here are many ways to describe an angel—the inexplicable subatomic
output of a black hole called Angelmass—but there is only one way to describe its
effect. Those who stay in contact with an angel start doing what's morally
right, even if they never have before. The Empyrean, a group of ex-Earth
colonies near Angelmass, believes it has found nothing less than an elemental
particle of good. Over the past two decades, it's equipped all its leaders
with angels, ushering in a new age of peace and a new economy based on angel
harvesting.
The nearby Pax empire doesn't like it. Aggressive and acquisitive, the
Pax—driven by a shadow government of bean-counting Adjutors—calls the
angels an alien invasion by mind control and moves to take over the Empyrean
for its own good. The broad Pax strategy includes secreting Kosta, a young
scientist hurriedly trained in espionage, inside the Empyrean's Angelmass
Institute. Kosta's mission is to learn as much as possible about the virtue-spewing
black hole while an impossibly massive Pax starship locates the
chink in the Empyrean's defenses.
En route, Kosta encounters a teen-age grifter named Chandris, who's hoping
for the impossible score: stealing an angel to sell on the black market.
Quickly established among his fellow scientists, Kosta stumbles across
surprising evidence that Angelmass's output is increasing. His findings
don't fit the plans of High Senator Forsythe, a maverick who fears the
angels' mollifying influence. Forsythe quashes Kosta's research, forcing him
to gather data the only way he can—aboard an angel-hunting ship bound for
Angelmass. To their mutual dismay, it's the same ship onto which Chandris had already
wormed her way.
Their lives twisted together by fast-moving events, Kosta, Chandris and
Forsythe must face the true nature of Angelmass, the spectacular Pax
invasion and their own mutual distrust.
A philosophical page-turner
Some of the best science fiction comes from the marriage of a simple,
inspired idea and a dedication to extrapolating the social, political,
economic, military and (yes) scientific effects this idea would have on
people who look a lot like us. Niven and Pournelle, for example, have
excelled at this in novels like The Mote in God's Eye. The trick
seems to be developing archetypical, empty-vessel characters that refract
their societies like prisms, without reducing these characters to ciphers.
Angelmass achieves this goal. Through Chandris, Kosta, Forsythe
and others, a carefully imagined societal interplay is uncovered through characters that are complex, engrossing and
unpredictable.
Kosta, the tenderfoot scientist-spy, is our ambassador to
Angelmass. He's been subjected to both Empyrean and Pax propaganda, and now
he's stumbling on new data about Angelmass that skewers all existing theory.
He never knows what to believe, which propels the suspense about the novel's
central mysteries: What is Angelmass, and what do angels really do?
Chandris—smart, scared and scrappy—is an intriguing tide pool of emotions
and vulnerabilities, and if her mentally disturbed ex is little more than a
transparent plot device, that's not her fault, is it?
Forsythe represents the undercurrent of doubt that
accompanies all such spiraling movements: the dissent that dare not speak
its name. As Forsythe acts unilaterally to defend an Empyrean ruled by
angel-complacent colleagues, he shivers with the loneliness of his position
and, like Kosta, with the fear that he might be the one that's got it
all wrong. The neglect that non-angel elements of the economy have suffered
is symbolized by the deteriorating city of Magasca rather than thoroughly
explored.
Angelmass could have been the pretext for a much heavier investigation of
good and evil, but Zahn has spun a richly layered page-turner spiced with
interesting people, sharp turns and a few meaningful glares.
