The Burning Heart of NightIvan Cat
DAW, 591 pages
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Pilot Lindal Karr is one of the few humans able to withstand fugue, the immune system of the vast living entities called fugueships. Instead
of falling into a comalike sleep, as most humans do, Karr simply slows down.
Passing a subjective day for every realtime year, he travels the universe
in symbiosis with his ship, seeding human colonies among the stars.
Sometimes, though, the seeded colonies don’t thrive--as on the ocean planet
of New Ascension, where the small human community lives in constant peril.
Initially judged a paradise, New Ascension hides a terrible secret:
Scourge, a deadly pathogen that infests all life-forms. The Khafra,
a native sentient species, are able to acquire a limited immunity through
a symbiotic exchange of immune venom. To obtain the venom, the humans
have forcibly domesticated the Khafra; but when Khafra bond with humans,
the immune exchange is one-sided, and the Khafra quickly die.
Jenette Tesla, rebellious daughter of New Ascension’s
leader, wants to find a better way, and she’s determined to contact the feral
Khafra--once friendly toward humankind, but now implacable foes--with an
offer of cooperation between the two species. But just as she’s putting
her plan in motion, Karr’s fugueship crashes into New Ascension’s ocean,
setting it ablaze. Karr, surviving, wants only to put out the fire
and save his ship. But for reasons no one really understands, the fugue
in his bloodstream is effective against Scourge, and the colonists see him as a potential savior--or
perhaps a sacrifice. As for Jenette, she believes
she’s found someone she can draft into her quest. These conflicting
agendas set in motion a chain of violent events that leadultimately to astonishing
discoveries about New Ascension and its ecology.
This
is classic space opera, with big gadgets, bizarre alien worlds, and adventure
on a cosmic scale. The storytelling is suspenseful, and the world building
interesting--I don’t know how much scientific sense it all makes, but it’s
certainly entertaining, and the various concepts (the biology of the fugueship,
the ecology of New Ascension, the pathology of Scourge) are credibly integrated
into the plot.
Cat creates sympathetic characters, both human and--especially--alien.
One of the book’s stronger elements is the portrayal of the Khafra,
whose intriguing culture is based on the pairs of their symbiotic immune-exchange
relationships, and whose mythology holds important truths about New Ascension
(the human colony, whose peculiar religious convictions and rigid social
structure aren’t adequately explained, is much less convincing). Cat
also does an effective job of contrasting the mindset of the domesticated
Khafra, who are conditioned to service, with that of the more sophisticated
ferals.
The novel is quite a bit longer than it needs to be, and some of the action
sequences feel gratuituous--especially a lengthy section at the book’s midpoint,
in which Jenette and Karr pay a visit to a long-abandoned colony site, and
endure a whole movie’s-worth of nasty perils and hairsbreadth escapes before
the plot gets underway again. Overall, though, it’s a solid read, and
I enjoyed it.
Copyright © 2002 Victoria Strauss
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