A Son of the Rock

Penguin, 1984, 253 p.

Mankind has spread out amongst the stars and adapted to the various planets where it has settled, speciating as required. One of these is the planet Brakrath, which is ruled by female barohna, able to channel the powers of stones to help melt winter snows and allow agriculture to take place. The narrative is carried by four voices, The Boy, Khira, Darkchild, The Guide, and Khira’s grandmother Kadura. That makes five you say? Well yes, but the boy from chapter 1 has become Darkchild by Chapter 3.

Khira’s mother Tiahna is the local barohna and remote as a result. Khira has effectively been brought up by her sister Alzaja who is in turn about to make a trip to the mountains (where their other sisters have journeyed before, not to come back,) to try to find the stone in her heart that will allow her to take over from Tiahna, or be killed in the attempt by the beast she challenges. Khira is left to face the winter alone in Tiahna’s palace. After an overwhelming noise wakes her one night she finds a boy in one of the tower rooms. She dubs him Darkchild. He is under compulsion to experience and remember everything about his new home. (In chapter one, as The Boy, he had been removed from a previous family on another world and subjected to medical intervention.) In his head is The Guide, a memory storage and control device he can only subvert by deluging it with sensory information.

Khira is alternately bewildered and intrigued by Darkchild but still befriends him. The interludes where The Guide takes over his body baffle her, though. Things come to a head when the expedition members of another human race, the Arnimi, potbellied with greying hair that hangs to their shoulders, return to the barohnial hall from their winter excursion investigating how the Brakrathi have adapted to their world, only to prevent Darkchild’s access to their quarters and recommend Khira puts him out in the snow. They say he is a Rauthimage and speak to Darkchild in his own language.

Not till Tiahna returns for the thaw do they reveal they find Rauthimages abhorrent, cloned from a cell specimen of a man called Birnam Rauth without his permission and hence anathema to them. Rauthimages are employed by a ruthless race called Benderzic to find weaknesses in adapted human races so as to exploit them.

The story juggles Khira’s experiences with Darkchild’s and The Guide’s and the one chapter narrated by Kadura fills in Brakrathi background.

This is a solid piece of Science Fiction of its time, with a well-worked out background and a more than adequate depiction of the psychologies of its main actors. (The Arnimi and Benderzic remain somewhat sketchy, though.)

Pedant’s corner:- vestigal (vestigial,) hostess’ (hostess’s,) minx’ (minx’s,) grill (grille,) Bullens’ (Bullens’s,) hiccoughing (there is no connection to a cough; hiccupping,) “‘you won’t even see my any more’” (see me any more,) “Khira led way” (led the way; several more instances of ‘led way’,) Rabbus’ (Rabbus’s,) Baronha (elsewhere the spelling always ended ‘ohna’,) snowminx’ (snowminx’s,) pondersome (ponderous,) vocal chords (cords,) pondersomely (ponderously.)