- Smith, L. Neil.
Blade of p'Na.
Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-61242-218-3.
-
This novel is set in the “Elders” universe,
originally introduced in the 1990 novels Contact and
Commune and Converse and Conflict, and now
collected in an omnibus edition with additional material,
Forge of the Elders. Around
four hundred million years ago the Elders, giant mollusc-like
aquatic creatures with shells the size of automobiles, conquered
aging, and since then none has died except due to accident or
violence. And precious few have succumbed to those causes:
accident because the big squid are famously risk averse, and
violence because, after a societal adolescence in which they
tried and rejected many political and economic bad ideas, they
settled on p'Na as the central doctrine of their
civilisation: the principle that nobody has the right to
initiate physical force against anybody else for any
reason—much like the
Principle
of Non-Aggression, don't you know.
On those rare occasions order is disturbed, the services of a
p'Nan “debt assessor” are required. Trained in the
philosophy of p'Na, martial arts, psychology, and burnished
through a long apprenticeship, assessors are called in either
after an event in which force has been initiated or by those
contemplating a course which might step over the line. The
assessor has sole discretion in determining culpability, the
form and magnitude of restitution due, and when no other
restitution is possible, enforcing the ultimate penalty on the
guilty. The assessor's sword, the Blade of p'Na, is not just a
badge of office but the means of restitution in such cases.
The Elders live on one of a multitude, possibly infinite,
parallel Earths in a multiverse where each planet's history has
diverged due to contingent events in its past. Some millennia
after adopting p'Na, they discovered the means of observing,
then moving among these different universes and their variant
Earths. Some millennia after achieving biological immortality
and peace through p'Na, their curiosity and desire for novelty
prompted them to begin collecting beings from across the
multiverse. Some were rescues of endangered species, while
others would be more accurately described as abductions. They
referred to this with the euphemism of
“appropriation”, as if that made any difference.
The new arrivals: insectoid, aquatic, reptilian, mammalian,
avian, and even sentient plants, mostly seemed happy in their
new world, where the Elders managed to create the most diverse
and peaceful society known in the universe.
This went on for a million years or so until, just like the
revulsion against slavery in the 19th century in our timeline,
somesquid happened to notice that the practice violated the
fundamental principle of their society. Appropriations
immediately ceased, debt assessors were called in, and before
long all of the Elders implicated in appropriation committed
suicide (some with a little help). But that left the question
of restitution to the appropriated. Dumping them back into
their original universes, often war-torn, barbarous, primitive,
or with hostile and unstable environments after up to a million
years of peace and prosperity on the Elders' planet didn't make
the ethical cut. They settled on granting full citizenship to
all the appropriated, providing them the gift of biological
immortality, cortical implants to upgrade the less sentient to
full intelligence, and one more thing…. The Elders had
developed an unusual property: the tips of their tentacles could
be detached and sent on errands on behalf of their parent
bodies. While not fully sentient, the tentacles could, by
communicating via cortical implants, do all kinds of useful work
and allow the Elders to be in multiple places at once (recall
that the Elders, like terrestrial squid, have ten
tentacles—if they had twelve, they'd call them twelvicles,
wouldn't they?). So for each of the appropriated species, the
Elders chose an appropriate symbiote who, upgraded in
intelligence and self-awareness and coupled to the host by their
own implant, provided a similar benefit to them. For humanoids,
it was dogs, or their species' canids.
(You might think that all of this constitutes spoilers, but it's
just the background for the Elders' universe which is laid out in
the first few chapters for the benefit of readers who haven't read
the earlier books in the series.)
Hundreds of millions of years after the Great Restitution Eichra
Oren (those of his humanoid species always use both names) is a
p'Na debt assessor. His symbiote, Oasam Otusam, a
super-intelligent, indiscriminately libidinous, and wisecracking
dog, prefers to go by “Sam”. So peaceful is the planet
of the Elders that most of the cases Eichra Oren is called upon
to resolve are routine and mundane, such as the current client,
an arachnid about the size of a dinner table, seeking help in
tracking down her fiancé, who has vanished three days before
the wedding. This raises some ethical issues because, among
their kind, traditionally “Saying ‘I do’ is the
same as saying
‘bon appétit’ ”.
Many, among sapient spiders, have abandoned the Old Ways, but some
haven't. After discussion, in which Sam says, “You realize
that in the end, she's going to eat him”, they decide,
nonetheless, to take the case.
The caseload quickly grows as the assessor is retained by
investors in a project led by an Elder named Misterthoggosh,
whose fortune comes from importing reality TV from other
universes (there is no multiverse copyright convention—the
p'Na is cool with cultural appropriation) and
distributing it to the multitude of species on the Elders'
world. He (little is known of the Elders' biology…some
say the females are non-sentient and vestigial) is now embarking
on a new project, and the backers want a determination by an
assessor that it will not violate p'Na, for which they would be
jointly and separately responsible. The lead investor is a
star-nosed mole obsessed by golf.
Things become even more complicated after a mysterious attack
which appears to have been perpetrated by the
“greys”, creatures who inhabit the mythology and
nightmares of a million sapient species, and the suspicion and
fear that somewhere else in the multiverse, another species has
developed the technology of opening gates between universes,
something so far achieved only by the now-benign Elders, with
wicked intent by the newcomers.
What follows is a romp filled with interesting questions.
Should you order the vegan plate in a restaurant run by
intelligent plants? What are the ethical responsibilities of a
cyber-assassin who is conscious yet incapable of refusing orders
to kill? What is a giant squid's idea of a pleasure yacht? If
two young spiders are amorously attracted, it only pupæ
love? The climax forces the characters to confront the question
of the extent to which beings which are part of a hive mind are
responsible for the actions of the collective.
L. Neil Smith's books have sometimes been criticised for being
preachy libertarian tracts with a garnish of science fiction.
I've never found them to be such, but you certainly can't accuse
this one of that. It's set in a world governed
for æons by the principle of non-aggression, but that
foundation of civil society works so well that it takes an
invasion from another universe to create the conflict which is
central to the plot. Readers are treated to the rich and
sometime zany imagination of a world inhabited by almost all
imaginable species where the only tensions among them are due to
atavistic instincts such as those of dogs toward tall plants,
combined with the humour, ranging from broad to wry, of our
canine narrator, Sam.
July 2017 