Grandmaster down to Pawn, with the oppressed masses below the latter; the various characters often wear masks to hide their facial expressions; they complete “moves”, etc., etc.). Also well done is the Game of Thrones-like intrigue that takes place between the various houses. Another strength of the story is the Greatwood/Vineyard handwavium, and the hint that Valencia was originally settled by a generation spaceship full of “First Gardeners”.
Indeed, one of the best parts of the story involves Dee entering the Greatwood to discover why it is dying:
The Greatwood’s iridescence dimmed to a shifting, multicolored glow as he exited the transport and four Knights surrounded him. He was marched alongside the Queen into the low-hanging needle-leaves that spun and glinted in the wind, until they reached the Barrier, which kept all but the Grandmasters from entering. A cylindrical drone swept over to verify his seedling, then retreated to its charging station somewhere beyond the Barrier. He walked into the heart of the Greatwood, sensing the Queen’s unwavering gaze on his back. At the transport hub a short distance from the Barrier, he got into one of the small carts and let it take him on its pre-programmed route to the Coretrees. The sweet, musky perfume of the flowering vines draped on the trees surrounded him like a blanket, but for the first time, he caught the dank scent of rot underneath it all. Purple, red, golden, and green seedpods peeped between the branches, but many were shriveled and blackened, and heaps of spoiled pods had burst open on the ground. He heard the rustling of small animals in the undergrowth, but sobered by what he’d seen, he focused on clearing his mind for the task ahead.
The enormous stand of Coretrees rose out of the deep forest like a monolith, entwined trunks and quantum vines woven together into one massive, flowering, windblown, pulsing glare that forced his mask to its maximum setting. But there were also large dark areas within the Coretrees, where saplings had faded and died. More than ever before.
As the cart halted, a vibration prickled his skin, and heat blasted him. He made his way to the nearest annex in the group of hollowed-out beds at the roots of the Coretrees. He lay down, heart hammering in his chest at the thought of what he was about to do, adrenaline making his fingers shake as he wrapped a Corevine around the hand implanted with the seedling. The needle-leaves sank into his arm, tiny stinging points.
Instantly, he was weightless, his body free of pain and filled with the euphoria of the joining. His mind squeezed with energy and impressions, even as it grew to include every scrabbling life in the Greatwood, every vine curtain on every Vineyard ship, every needleleaf that draped over his paralyzed body, every quark in every Arbor floating in the silent dark.
The climax of the story (spoiler) later takes place at a meeting of Grandmasters where Dee manages to instigate a coup by telling the various Houses that he is the only one who can repair the Greatwood and maintain their space-wide Empire. He also tells them the masses must be enfranchised.
(If I recall correctly, the problem with the Greatwood has something to do with exchanges that he and the previous King had with the sentient trees that comprise it—something about feeding them emotion rather than logic and puzzles, although there is also a reference to problems that Dee left unfixed before his exile. Whatever the explanation was, it wasn’t particularly convincing.)
The story ends with Dee meeting Sister, who has been quietly subverting various AI systems and ships to get to the planet and rescue Eva. They collect her and go home.
This is a bit of a mixed bag to be honest, but the best of it, which is very good in parts, outweighs its flaws. It also struck me that this writer has more in common with previous generations of SF writers than current ones—there are flashes of C. L. Moore here, the sensory stuff about the Vineyards; Jack Vance, the odd and complex Valencian society; and Iain M. Banks—the AI/robot superbeings, and Dee’s “free the masses” politics. The story is also quite heavily plotted, and Garcia’s storytelling is largely brisk and clear (clearer than I’ve been above, I fear, but there is a lot going on in the story and I read it a couple of weeks ago).
A writer to watch, I think.
*** (Good). 16,450 words. Story link.