Krishna
Cirocco is called by an excited Gaby who shows her a picture of the twelfth moon of Saturn. They are all stunned because it seems to be a doughnut shaped disk! And it should not naturally exist where it does, as a moon of Saturn. It seems to be less dense than water so it is also possibly hollow.
A strange disc seems to be rotating and incautiously, they go closer to it when they are captured by an arm that is incredibly fast – their spaceship and all.
But four of the people find that they have survived. They have been expelled. Cirocco finds that she is alone and then Gaby and she find each other. They all find that they have lost all hairs in the rescue and then Cirocco finds that Gaby has changed – she seems to be in love with Cirocco who is in love with Bill.
They find one other who finds them and shows them a ‘living dirigible or blimp’ inside which they could travel and then find two others. Only two of the original seven are missing but two of them decide to leave, against Cirocco’s wishes – she has no ship, they have no way of going back, so she really cannot exercise her authority over the others.
They easily kill the land animals they christened Smiley. They also name all the rivers and areas from mythology – like Hyperion etc. When they are about to think that all animals are not used to men and therefore harmless, they meet a fish with large eye and when they try to kill it, it fights back, breaking Kevin’s leg and almost killing Cirocco. It has a circular teeth that rotates – and several rows of them. They somehow manage to kill it.
Then they meet a centaur like creature.
Now, I will confess I am not a fan of some kinds of science fiction. This book for example bores me. It is an endless exploration. Why are there thick cables all over the land? Why are there centaurs? Why can some people understand alien language (Calvin for the blimps and Cirocco for the Centaur) and the explanation for the last? ‘Something must have happened to them when the planet ate them and spit them out as excreta’. (I am not making this up).
To be harsh, to string together disjointed events in a non story, it does not take much!
The ‘Titanide’ or the centaur like creature turns out to be only three years old and has heard of earth, though not how it is populated.
They fight ‘angels’ a human form with wings who are their deadly enemies. All woman find themselves inexplicably pregnant and Cirocco gives birth to something that has four legs and she asks it to be taken away and destroyed.
Enough random walk for you in a story?
This gets a bit interesting when their companion Gene tries to kill Gaby and then rape Cirocco. They subdue him and throw him overboard (with a chute as a measure of compassion).
And drops right down to a boring pace. They keep going in a long way of stairs and on and on; sometimes hot; sometimes cold. You are sicker of the journey then they themselves are.
The story gets bizarre by the minute. One of their crew, they find, has been turned into an angel! (Huh?) which is a human with wings.
They finally meet Gaea – the earth mother herself. Then they meet the ‘real’ person behind the Gaea pageantry Though it has shades of the old man putting on a puppet show as in The Wizard of Oz, it is different, when you get into the details.
. It ends not abruptly. Which is nice. I do hate books that assume that you will buy the next one in the sequence.
This has a formal ending, and you can either read the next one or let it go, without any emotional baggage.
Do I like this book? It has its moments but too much of it seems just arbitary.
4/10
— Krishna