Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Children of Time (2015), Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a Sci-Fi Novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky: summary

“True science demands a certain seclusion, if only so that its more unexpected results can be safety contained.” (p. 181)


The highly intriguing science fiction will bring readers to imaginative horizon of space technology. The 600-page book published by Pan Macmillan in London 2015. Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British author, the book is winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. The beautiful written made it richly deserve to keep the title.

Earth has been in ruins. Human race survivors had made a long journey to seek the new planet, the Key Crew (Earth’s scientist), asked permitted for living from Kern’s World, the only hope for the sick old ark ship to harbor, but the inventor of the planet, Avrana Kern, has already rejected them and offered a war. Doctor Avrana Kern was a scientist who built green planet, she gave no chance to human race.

Not like her experimental monkeys, her another creation, the spider, has developed to be artificial intelligence unit which could built a technology society and space ship. Portia, the spider’s leader, and her people worshiped Kern as their God, named as the Messenger. Giving the ritual in their temple, and sometimes talked to God (Kern) through the transmission on a crystal.

Great Nest is metropolis for the spiders, but they also had the rivalry. It was ants with their technology. On the space, human had been struggling in their old ship named the Gilgamesh that loaded numerous scientists and five hundred thousand humans in their pod. Guyen was firstly awakened and turn to be mad and made himself as a god to another human, the commander was in ambitious immortality project and set a war to Kern’s world. People wanted to occupy the green planet. The Classicist Hoslten Mason, the oldest man in universe, and the other human scientists, the Key Crew, tried to stop Guyen.

This book is not an easy for novice reader. I found the book to be an exciting fiction that presents some intriguing ideas. I especially enjoyed the AI (Artificial Intelligence) part. The author blends space technology with entomology, human's greediness, and faction’s war to present a fantasy space story that is highly entertaining one.




Children of Time (2015), Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a Sci-Fi Novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky: summary

Earth had been green, in her day, though her colors had faded since. Perhaps never as green as the beautifully crafted world though, where even the oceans glittered emerald with the phytoplankton maintaining the oxygen balance within the atmosphere. All nineteen of them, though the fifteen were in the control room with the chief. Doctor Avrana Kern looked out upon her project, her dream, her planet. The Kern’s World is the future where mankind takes its next great step. His engineering teams under Doctors Fallarn and Medi were well on their way.

A journey took twenty light years home. Whilst thirty years drag by on Earth, only twenty will pass for Fallarn and Medi in their cold coffins. Human history was balanced on a knife edge. Millennia of ignorance, prejudice, superstition and desperate striving had brought them at last to this: that humankind would beget new sentient life in its own image. They were lonely and now gods. Earth itself had fallen in fire and dust, there would be a legacy spreading across the stars – expanding variety of Earth-born life diverse enough to survive any reversal of fortune until the death of whole universe.

After the monkeys had been delivered and the Sentry Pod detached to monitor them, those other gems were where her attention would next be drawn. Meanwhile the Brin 2’s hub, the barrel system, where. The Flask was the delivery system for virus that would accelerate monkey along their way- they would stride, in a mere century or two, across physical and mental distances that had taken humanity millions of long and hostiles. The virus was clearly an impressive piece of work. Infected individuals would produce offspring mutated in number of useful ways: greater brain and complexity, greater body size to accommodate it, more flexible behavior path, swifter learning. The virus even would recognize the presence of infection in other individuals of the same species, so as to promote selective breeding, the best of the best giving birth even better. She wanted to make new life, in her image as much humanity’s. She wanted to know what might envolve, what society, what understandings, when her monkeys were left to their own simian devices.

Portia is eight millimetres long but she a tiger within her tiny world, fierce and cunning. Like all spiders, she has a body of two parts. Science named her Portia Labiata, just another unassuming a species of jumping spider. Portia specializes in eating spider-eating spiders, most of whom are larger and stronger than she. Portia had no thoughts. Her sixty thousand neurons barely from a brain, contrasted with a human’s one hundred billion. Portia’s ancestor have making the calculation for millennia, each generation fractionally more accomplished because.

The nanovirus itself is subject to variations in its transcriptions. It was designed that what way in order to creatively accomplish its hardwired him: to bring the host to a detected level of sophistication set by its creators and, once its victory conditions are met, to cease further assistance. The virus was intended for primate host, and so the end state that it has been programmed to seek is something that Portia can never become.  Long ago in Portia’s evolutionary history, her species’s social development was greatly accelerated by a series mutations in the reigning infection.

A larger community like Great Nest has a great many Understanding to draw upon, different lineages passing on their mysteries and trading with others. They were the spider-killers from the first, and their venom will immobilize an enemy of their own species.


The Human

They got the signals danced across those millions of kilometres of void, it’s calling himself the Second Brin Sentry Habitat. The Gilgamesh was the Old Empire technology, The 2 Sentry warned them to leave or they will destroy Gilgamesh. As the Gilgamesh was still fighting to slow down, the drones outstripped rapidly, their own thrust hurrying them towards the planet and the sentinel at an acceleration that a manned craft could not have managed without pulping its occupants.

They got the drones into atmosphere, the drone’s image were grainy and distorted, a high altitude scan of a world so green that one of the scientists asked if the pictured had been recolored. The Earth that they remembered had not looked like that. Any such verdant explosion had been locked away in the years before the ice, and it never returned after the toxic thaw. They came from a planet immeasurably poorer than this one.

Kern’s world ordered the Gilgamesh to a quarantine planet. Gilgamesh is the ark ship that carried five hundred thousand humans in suspension. They were the survival of the human species.

Eliza Kerns, a composite expert system of the Second Brin Sentry Habitat, gave no respond to Gilgamesh’s message, the engineering team began their anxious watch over ship’s system, as the ancient ark ship began to creak and strain at the unnatural imposition of an external source of mass. But finally, the same female tones sounded, Doctor Avrana Kern, chief scientist and administrator of the Second Brin Exaltation Project, was his translation.

Holsten, the classicist of the Gilgamesh asked her permission to establish a colony on Kern’s World.  The vessel is the ark ship Gilgamesh from Earth that was built after their time. A civil war between factions of the Empire. Both sides unleashed weapons the nature of which were effective in devastating higher civilization on Earth and completely destroying the colonies. Earth people had lapsed back into barbarism. When the power had failed, the electromagnetic viruses murdered the artificial minds, they had died. They wouldn’t be returning to Earth, people couldn’t counterbalance the increasing toxicity of the environment. They built the ark ships, in the end they had old star maps to guide them to Kern’s World.

To Kern, people Earth were only monkeys, but they were not even her monkeys. Her monkeys were pure, undergoing uplift in great experiment.


Portia, Great Nest

The creature is slightly smaller than Portia’s standards. He was Fabian. Frequently the entire root system has been unearthed as well, ensuring that nothing will regrow. The forest is under wide-scale attack, its fringes being gnawed away. Fabian can remember when there were more trees, he communicates. The clearing of land continues year to year, and Fabian’s inherited Understanding suggests that it is happening faster now than in his mother’s time.

They are small and squat bulbous, with fleshy leaves and trunks that are warty with protrusions. The exaggerated space between each copse is a firebreak-something the spiders are very familiar with. Their planet’s oxygen levels are higher than Earth’s –lightning-sparked fires are a constant threat. What they are seeing is no work of future. There is a plantation on a grand scale, and the laborers tending it are plainly visible.

There are certain species she shared the planet with, that her people recognize as something more than animals. The Spitters are a low-end example, weak eyes. The western oceans that Portia’s Great Nest looks over are home to a type of stomatopod with which her people have causes, ritualized relations. Their ancestor were fierce, inventive hunters, equipped with unparalleled eyesight and deadly natural weapons and used to living in colonies where negotiations over living space are common.

Portia understands the nature of ants. There are colonies near the Great Nest, and she has both personal and genetically encoded dealings with them to draw upon. It is the Great Nest’s collective experience that ant colonies are complicated neighbors. They must be dealt decisively. They can be destroyed- her inherited Understandings include chronicles of such conflicts- but war with even a small colony is costly and wasteful. Portia knows ants are not like her people, nor like the Spitters or the stomapods of the western shallows. There is no intelligence within colony, but there is such a hierarchy of interacting am co-dependent instinct that seems to Portia that some manner of entity is behind a colony’s actions and reactions.

With ants, the nanovirus has simultaneously failed and succeeded. The colonies are the perfect exponents of game theory: they will cooperate where that course is less costly and more beneficial than other strategies, such as all-out genocidal war. Portia and her people are going to have to continue their journey into the land of the ants. With Fabian taking the lead, the spiders ambush an ant logging party, trapping and killing them quickly and efficiently.

At such time, Portia knows, the Messenger itself would be in the skies overhead, going about her constant journey- whether at night and visible, or hidden by the brightness of the daytime sky. Here in Seven Tree there is no crystal, but internally consistent complexity, to spin and consume and spin again, is a calming ritual that settles Portia’s mind, and allows her to face whatever must soon come, with equanimity.

Her people have solved the mathematical riddles posed by the orbiting satellite- the Messenger, as they think of it- learning the proofs first by rote and then in true comprehensive, as a civic and religious duty. Here is something demonstrably from beyond, and it fascinates them; it tells them that there is more to the world than they can grasp; it guide their thinking in new ways. The beauty of the maths promises in a universe of wonders if they can but stretch out their minds that bot further: a jump they can almost, but not quite, make.

Seven Trees now encompasses more than the original seven, the ticket of trunks interlinked by hundreds of lines, each part of a plan, each assigned a specific purpose, whether structural, as a thoroughfare, or for communication. The vibratory languages of the spider transmits well down silk threads over some distance, and they had developed nodes of tensioned coils that amplify the signal so that amplify the signal so that speech can pass for kilometres between cities in calm weather.

