No matter how hard some among us strive to live lives of honesty and integrity, there is, for all of us, a vast gulf between our public and private faces. The former, the facade we show to the outside world, is the best representation of ourselves, a moderated distillation of personality and attitude designed to help us fit into the world we know. The latter, the gestalt of our deepest thoughts and emotions, is the naked visage of our true selves that we dare not expose. For to do so would be to reveal our dreams and our fantasies, our pettinesses and our grudges, to not only those dearest to us, but the world at large. Why are these two faces so different? Is it healthy to have this private space in which we may grapple secretly with demons endemic to our species? Or would we all be better off in a world where our innermost thoughts were broadcast to everyone around us, compelling us to adhere more closely to the ideal espoused by our public faces? Mr. Brown's darkly entertaining trilogy speculates.
In the 22nd century, on an over-populated Earth riven by political, economic and ideological feuds, Bengal Station is a microcosm of human society. Perched on the Bay of Bengal, the station's 20 levels are home to 25-million souls who range from the corpulently affluent to the hopelessly impoverished. The former, inhabitants of the station's uppermost levels, enjoy fine dining on spacious decks which have been tricked out with colorful parks and sunsplashed courtyards. The latter slave away belowdecks, in a heavily industrialized warren of factories that generate most of the station's economic output. Down here, the rights and freedoms of citizens are as fleeting as the sun which never penetrates this humid and overheated gloom.
The station is an interstellar port of call, a sleepless hub of activity that is a world unto itself. Consequently, it has its own politics, its own hierarchy and its own crime which takes on any of countless guises. To keep ahead of the curve, the station employs telepaths to protect its interests. These psy-sensitive humans have been augmented with neural rigs that that enhance their psychic talents, transforming them into empaths and mindreaders who can fish from the minds of the guilty the darkest of intentions. The only check against their powers are the silvery mindshields, discs which, when worn close to the body, sheathe the wearer's mind in a cloak of impenetrable static.
In Necropath we meet one such telepath, Jeff Vaughan, a middle-aged Canadian scarred by a dark past and burdened by a grim and endless present. Years of submerging himself in the minds of the cruel and the hateful,searching for ill intentions towards the station and its personnel, have worn him down, leaving him a cynical ruin of a man who softens his pains with drugs, booze and Tiger, a sweet-hearted orphan who is part of a crew of beggars working the station.
Vaughan, whose painful past compels him to keep a certain distance between himself and the beggar girl, is shattered when Tiger overdoses on a powerful, offworld drug that promises communion with the divine. Motivated by guilt and vengeance, Vaughan allies himself with a sympathetic station cop who can help him find the source of this drug and the madness that spawned it. Together, the two men attack the mystery, discovering that a cruel and alien conspiracy lies at its vicious heart and that there may be precious little either of them can do to stop it.
In Xenopath, the tone of the trilogy takes a distinct turn for the positive. Jeff Vaughan is free of his crippling burdens. Not only is he no longer a telepath -- his rig having been destroyed by a ghost from his past --, he is in love with a young woman pregnant with their first child. Sure, the loss of his telepathic talents has reduced him to blue-collar work refuelling starships, a difficult job for poor pay. But not even this labor can mar his newfound joy at being free of both his talent and his past.
No sooner has he gotten used to the absence of the innermost thoughts of others then an old colleague comes calling with a job offer. A private investigator, she wants Vaughan to join her agency which is paid handsomely by the station police to solve crimes beyond the talents of its overworked personnel. Vaughan is reluctant, knowing that signing on with the agency will necessitate an operation to restore his telepathic talent, without which he's useless as an investigator. However, the lure of extraordinary pay, which would set his family up for life, compels him to agree to both job and operation which has barely been completed by the time his first case begins. Scientists are being murdered on the station. Vaughan doesn't have to dig far to discover that they worked together on a newly colonized world which contains immense promise for Earth's mining concerns. How far are these companies willing to go to preserve their newfound profits? Are they capable of descending to murder to keep their dirty secrets out of the light of day? Jeff Vaughan must discover the truth quickly if he's to prevent the death of something sacred and pure.
Cosmopath, the trilogy's final instalment, finds Vaughan a happy husband and a proud father. Basking in the solace his family provides him, a solace that helps to bottle up the darkness of his past, he is rocked when his youngest daughter contracts cancer, the cure for which is expensive beyond his considerable pay. Just as Vaughan is coming to grips with this cruel turn, he is approached by a business tycoon intent upon exploring the disappearance of one of his company ships. He has, in cold storage, an engineer from the doomed mission, frozen at the moment of her death. If Vaughan will travel with him and consent to read the thoughts contained in the woman's dying brain, the tycoon will arrange for Vaughan's daughter to be treated by the finest doctors. Backed into a corner, Vaughan agrees to the proposal, but what he finds on the distant world rocks him to his core. For the tycoon, in his arrogance, is tampering with alien forces far more powerful than he can comprehend. Teamed up with another telepath, who also happens to be the tycoon's lover, Vaughan tries to find both the truth and the proper outcome to a mystery made alluring by greed and the lust for power.
The Bengal Station Trilogy is imaginative science fiction. Mr. Brown's 22nd century world, dominated by fractiousness, economic inequality and Asian power is as fascinating as it is convincing. The universe is populated with alien races, many of which are millions of years ahead of relatively rustic humanity, a species just beginning to extend its influence to distant stars. This expansion is viewed with a kind of stoic skepticism by the other races who know full well that humans have not yet overcome the fundamental flaws that have plagued them for centuries. Consequently, they are wary of this human Diaspora which will inevitably lead to conflict.
Just as Mr. Brown uses the aliens in his trilogy to highlight the flaws in humanity's character, he deploys his cynical, telepathic protagonist to do the same for human institutions. Jeff Vaughan has spent his life being pulled by one government or another into schemes that pit the powerful against the disenfranchised. A lifetime of these manipulations have compelled him to reject all political and ideological affiliations. He identifies himself as a human, a husband, and a father, a man who lives for the love of his family. For these are the only things over which he has total control. He knows they are pure because they play out before him, around him, every day. To agree to be part of institutions is to subject oneself to the corruptible moralities of others who consider themselves superior. In this, Vaughan is a glimpse into our future, one in which the fatal flaws of large institutions are recognized, allowing us to rejected them for lives that we can control.
Beyond the species and institutional critiques, Mr. Brown's trilogy holds up modestly. The mysteries here are uncomplicated knots that the observant or experienced reader will have untangled before too many pages have been turned. What's more, Mr. Brown reserves the right to change the powers and the properties of the technology in his stories to best suit the plot. On most occasions, this passes without annoyance, but in the case of the story's mindshields, his inconsistency irritates. These are not stories that will be welcomed by fans of hard SF, but they will certainly be cherished by fans of science fiction in which the fiction dominates the science.
Commendably entertaining work. Nothing revelatory here, but Vaughan's personal evolution, along with a colorful and gritty world, keeps the reader engaged throughout. (3/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment