Marion Zimmer Bradley: The World Wreckers

[bibliogramma]

The World Wreckers (pub. 1971) is, in terms of internal chronology, the last book set in post-Contact Darkover written by Bradley alone, without a collaborator. It is a story of catastrophic endings and unlooked-for new beginnings, and is the book that gives us the most information about the original non-human inhabitants of Darkover, the chieri.

Andrea Closson is a world wrecker. For a fee, her company will destroy the economy of a planet, making it easier for her clients to step in and take it over. And she has been hired to damage Darkover so badly that the planet will have to give up its protected status and beg for Terran assistance. Her methods are ruthless. She targets three key resources - forests, soil, and the Darkovan telepaths - with arson, poison and assassination. The irony is that Andrea Closson is a chieri, and the world she is destroying is her home, the telepaths, her distant cousins.

Regis Hastur knows that something is wrong. The Comyn are dying, through illness and assassination, and the people are starving as forest fires and other disasters wreak havoc on Darkover's fragile ecology. Desperate to keep the knowledge of Darkovan matrix sciences alive, Regis offers to teach these sciences to Terran telepaths. The pilot project brings together Darkovans - Regis, his paxman and lover Danilo Syrtis, the elderly Desideria (from Winds of Darkover) and her granddaughter Linnea - and Terrans - David Hamilton, David Connor, and Rondo - and most unexpectedly, two chieri - Keral, one of the last fertile members of a dying race, and Missy, a foundling with no knowledge of her background who has wandered the Terran Empire for centuries, living by her ability to project a powerful femininity but so psychically damaged that she is barren. Supervising the project, which seeks to understand what makes a telepath, is Jason Allison (whom we met in the very first Darkover novel, The Planet Savers).

As matters grow worse, Regis puts out a call to bring together all the telepaths of Darkover - not just those of known Comyn heritage, but anyone with a trace of laran - to form a new Telepath's Council to replace the Comyn Council. Closson sees this as her chance to put an end to all the telepaths of Darkover, and plants a bomb to explode during the Festival of the Four Moons, when her spy within the project, Rondo, has reported that all the telepaths will be celebrating at Comyn Castle.

When the Festival begins, Closson conceals herself nearby, to see the end of the those she thinks of as the usurpers of the place her own people once held. When the remaining chieri teleport into the festival, called by the newly pregnant Keral's joy, Closson's shock allows Rondo, to read her mind and discover her plan. A powerful telekinetic, he calls the bomb to himself and in a desperate attempt to save the others, hurls himself upward, still holding it; the bomb detonates high above the city, and Closson comes out of hiding to face her long-lost kin.

Now knowing that the Darkovans carry the heritage of her own people, Closson puts her knowledge and fortune to work saving Darkover; finally at peace, she dies holding the child of Keral and David Hamilton in her arms.

There is relatively little action in the novel; much of it is focused on a topic Bradley would return to again and again, the link between telepathy and sexuality. This is explored primarily in the relationships between David Connor and Missy, and David Hamilton and Keral. In both cases, there is the added dimension of the androgyny of the chieri, and the complex processes that result in a change from a neutral state - in which the chieri may appear somewhat male, somewhat female, both or neither - to a fertile state in which a male or female state becomes dominant, allowing the chieri either to inseminate or to conceive.

We learn that the chieri are almost extinct because their telepathic sensitivity and its relationship to the biological transformation necessary for reproduction makes it almost impossible for them to reproduce except in an environment of close telepathic bonding. (Many of the Darkovan telepaths also display such a sensitivity, though not to the same degree.) Most historical cases of interbreeding between chieri and human have been the result of a kind of madness and desperation to have a child. Add to this their relatively infrequent cycles of fertility and the fact that there is no guarantee that when a bonded couple both come into a fertile phase, the change will end with one in male phase and the other in female phase.

Many thousands of years ago, the chieri, already seeing the inevitable end of their species, took to space to try and find another species they could be compatible with. Failing to do this, most withdrew to Darkover, let the signs of their civilisation disappear, and prepared to die,leaving the planet to other developing species. Some, like Closson, remained on other worlds. There is a strong indication in the novel that Missy is Closson's child, the product of an episode of madness.