In the high centre, shadowing much of the city, is the reservoir; a watertight net spread wide that catches rain and run off from a grand area around Seven Trees, the water channeling to it through troughs and pipes from a multitude of smaller rain-catchers. Around the Seven Trees the forest has been cut back by the semi-domesticated local ants. Previously this has been a fire-break, Soon it will be a killing ground. Out there is an army of hundreds of thousands advancing towards Seven Trees. There were webs to catch incautious ants.

Portia stamps out a call to arms and her sisters from Great Nest muster around her. The local defenders are less well armed, lacking both experience and innate understanding of ant-war. She and her fellows will lead the charge.  They are far larger than the attackers, both stronger and swifter. Their bite is venomous, but it is a venom best used against spiders, so they now concentrate on using their fangs at the intersections of the insect’s bodies, between head and thorax, between thorax and abdomen. Most of all, they are more intelligence than their enemies, better able to react and manoeuvre and evade.

The new ants are larger-though still smaller than herself. They are many castes, each to its own speciality. Their purpose is to monopolize the defender’s attention and sell their lives as dearly as possible, so as to allow more dangerous castes to close the distance. Most of the enemy are even now entering the tunnels of the local ant’s nest, spreading confounding chemicals that throw the defending insects into confusions, or even enlist them to the cause of the attackers.

For foreign species such as Portia, there is no purpose and no mercy. The defenders are taking loses now. The technology of Portia’s kind is built on silk and wood, potential energy stored in tensioned lines and primitive springs. Only for now, this army is closing on Great Nest, and after that there will only be the ocean. If Portia’s kind cannot defeat the mindless march of the ants, then nobody will be around to write the histories of future generations. 
   
The unnamed gunman and woman, Brenjit Nessel, the scientist of survival human, went to their duties without speaking to one another; she bent over the computer displays, he scowling at the prisoners. The classicist, Holsten Mason, became more and more oppressed by the silence, there was a gun pointing his way. Brenjit Nessel recognized Doctor Holsten Mason, the oldest man on the ark ship. He met his student in jail. While he lived in Earth he taught.


The Great Nest

The greatest metropolis of Portia’s kind, a home. The ants do not know where Great Nest is, of course- their spread across the world is methodical but mindless-but they will reach the coast soon. Great Nest is vast, home to several thousand spiders. The natural forest is still thick there, but great effort and artifice has gone into erecting artificial trees to provide more living room. Great pillars made from felled trunks, sheathed and strengthened with silk, spread out from the living copse at the city’s centre-and even out into the sea itself, allowing the webwork of the city to reach out across the waters. Space is at a premium. And over the last century, Great Nest has grown exponentially in all directions, including up.

Beyond the city proper, there lies a patchwork of farms: aphids for honeydew, mice for meat, and stands of the blister-trunked trees cultivated by the ants, another secret stolen from the enemy. The seas throng with fish ready for the netting, and offshore there is a sister-settlement on the sea bed; relations with the marine stomatopod culture are cordial and mutually profitable, in a sort of way. A generation ago there was friction as the spiders began to expand their city seawards. 

Using communal creches and lacking any maternal instincts, Portia’s people have no strict family units. The youngest spiderlings, still confined to the crèche, are provided with food by the city, but this period of free bounty does not last long. The males must make themselves useful.

The temple at the Great Nest is the city’s highest point, a space without walls, strung between the extremity of the canopy above with an inward-sloping floor below. As its centre, on the apex of one of the city’s original trees, is the crystal that the ancestress’s wrested from the ants. Portia and her people arrives ahead of the Messenger’s appearance, they are come to find hope. Her people regard the Messenger and its message is hard to say. The priests has emerged to dance, her stylus hunting out the connection points on the crystals as, invisibly, the Messenger crosses the blue vault of the sky while broadcasting its constant message. After the service finishes, and feeling more shaken than reassured.


The Human

They were all under a death sentence on Earth, the last time Holsten and Lain were working together, a mad computer-person hybrid thing wanted to kill them for disturbing the experimental monkeys. Lain was the Key Crew and the best engineer on the ship. One of the sat at a console apparently fighting the Gilgamesh’s attempts to override control of the shuttle, whilst Nessel and another woman were giving reports on the system powering up. Isa Lain tried to explain that the Gilgamesh’s array is nothing to the Kern’s satellite. It’s got a defense laser that will carve the Gil into tiny pieces.

Chief Engineer Lain indicated that Doctor Avrana Kern was what’s in the satellite. She was one of the things in the satellite. There are the basic computers, and there are called Eliza. It is an AI (Artificial Intelligence), or a very well-made computer. Avrana Kern also might be an AI.


Great Nest

Portia’s military exploits have won some esteem for her peer group, but Bianca is currently their greatest asset: one of the Nest’s most admired and maverick scholars. She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back. Infiltrating an ant colony is no longer just a case of taking some heads and stolen scent glands. The ants now use the chemical equivalent of shifting cyphers that change over time, and in different detachments of the sprawling colony, and Portia’s kin have unable to keep up. The chemical weapons the spiders use toe disrupt and confuse their enemies are short-lived, and barely an annoyance in the face of the sheer scale of the enemy.

