unning from her evil brother, the tyrant of the small space station where our protagonist has spent her whole life, young Rue Cassels manages to secure the station's lone ship and blast off into adventure. Her sights are limited at first to establishing herself on some world of the struggling Cycler Compact, the community of settlements that rely on the numerous guttering brown dwarf stars of our galaxy to provide heat and light. Rue will take any old menial job, so long as she can be free to manage her own life. But she has not reckoned with making a crucial discovery along her unfrequented flight path. Rue's ship announces that it has detected an unclaimed derelict. Rue gets salvage rights, and is suddenly rich—in theory.
Arriving on the planet Erythrion, Rue is immediately swept up in intrigues. Her heretofore silent relatives on Erythrion are eager to befriend her. These include a cousin, Max, whose motives could be interpreted as either altruistic or shifty. But the powers-that-be do not intend to let Rue keep her prize, and she seems to be doomed to a life of insignificant poverty. But a new twist arises: Experts learn from afar that the ship is not of human manufacture, but an alien artifact, seemingly from an ancient extinct race, the Lasa.
Rue's rights to the ship—named Jentry's Envy—are restored, but the stakes involved ratchet higher. Allying herself finally with Max, Rue and her hastily assembled crew manage to make a visit to the Lasa ship. But after a cursory survey, its enormity confounds them, and they are forced to enter into an agreement with the military. Headed by Admiral Crisler, a joint expedition—which includes a neo-Shintoist scientist-monk named Michael Bequith, a follower of the philosophy dubbed "Permanence"—returns to the Jentry's Envy and learns much more about the strange craft. In fact, its contemporary point of origin is discovered, a twin-star system where the fate of the Cycler Compact and its rival, the Rights Economy of the "lit stars," will be decided.
Treachery erupts during some downtime on the planet Oculus, and Rue is seemingly cut out of the contest for the ship and its legacy. But once the Cycler Compact realizes the real implications of the struggle—Crisler intends to reactivate an old weapon that once wiped the galaxy clean of sentience—Rue gets their backing and rejoins the fray. Around the brown dwarves known as Apophis and Osiris, where an ancient factory of the Lasa is still running, a last-ditch battle will take place.
An exciting romp worthy of Heinlein
Permanence possesses a much more straightforward plot, a less recomplicated set of issues and a more down-to-earth set of characters than
Karl Schroeder's first novel, Ventus (2000). Although not a young-adult novel in any but the most peripheral sense of that term (the age of the heroine and the typical trials attending the transition to maturity she faces), the book does feel at times like one of Heinlein's classic juveniles or one of John Varley's Nine Worlds romps, at least in contrast to Ventus. But this is not to say that there is not an incredible amount of excitement and intellectual riches in its pages.
First comes the notion of "Permanence: the creation and maintenance of a human civilization that could last a million years." This philosophy and the quest it engenders permeate the book, most explicitly in the character of Bequith, a man torn between his spiritual-scientific impulses and his hatred of the galaxy's oppressors. In opposition to Permanence is the Rights Economy, a lunatic extrapolation of capitalism worthy of Ken MacLeod. In the R.E. worlds, every single object is marked with nanotags that allow a complex system of payments and charges to snake through every moment of living. Even giving religious counsel is a taxable service!
A second set of themes revolves around FTL versus slower-than-light travel. The R.E. is linked by FTL ships, while the Cycler Compact relies on sublight connections. As interstellar archaeologists such as Bequith's boss, Dr. Herat, learn more about the rise and fall of galactic civilizations, these theoretical quibbles take on important new meanings. Additionally, a puzzling lack of contemporary aliens who can share humanity's peculiar worldview needs to be explained. And finally, the good old puzzles of "first contact" get a workout in the manner of Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1973).
But affairs of the heart and soul are hardly neglected among the intellectual turmoil. Rue herself, onstage for most of the book, is a charming heroine who undergoes real changes over the years of action which the book encompasses. Her love affair with Bequith is a subtle entanglement and simultaneous disengagement, as neither one really knows what drives them. And all the supporting players are nicely developed as well, although one, the reporter Blair Genereaux, after some prominence in the early pages is more or less discarded.
If I have any complaint about this superb book, it's only that it feels a trifle too long. I'm hard pressed to nominate passages for cutting, but I still have the feeling that it would have soared even higher after losing the weight of about 100 pages. But Schroeder's enthusiasm for his world and characters, as well as his fecund sense of invention, carry us over any longueurs.
