here is an old story, from the middle years of this century of
science fiction. It was by Nelson S. Bond, one of the very few SF authors
still alive whose careers began before World War II. I do not remember
the name of the story, though it may have been called "The Egg," and it
probably appeared in Blue Book Magazine in the 1940s, where I probably read it for the first time.
All I remember of the story is a central image, of a scientist on
Earth, probably an astronomer, who sees through his telescope a great bird
in space, flapping inwards from the interstellar vacancy. It is much
larger than Earth, which the scientist realizes is in fact an egg, which
the bird had laid aeons ago. The bird is returning to hatch the egg.
It is no dishonor to Sheri S. Tepper's ingenuity to say that Six
Moon Dance--60 years on, and almost infinitely more complicated in the telling--is perhaps the ultimate Shaggy Egg story. It goes about as
far as it can go and remain SF. It is the end of the Shaggy Egg story for
this century.
It is also, of course, much, much more.
We are in Sherri S. Tepper's usual sort of universe. There are a
lot of inhabited stars. There is an Old Earth which has--in this tale
almost benevolently--somehow survived the bad years, a period which began
yesterday, and during the course of which almost all life on the planet
has been destroyed or mutilated by a species (us) made up of powerful,
self-righteous, self-deluding "beings who would willingly destroy the
common good for private gain." There is faster-than-light travel; a backdrop of other
species; a concordat of worlds (here called the Council of Worlds); and a
sense of wonder. It is an arena. It does its job.
A mysterious disappearance
Two waves of humans have settled on the planet Newholme. The
first wave has mysteriously disappeared. The second wave has shaped
itself into a matriarchal society that works, partly because a
mysterious virus makes girl babies scarce. Men are allowed to follow
their obtuse and tongue-tied daemons, their business lives and their
agons and their boys' clubs; but women are also allowed what they need: a
companionate environment, enjoyable sex, and mutual sustenance (which does not exclude males) throughout life.
Like a card sharp, Tepper gives us this society with enough
entrancing detail to fool the eye.
But there is something very wrong. Most of the menial work on
Newholme is done by the "invisibles," an indigenous species (as it seems)
whose very existence is so shameful to humans that, through an act of
collective hysterical blindness, they deny their existence.
The Council of Worlds (or COW) enforces ethical standards--an
adroitly argued interaction between liberty and civility--through the
human-inhabited galaxy. Its main tool of enforcement is a plenipotentiary
device called the Questioner, which has the authority to terminate human
populations in severe breach of standards.
The Questioner has its suspicions roused, and comes to Newholme.
And from this point Tepper begins to juggle mercilessly with the
expectations she has aroused in her readers. The Men of Business (or
MOB), a boy's club for grown men that supervises male enterprises, may
remain a comic turn no matter how many times the cards of story are
shuffled; but nothing else can be trusted.
Preservers of culture
The Hags who run the Hagion, which governs Newholme, are
ridiculous, arrogant, peremptory; but the seeming viciousness of the
social engineering enterprise they run in secret has, in the end,
implications far more benevolent than we could have expected. The Consort Houses, which train otherwise supernumerary males to become consorts of wives who have done their breeding, turn out to be preservers of culture.
And the "invisibles" are not what they seem, either. They are not
indigenes, or not exactly. Their relationship to the sentient world-net
which precedes all other life on Newholme is unutterably complex; as is
their fomenting relationship to the human invaders whose weird individual
behaviour so excites the world-mind that it has made Newholme into a kind
of covert Xanadu where humans and invisibles may disport themselves.
But the humans are ignorant of this, and the Questioner
must--with the aid of a carefully introduced cast of companions--work out
the mysteries.
The greatest of these mysteries is the huge increase in tectonic
activity on Newholme, spasms of volcanic activity accompanied by profound
emanations of anguish, which some of the cast can literally hear, booming
from beneath the roots of the mountains.
Is this anguish the anguish of the six-mooned planet itself?
Is it the anguish of an egg about to hatch?
Not quite.
To work out what "not quite" exactly means takes up most of the
454 pages of Six Moon Dance, a long book whose longueurs (though they
exist) are few.
A sharp-tongued para-feminist
Over the past decade or so, Tepper has developed into an
extremely sharp-tongued para-feminist, one whose thrusts of thought about
gender in particular and homo sapiens in general and the fate of our
planet overall have sometimes suffered procrustean simplification as they
get squashed into stories of infernal elegance.
But story does not dictate well. And some of Tepper's earlier
novels have lost their elegance before they closed, have died from
arguments too dryly insisted upon.
One might call this Tract Drought.
In Six Moon Dance, there is a kind of compromise between
thought and story. The thoughts are there, laid down in lacquered probes;
and the story is allowed to run with them.
At points, it runs away with them.
But there's no Tract Drought. No death of story.
Where Six Moon Dance goes--what happens to the Shaggy Egg at
its heart, what neat twists and consonances of story will be unpacked--it
will be the reader's pleasure to discover.
But find a comfy place to sit.
This time, the card-sharp has a lot to tell us.
And she does not miss a trick.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, co-editor of the Hugo winning Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and one of the co-founders of the Hugo winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Encyclopedia of Fantasy--which he co-edited with John Grant--is nominated for the 1998 Hugo Award.