The increase security of the colony has had a catastrophic impact on a number of other species. Ant nest are ecosystems in their own right, and many species live in uneasy communion with them. Some, like the aphids, provide services, and the ants actively cultivate them. Others are parasitic: mites, bugs, beetles, even small spiders, all of them adapted to steal from the ants’ table or to consume their hosts.

Holsten translated the words, the message from Kern. Doctor Kern had warned them not return to her planet. The Kern’s World is her experiment and she wouldn’t have it tainted. The planet is her legacy. She called them as a human, so Holsten assumed Kern was a human once.  

Portia’s people have no fingers, but her ancestors were building structures and using tools millions of years before they attained anything like intelligence. They had two palps and eight legs, each of which can grip and manipulated as required. They work best suspended in space, thinking and creating.

Portia flags her palps in fierce agreement, and then they all do likewise. Staring at the trail of smoke still blotting out the night stars, Portia knows it is a sign from the sky, the Messenger’s sky. All her hours spent in reverent contemplation of mathematical mysteries of Temple, on the brink revelation, seem to her to have let to this.

Something fell from the sky. It was not the Messenger, which clearly retains its regular circuit of the heavens, but in the mind of Portia and her kin it seems linked to that orbiting mote. Some hypothesize that it was a herald of forerunner, a message from the Messenger, and that if its meaning can only be interpreted, then Messenger will have a lesson to teach.


The Gilgamesh
Guyen’s plan is simple. An active crew of fifty had been woken up and briefed on what was expected. The base was ready for them, everything constructed by the automatics during the Gilgamesh’s last long sleep, and tested fit for habitation. 

Great Nest
The fallen giant had died, Portia and her kin found it difficult to conceive of the thing. Speculation as to its original purpose, and connection with the Messenger, continued, with the most commonly held theory being that Messenger was served in the sky by a species of such giants, who performed necessary tasks for it.  


Classicist Doctor Holsten Mason

When he was a child, Holsten Mason had been mad about the space. He had watched actual recordings of the real-life expeditions- often disturbing, often cut suddenly. By the time he was grown up, his interest had migrated back through time from those bold scavenger pioneers to the lost civilization that they were rediscovering. He had lived to see his discipline steadily tainted by vicarious disgrace. The Old Empire was reaching out of deep history to inexorably poison its children. He was one of the few Key Crew able to participate from the comfort of the Gilgamesh itself. Karst and Vitas had taken a shuttle and some drones to check out the barren-looking planet below them. Lain and her engineers were out on half-finished station itself, slowly proceeding down its compartmentalized length and recording everything they found. Holsten deciphered and catalogued it wherever he could, or put aside for further study where he could not.

Nobody had ever access to an Old Empire terraforming station before, even an incomplete one. Here, at the wrong end of his career, and at the wrong end of the history of human race, Holsten finally in the undeniable position of being able to call himself the grates expert ever on the Old Empire. He was now in possession of a greater trove of communication, fiction, technical manuals, announcements and trivia in several Imperial language-but mostly Kern’s Imperial C-than scholar before him since the end of the Empire itself. The Gilgamesh had translation algorithms now, mostly designed by Holsten himself.

Six people had died: four to what had either been a working security system or a defective maintenance system, one to a suit maintenance, and one to sheer clumsiness. Their technology had proved stony ground, the virtual attack frustrated by their primitive system.


The Great Nest  

In the last few generations, Great Nest’s population has swelled to somewhere a hundred thousand adult spiders, and countless-uncounted-young. It spreads through several square miles of forest reaching from the earth to the canopy. Plague is coming. Hundreds of thousands are already dead from it, and now Great Nest has seen its own first victims.  She knows this was inevitable, for this current Portia is a priestess and a scientist.  One of the other scientists who chose to support Portia call her Viola – has studied the mechanism of Understandings for years, and passed on to Portia all she knew. Viola herself was initially unwilling to even cross the city, for fear of infection.

Bianca is already infected, she believes. However, Viola has already put in the work, and Portia sent her samples from the three captive spiderlings for comparison to the studies Viola had already undertaken of other members of species. Bianca has survived the plague, For Viola, whose biochemical genius furnished the means, the cure came too late. Many others, great minds, great warriors, leading females of peer houses, starving males in the gutter, all have been struck down. Great Nest has been saved, but thousands of its inhabitants were not so lucky. Other cities were similarly affected.

The Brin2’s Sentry Pod

The signal from the green planet resonated through the Brin 2’s Sentry Pod like an earthquake. For a recursive, untimed moment, the systems of the Sentry Pod-the sea of calculation that boiled behind the human mask of Eliza-were unable to make a decision. The distinction between living woman, uploaded personality construct and pod system was not finely drawn. Doctor Kern awoke, or she dreamt of waking, and in her dreams into the cold logic of the others.

A traveler had come to steal the secret of her project-to rob her of the immorality represented by her new life, by her progeny, by her monkey-children. The Sentry Pod was designed to lie dormant for centuries. Avrana remembered that much. How long would it take the virus to spark intellect into generations of the monkeys. She remembered now why she was in the Sentry Pod at all, performing this function that had been meant for someone far more disposable. In her dream there had been come a primitive boat of travelers claiming to be her kin, but she had looked at them and seen them for what they truly were.

