n the end, it was impossible to think of Hammerfall as doofus. It's true that once in a while over the week it took to read this big first volume of a sequence whose ultimate dimensions remain, at time of writing, beyond mortal ken, a negative thought or two did well up through the exhaustion. But I kept on. After all, C.J. Cherryh, who has written at least 50 novels in an intensely active career, is no fool. If she wanted to ride Hammerfall all the way to the last page, a reviewer should trust her enough to follow, and to follow, and to follow, and I did. Call me Ishmael.
There certainly is a problem here. The deep exhaustion one feels after closing the last page of Hammerfall cannot have been an effect Cherryh failed to mean to engineer, for she is one of the most professional of all SF writers, and she must have known she was asking a great deal of her readers. If she applies the pared-down, unrelentingly forward-march idiom she has mastered to a book like Hammerfall, a book whose storyline is little more than an Idiot-Plot circumbendibus, a storyline which only exists because (inexplicably) telephones do not, then she must know readers will suspect that she is using all that hard-earned skill, which they have learned to trust, to take them for a ride. That narrative voice developed, at least in part, in order to control the baroque high-wire multilayered space-opera plotlines at the heart of the best novels in the Union-Alliance mega-sequence which has occupied most of her time for decades. What is it doing here? Why is C.J. Cherryh insisting so very competently on our paying attention to a vicious circle?
The action of Hammerfall takes place in a desert called the Lakht, on a planet seemingly colonized centuries earlier by humans whose genes are monitored and occasionally tweaked by nanoceles controlled at first by the tyrant who brought them here, and subsequently by his sort-of-immortal daughter, the Ila. She now rules the roost from the city of Oburan in the center of the Lakht, which is dominated by wandering tribes, who very much resemble Bedouin on Earth: phallocentric adolescents fixated by territory, procreation, patriarchy, honor, superba, spite. They ride camel-like creatures called beshti. Closer to the edge of the Bakht are villages, whose inhabitants are comparatively cowardly (or adult), and treat their women better.
Close Encounters with a new Dune
For 30 years now, a madness has been infecting these humans. They hear voices calling them eastward, they have visions of a hall of stars and a tower, and the planet seems to tilt under their feet at dawn and dusk. They feel compelled to follow their vision. It is a bit like Close Encounters of the Third Kind Meets Dune. Each of the various societies in the Lakht treats the victims of this compulsive madness identically: by driving them from their homes. Not one Lakhtian society thinks of them as worthy of care, or as seers. Finally, the Ila has begun to show interest in the growing plague, and has her guards gather victims from all corners of the land, and bring them, by force if necessary, to the central city. Our hero, Marak, has been disguising his madness for decades, but is finally found out by his patriarchal pa, who gives him over to the Ila's guards.
As the story opens, he is being driven across the desert toward Oburan, along with others of the afflicted. We are told a great deal about sand, the scarcity of water, the heat of the sun. They reach Oburan. The Ila interviews him. She has a translucent beauty. She commands Marak to lead a small expedition into the East, where the voice have been more and more urgently demanding he go, in order to find out what's going on.
He sets off, retracing his steps. We are told a great deal about sand, the scarcity of water, the heat of the sun, the habits of the beshti. He continues eastward, fighting the elements and winning. He reaches the tower which is his goal, and the goal of the two women who have become his wives. Here he finds two advanced humans, Ian and Luz, whose voices he has been hearing, and who have come down to the planet in order to attempt to save its inhabitants from the alien race which fears that the Ila's gene-shaping activities constitute a continuation of a long-ago war in which they (the other race) suffered deeply, and which, consequently, plans to devastate the planet by (I think) tossing big asteroids at it. In fact, lo!, they have already begun. There is no time to waste!
Marak must go all the way back to Oburan and tell the Ila the score, and persuade her to let her people go, through the desert, to the tower, where they will be safe from the hammerfall of asteroids. (It is at this point that the reader begins to wonder why Ian and Luz don't simply telephone Ila and tell her the jig is up. No satisfactory reason is given for their inability to use the technologies they must have to communicate with their target.) He sets off westward, retracing his steps, again. We are told a great deal about sand, the scarcity of water, the heat of the sun, the habits of the beshti, the danger of the shale which trips the unwary. He reaches Oburan, where all the tribes have foregathered, out of fear of the sky falling. He persuades the Ila that she must OK the trek of all the peoples eastward, across ground we the readers have already trod thrice.
Immortality is only the beginning
And all the folk begin to trek eastward. We are told a great deal about sand, the scarcity of water, the heat of the sun, the habits of the beshti, the danger of the shale which trips the unwary, the genes which heal, the sex that is good between man and wives, the storms which sting, the sand which blinds, the water which is bitter, the beshti who piss the water which is bitter, the vermin who haunt the spoor of all and sundry, bitter and sweet. The asteroid falls become more frequent. There is no time to waste!
Marak, who has learned to become a very great leader of the folk, gets most of them to safety. A great asteroid half-splits the planet in two, but the other race is then persuaded to lay off because Ian and Luz's "makers"--their own new brand of nanoceles--have neutralized Ila's makers, making it impossible for her nanoceles to start the war again. In a short final chapter, we learn that Marak and his wives have become immortal, in readiness for volume two.
It is a most extraordinary text. It walks in its own bitter water. It is told with all the intensity of an epic, with prose rhythms that evoke the Bible, with a strange wild-eyed earnestness. The whole of the book is told in a faux-naif bardic yawp that Cherryh seems almost to be uttering out of a conviction that she is telling us the truth. That the bone-wearying stepping in its own steps of Hammerfall's storyline is justified because it's true. The reviewer shuts up, abashed. He awaits the sequel. He has not solved Hammerfall, but he has finished it.
The New Testament better be something else.
