lena Irinovna was once a scientist working on the Soviet space program. Now she is as obsolescent as her country, making ends meet as a janitorial worker in a Kazakhstan where ethnic Russians—even those who have lived in the area for generations—are increasingly unwelcome. A stranger in her own homeland, she saves every scrap of money she can earn, dreaming of a far-off day when she and her family can escape, first to Moscow and then to Canada.
The quest for cash draws Elena into a trip to Uzbekistan to sell black-market jeans, and along the way she finds a small black sphere with peculiar physical properties. Ever the scientist, she struggles to unlock its mysteries, but the sphere stubbornly resists analysis. Not surprisingly, there are several factions of people who know what the object is, and some of them want it badly enough to commit murder for its sake. Elena is soon on the run not only from the ordinary but terrifying security forces of the Kazakh regime, but also from the rusalki, mythical water-nymphs said by some to be the spirits of drowned girls.
Another of her hunters is a legend in his own right, an immortal warrior named Ilya Muromyets who took on the job of finding Elena's cryptic bauble in the hope that his employers would have the means to end his life. A true hero, however, Ilya cannot allow Elena to come to harm, and his role shifts quickly from seeker to protector. Ilya is in a remarkably delicate state for someone who cannot die, however, and the forces seeking the sphere have the resources of two worlds to bring to bear on their pursuit of the pair. Outmatched and with barely a shred of a plan, the two must flee over the inhospitable terrain of Central Asia.
A surreal chase over a landscape of dreams
Liz Williams may be one of the most sheerly evocative writers working in SF today, and in Nine Layers of Sky she brings the landscape of modern-day Central Asia into sharp focus. Its paradoxes are vividly portrayed, in all their beauty and corresponding ugliness. Elena believed in communism and particularly in putting humans into space, and the erasure of her chosen life path has affected every other front of her existence: She is a citizen of a country that has vanished from the world, she has an education and skills nobody wants, her personal life is deteriorating. Though the novel's attention is keenly concentrated on this character, Williams deftly makes it obvious that Elena's distress is not unique—that an entire people is bleeding in the same painful way.
The development of the relationship between Elena and the frail but sensitive Ilya is portrayed as one beset by doubts from both participants. Drawn to each other but having lost so much, both fear to place their hopes in anything, even as commonplace an ideal as romance. Both must reach past their rational concerns as they run from the strange entities who pursue them; each must learn to put some faith in dreams again. Nine Layers of Sky is all about dreams, in fact, individual and collective ones—the idealism at the root of communism, humanity's ardent desire to touch the stars, the conflicting national aspirations of the different peoples who inhabit Central Asia.
Despite its apparent trappings of fantasy, this book is pure science fiction, a dream in its own right and intriguing in both its cultural speculation and the depth of the empathy it will arouse in readers for its principal characters. A journey through the heart of a terrain both worldly and unfamiliar to Western readers, Nine Layers of Sky is not to be missed.