She had scanned through their histories and understanding. They were hopelessly corrupted with the same sickness that had killed Kern’s own civilization. Better to start a new with monkeys. When she woke she found the entity/entities that surround her. She looked into their faces. She remembered when the false human, that disease that had outlived her people, had approached the planet.

     
The Prisoners (the human)

Holsten was pondering his relationship with time. Lain called him ‘old man’ but truth the span of objective time that had passed between his nativity and this present moment was ridiculous, unreal. No human ever bestrode time as he had done, in his journey of thousands years. Now in his cell, time weighed him down, and dragged at his heels, chaining him to the grindingly slow pace of the cosmos where before he had leapt ahead across the centuries, skipping between the bright points of human beings.

His captors all wore robes of the same sheer, grey material that the squatters were also using for their amateurish tents- something that the Gilgamesh had presumably been storing for some other purpose entirely, or that had been synthesized in the workshops. They were all thin, malnourished, underdeveloped. They wore their hair long, very long, passed the shoulders. The whole scene had weirdly primal feel to it, a resurgence of the primitive days of mankind. Certainly the manner of his captors was not simply that of oppressors or kidnappers. They refuse to meet his eyes. Then they set him to work, and he realized that he must surely be dreaming.

One day he woke up in his cell to find that his captors had brought in a mobile terminal: a poor, lobotomized sort of a thing, but at least a computer of sorts.
At far at the end of the room was a woman with short-cut hair, a little older than Holsten. She wore a shipsuit that had been fitted out with plastic scales and plates, like somebody’s joke idea of warrior queen, if only she had not looked very serious. There was a ragged, healed scar about her chin, and a long pistol was thrust through her belt, the first modern weapon Holsten had seen.

He was surprised that it was Lain. He got at her confederates, wondering if things here in Lain’s camp had got to the point where dissent was punishable. She said Vrie Guyen had taken over the ship. The new commander had woken up a whole load of cargo. Some of them he thought he recognized as her engineers. They are like a cult he has got. Guyen was their savior. He wanted to live forever, he had the whole human race in his hands. He has set his cult and brainwashed them into believed he was the great hope of the universe. He had been up for fifty years, he promised the human a promised land, a green land.  

After his awaken, the Gil’s already starting to come apart at the system level. Holsten and the whole gang’s together again to stop Guyen’s grand immortality project.


Great Nest

Great Nest is a vast forest metropolis. Hundreds of square kilometres of great trees are festooned with the angled silk dwellings of Portia’s kin, constantly being added to and remodeled as each peer house’s fortunes advance or decline. It is a complex interconnecting web of such capsule-runs, a network amongst networks, like the vibrational communications strands that go everywhere, since the temple maintains rigorous monopoly on the invisible traces of radio waves. Portia tried to seek the position of the Messenger. The voice of God is in the sky, invisible the day light. The old crystal receiver has been improved steadily since the messages of God became comprehensible- that being the first lesson of God, and one of the most successful. 

The Messenger was the last survivor of an earlier age of the universe, they were told. In the final throes of that age, it was the Messenger who was chosen to come to the world and endanger life out of the barren earth. The Messenger- the Goddess of the green planet-remade the world so that it would give rise to that life, next seeded it with plants and trees, and then with the lesser animals. The Messenger is trying to teach them how to live, and this involves building machines to accomplish purposes that Portia’s people can hardly grasp.

Portia and hers sisters are often in contact with the temples of other cities, but they are nevertheless drawing apart. God speaks to each of them, each temple being assigned its own frequency, but the message substantially the same- for Portia has eavesdropped on God’s dictates to others before.

Spider has always killed spider. From the start, the species has had a streak of cannibalism, especially female against male, and they have often struggled for territory, for local dominance. The superiority of God’s ideas has become a major point of dogma for the Temple-after all. A unity of religion has led rivalry and factionalism between the nests. The temple scientists try to build a network of lightning according to God’s designs, but it achieves nothing, save occasionally to destroy its own creator. Somewhere out there, Portia fears, some others community may be closer that Great Nest to achieving God’s intent.
 
Other city states, like Seven Trees, have gone even further, given the far greater ravages of plague there. Great Nest, originator the cure, has combined cultural dominance with a greater social rigidity than many of its peers.

The Human

He wore robes that lay open over a shipsuit that seemed to have been patched together from several older garments, but none of it hid the fact that two thick, ridged tubes had been shunted up under his ribs, and that one of the machines beside him seemed to be doing his breathing for him, its flaccid, rubbery sacs rising calmly. Guyen was an extreme case. Guyen had beaten him to that title by a comfortable margin. Lain had said he was old, but Hoslten had not really processed the concept. Guyen was old. He instructed Holsten to be his uploader working to start war at the Kern.

