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Eternity Row: |
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uthlessly hunted by slavers who want the secret of her near-indestructibility, Dr. Cherijo Torin and her husband Duncan have long enjoyed the protection of the warlike Jorenians and their powerful starship. But the equation is changing. First, the captain announced combat training for everyone—even Cherijo's two-year-old daughter. Then a suspicious new psych resident started skulking around Cherijo, apparently with the captain's blessing. Even her husband has been distant and moody.
As they cruise toward their destinations, Cherijo's alien friends start having competing crises. Her lonely boss, the Senior Healer, has sent for a mail-order bride, who turns out to be an insufferable, imperious harpy. A pilot is denying he could have impregnated his girlfriend—because all his race is sterile. Meanwhile, the girlfriend has instigated a fight to the death with a Jorenian twice her size.
As Cherijo is juggling her friends' problems, they arrive at the first of the three planets—the homeworld of her winged friend Hawk. Unfortunately, the inhabitants turn out to be religious fanatics who believe themselves to be the scourges of their sadistic god. Reviled as polluters, the good doctor and her shipmates narrowly escape with their lives. Mysteriously, Hawk returns in a state of severe, untreatable paranoia.
The visit to the second planet, the home of the sterile pilot, is even more disastrous. Researching the inhabitants' acquired incapacity, Cherijo discovers both a secret underlying condition and their treatment, which is worse than the disease. She agonizes over how to relieve their suffering, but her brooding is cut short. When the inhabitants sell them into slavery in exchange for medicine, Cherijo and the others must effect another hair's-breadth escape.
Their last stop is the homeworld of Cherijo's hated alien mother, Maggie. After invading Cherijo's thoughts for years, Maggie finally unspools the plans she's laid out for her daughter. As Cherijo takes on the impossible cures of her two friends and their anguished planets, she must also face the consequences of the path Maggie has placed before her.
A healing hand and an acid tongue
It didn't seem possible, but Cherijo Torin has become even more sarcastic than she was in her previous four novels. Apparently, she's narrowed her communication repertoire down to the Snide Retort, the Loaded Question and the Bitter Torrent of Abuse. Maybe being hunted by slavers will do that to a gal, but it gets darned annoying.
There's a telling moment halfway through Eternity Row. The regulars are all on Hawk's home planet, and things aren't going well. The visitors are taken to a temple, where they're all required to remain silent while the escorts explain what's expected of outworlders. Cherijo manages to keep her mouth shut for over half a page before precipitating the crisis which, but for a deus ex machina, would've gotten all their heads bashed in.
Cherijo's constant hail of smart remarks seems born of a personal sense of moral and physical superiority. It's her way of talking down to everyone. There are a few moments where Cherijo and Duncan come close to addressing this—their trust issues are a running subplot—but not enough to make her a complex, fully realized human being.
The chunky storyline does little to shed light on anyone. The plot is framed as a series of discrete episodes, islands unto themselves. Meanwhile, the guest stars—and even the supporting cast—mostly emerge as sketchy as they were at first meeting.
The fundamental issues faced in Eternity Row's climax involve classic science-fiction questions of medical ethics. Cherijo understands her dilemma and jousts with it creditably. If Eternity Row had led up to this point, rather than just arriving at it, and if Cherijo hadn't spent the novel tearing everyone else down, it would have been easier to care.
The wisecracking doctor has become a common stock character, but didn't doctors use to be different—paternal and genial? Perhaps the prevalence of Hawkeye Pierce and Leonard McCoy in nonstop reruns has led us to expect our doctors to have a jaundiced eye as well as a bleeding heart. — Mark
Also in this issue: Metal of Night, by Mark W. Tiedemann
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