The War of Great Nest against Seven Trees

The spider city states operate a variety of mining concerns, but they themselves do not dig. They have insects for that. For centuries there has been enough for all, since spider technology is not metal-heavy, and the organic chemicals more important to them are fabricated from the common building blocks of life itself. Open conflict between spider cities is almost unknown, since every city is bound to its neighbors by hundreds of ties. There are struggles for dominance but thus far in their history, the point was always been that there must be something to be dominant over.

Fabian, a chemical architect, had come to the gates of Great Nest with an army. Technically, it was not his army. Viola, one of that city’s most powerful females, is the speaker for her home and therefore nominally in control. He attends to the tactics, playing an army of thousands of ants like a maestro with his fluid, adaptable chemical architecture.

Sven Trees and its allies have tallied up a butcher’s bill of the enemy that leaves Fabian shaken every time he considers it. Aside from numberless dead ants, several hundred spiders have perished in the fighting, some by design, others by happenstance. Great Nest has done its best to reverse the tide of killing the Seven Trees leaders, hampered in its belief that those leaders must necessarily be female.

This is not the end of the war of doctrine, but it is the beginning of the end. The fall and conversion of Great Nest is both catalyst and a model for the future. Fighting continues in various parts of the world but those who still believe that Messenger’s message is all-important only lose ground.  This doesn’t mean that nobody talking to God, but they no longer listen with the same single minded purpose that Portia and her fellows did.

And out in cloud orbit is the fused thing that is Avrana Kern and the Sentry Pod, its computer system and Eliza mask that is sporadically dons. She is desperate to communicate with her creation. She has taught her monkeys. They have made  draggingly slow progress, and time is one of many things that Avrana Kern simply does not enough. They don’t even seem to have invented the wheel, yet they have radios. They are slow to understand much of the task she has set to them. She, in turn, cannot follow of what they say. Their technical language is a closed book. She need to prepare and warn her people. They are in danger, the Gilgamesh is coming back.


The Sky Nest

Elsewhere in the city in the hub of learning and research that is also the Great Nest temple for the dwindling number of parishioners who still need embrace the unknown in their lives, Bianca is at work making her last minute preparation. She is a born polymath, in this context meaning she is able to absorb far more Understanding than average spiders. She is not one of Portia’s selected crew, but she has had a hand in the mission as a whole.

Spiders have been using silk for gliding since before the earliest Understanding, and their increasing intelligence has led to multiple refinements of this art. Their chemical synthesis meanwhile gives them access to as much hydrogen as they need.

The airship is a triumph of engineering, rugged enough to withstand the turbulent weather of the lower air, and yet- with the gasbag fully extended and filled-capable of ascending to previously inaccessible heights. The aerodynamic profile of the entire vessel is fluid, and determined, moment to moment, by the tensioned cords of its internal structure. The flight crew has settled in, the Sky Nest tells the crew that all its component pieces are holding up. The Sky Nest carries them on up towards the light dusting of clouds. In the fore-cabin space, Viola has sent a signal that all’s well. Down in Great Nest district, Bianca will receive their message and send a communication of her own to their God that says they are coming.

The Sky Nest is making good progress on its historic mission, rising steadily into the atmosphere. The onboard colony reports on its own radio frequency to Bianca, confirming that all is well, and data from three other distant transmitters triangulate the airship’s position.

Kern’s world was some bioengineering planet. Kern used her giant spiders as a biological weapon. The spider was huge, but only huge for spider. They were on the Gilgamesh, they took over the ark ship, crawled through the breach. The shuttle seems to take forever to fall from the clear sky. There is a quite a crowd gathered here, on a cleared field beyond the edge of the Great Nest district of Seven Trees City.

Doctor Avrana Kern watches omnipresent, as her children prepare themselves. Her surviving files on human neurochemistry, together with the spiders’ own investigations of their long-ago captive, have wrought this. The spiders themselves argued along and hard over how to respond to long-waited invaders, discounting her advice more than following. They accepted her assessment of the path the humans would follow, if given free rein over the planet. Genocide- of other species and of their own- was ever a tool in human kit.

The shuttle lands. Up on the Gilgamesh, orbiting a hundred kilometres beyond web and its space elevators, there are many humans, all infected, and thousands still sleeping who will need to have the virus introduced to them. Even within the spiders, the nanovirus has fought a long battle against ingrained habits of cannibalism and spouse-slaying. The real difficulty for that legion of spider scientists, working over generations and each inheriting the undiluted learning of the last, was to engineer the human infection to know its parents: to recognize the presence of itself in its arachnid creators, and call out to the similarity.

Once the shuttle has landed, the spider press closer, a sheeting, hairy greyish tide of legs and fangs and staring, lidless eyes. Kern watches the hatch open, and the first humans appear. Amongst the humans is one of who Portia had thought was injured or ill, but now understands to be simply at the end of her long giant’s life. Another male has carried her from the shuttle and laid her on the ground, with the spiders forming a curious, jostling but respectful circle around them.

Helena Holsten Lain reclines in her webbing, feeling at ease in the zero gravity, whilst around her rest of the crew complete their pre-launch checks. She does not know that this was once, in a long-long age, the name for pioneering human space vehicle. The old technology of Earth, so painstakingly husbanded by Helena’s great-great-grandmother, has been resurrected, rediscovered, built upon and advanced.

The scientist amongst the spiders first learned what the humans could teach, about their technology of metal, electricity, computer and fusion drives. They taught it back to their tutors’ children, broadened and enhanced by a non-human perspective. Human minds have unraveled the threads of the spiders’ own complex biotechnology and offered their insights. Both species have limits they cannot easy cross: mental, physical, sensory. They need each other. After all the years, the wars, the tragedies, and the loss, the spiders and the monkeys are returning to the stars to seek their inheritance.


******
May 17, 2017
  
   
             
        
  


Sekapur Sirih

Buku fantasi yang dituliskan dengan frasa dan kalimat-kalimat indah, sangat tepat menerima penghargaan. Sains fiksi pemenang Arthur C. Clarke Award, novel setebal 600 halaman cetakan pertama diterbitkan tahun 2015, dicetak oleh Pan Macmillan tahun 2016. Memang tidak mudah untuk dicerna, sehingga kurang tepat bagi pembaca pemula. Penulis Adrian Tchaikovsky adalah penulis berkebangsaan Inggris.Teknologi angkasa luar yang dikombinasi dengan kehidupan serangga cerdas, konflik kekuasaan bahkan kegilaan menjadi tuhan di depan makhluk lain.  


Ringkasan Terjemahan dalam Bahasa Indonesia: Children of Time (Anak Sang Waktu), karya Adrian Thcaikovsky

Doktor Avrana Kern seorang ilmuwan berhasil menciptkan planet hijau dan menciptakan laba-laba dan makluk satu species lainnya sebagai ciptaan cerdas. Mereka hidup dengan teknologi, bertolak belakang dengan eksperimen monyetnya. Monyet ciptaan berkembang lambat. Wanita penemu ini juga menjadikan dirinya sebagai tuhan untuk disembah pada kuil-kuil yang dibuat oleh makluk ciptaan termasuk koloni semut dan serangga lainnya.

Bumi telah hancur, perang antar fraksi dan kekaisan membuatnya menjadi hunian para barbar dan tanpa sumber makanan. Bumi tidak mungkin ditinggali. Sebanyak lima ratus ribu penyintas manusia yang tengah tidur dalam peti dingin mereka dan sejumlah ilmuan yang mengendalikan pesawat ruang angkasa Gilgamesh. Ilmuwan menciptakan pesawat berupa satelit kuno dengan bahan yang tersisa di bumi, berhasil menembus ruang angkasa dan bertahan hidup di peti-peti dingin mereka. Mereka sangat membutuhkan planet baru, kondisi pesawat dan persediaan semakin mengkuatirkan.

Setelah mereka bangun, tim ilmuwan menerima sinyal dari sebuah planet. Mereka meminta pertolongan dan ijin untuk memasuki planet hijau, tetapi penemu planet Dr. Kern meminta mereka menjauh dari planetnya. Dia telah muak dengan perilaku manusia, kini tengah sibuk dengan ciptaan dan ekperimen barunya. Portia, pemimpin laba-laba cerdas, sangat ambisius menguasai planet ciptaan tuhannya Kern.

Perang haus kekuasaan sesama serangga tidak terhindarkan, yang berakhir pada penaklukan dan perbudakan. Species laba-laba ingin menjadi nomor satu di hadapan sang tuhan dengan memerangi dan mengalahkan serangga lainnya. Sama halnya manusia, yang kini mereka berdiam pada pesawat angkasa Gilgamesh yang sudah menua, tidak terhindarkan dari konflik kekuasaan. Guyen mengambil alih komando dan menjadikan dirinya tuhan bagi manusia lainnya yang ia dogmakan selama bertahun-tahun. Insinyur ahli bahasa dan pengenkripsian sinyal dan sandi terpaksa menuruti keinginan ambisius Guyen untuk menyerang Kern yang menolak memberi ijin pada mereka untuk tinggal dan hidup di planet harapan tersebut.

Perang pun tak terhindarkan, sejumlah insinyur terluka dan tewas, manusia terinfeksi dan ribuan manusia lainnya masih dalam tidur mereka pada peti hibernasi. Pihak serangga memiliki nanovirus yang mematikan dan berhasil menaklukkan manusia, namun pada akhirnya ahli manusia dan laba-laba bekerja sama. Mereka saling membutuhkan satu sama lain. Manusia membutuhkan planet untuk bertahan hidup. Laba-laba membutuhkan teknologi kelistikan, komputer dari manusia.  

*****



Saturday, May 6, 2017

A Little Life (2015), A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara: summary

The book is really touching and inspiring one. It was in shortlisted for three different book awards, and the winner of the British Book Industry for Fiction 2016. It richly deserves the prize, the writing is superb, and the characters are memorable, vivid, and realistic one.

The story follows the life of four roommates from a college in Boston, and they start living in New York. Jude as the main character, was a lawyer; Willem, an actor; Malcom, an architect; JB as a painter. He was cripple, good looking, successful lawyer, but haunted by his traumatic past, the sexual abuse in a Catholic monastery, then a Brother named Luke, a pedophile, took him run away and exploits the nine-year-old Jude as child prostitute in years. In the middle of tale, his friend, Willem, the famous actor, gives him a little life and hope, they loved each other, but Willem died at young age in a car accident.

The 720- long novel published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London 2016. This is the second book of the author, Hanya Yanagihara is American author and she lives in New York. This fiction depicts modern realistic life in a big city, the friendship that takes ups and downs, gay relationship, family, drama, complicated conflict, hard worker, love, sex (homosexuality), poverty, sentimentality, pathology, mathematics, law, painter, race, architect, despair life, and traumatic childhood related to sexually abused. 


A Little Life (2015), A Sentimental Drama by Hanya Yanagihara: summary

Lispenard Street
Four men just dealt with an agent, they rented a cheap apartment at Lispenard Street in New York. The apartment was not impressive. There was a small foyer, little larger than size of a doormat, from which pronged the kitchen (a hot, greasy little cube) to the right and dining area to the left that would accommodate perhaps a card table.

In their first year in college, the four of them had shared a space that consisted of a cinder-blocked common room. Malcom was the only one of the four of them who lived at home, and as JB liked to say, if he had Malcom’s home, he would live at home too. Malcom’s sister, Flora, who was three years older than him, had moved out of the basement apartment recently, and Jude had taken her place as a short-term solution. It was natural that he would live with Willem; they had been roommates throughout college.

Jean-Baptiste Marion, a Painter
JB worked as a receptionist at a small but influential magazine based in SoHo that covered the down town art scene. This was a strategic job for him; his plan, as he had explained to Willem one night, was that he’d try to befriend on of the editors there and then convince him to feature him in the magazine. He estimated this taking about six months. He was not a good receptionist, although the phones rang more or less constantly, he rarely picked them up. He rode the train to his mother’s on Sunday, he was unable to keep himself from experiencing a vague sort of self-congratulation, combined with something approaching gratitude that he had the life and family he did. And yet he was relieved to return home every week, where the food was plentiful and free, and where his grandmother would do his laundry.

His father, who had emigrated to New York from Haiti, had died when JB was three, and although JB always liked to think that he remembered his face- kind and gentle, with a narrow strip of mustache and cheeks that rounded into plums when he smiled. He was fatherless, and he knew that fatherless children mourned the absence in their lives. After his father died, his mother, who was the second-generation Haitian American, had earned her doctorate in education, teaching all the while at the public school near their house that she had deemed JB better than.

She had been the subject of an article in The New York Times for her innovative teaching methods, and although he had pretended otherwise to his friends, he had been proud of her. At home, there was his grandmother, who cooked whatever he wanted, and sang to him in French, and told him literally daily what treasure he was, and how he was the man in her life.

And there were his aunts, his mother’s sister, a detective in Manhattan, and her girlfriend, a pharmacist and second-generation herself (although she was from Puerto Rico, not Haiti), who had no children and so treated him as their own. His mother’s sister was sporty and taught him how to catch and throw a ball, and her girlfriend interested in art; one of his earliest memories had been a trip with her to the Museum of Modern Art, barely listening to his aunt as she explained how Pollack had made the painting. JB was the lone classicist among them. He painted.

Willem Ragnarsson, an Actor
Willem had been a waiter at Ortolan for almost two years. Before Ortolan, he had worked the weekend brunch and weekday lunch shift at a loud popular restaurant, where the customers would ask him if she was on the menu, and then laugh, naughty and pleased with themselves. It had been a friend of his graduate school, another actor named Roman, who had recommend him to a soap opera and had quit. It was easy to tell who at Ortolan was once an actor and was now a career waiter. 

He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in lives of the beautiful and the rich. He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from Wyoming, and his leaving didn’t mean that everything he had once was erased. He was his parents’s fourth child, and the only one still lived. His sister had died of leukemia when she was two, long before Willem had been born. This had been in Sweden, when his father who was Icelandic, had been working at a fish farm, where he met his mother, who was Danish. Then there had been a move to America, and a boy named Hemming, who had been born with cerebral palsy. Hemming was eight when Willem was born.

His second year of college, Hemming had had to have an emergency appendectomy. They said they caught it just in time. The flights were expensive, much more than he had anticipated. He researched bus routes, but it took three days to get there, three days to get back, and he had midterm exams he had to take and do well in if he was keep his scholarship, and his jobs to attend to. He drunk that night, he confided in Malcom, who got out his checkbook and wrote him a check. They argued back and forth until Willem finally accepted the check. Still it became important to him to repay Malcom somehow, even though he knew Malcom wouldn’t accept his money. It was Jude who had the idea of putting the money directly into Malcom’s wallet, and so every two weeks after he had cashed his check from the restaurant, he had stuff the money into it while Malcom was asleep. He never quite knew it Malcom noticed- he spent it so quickly, but Willem took some satisfaction and pride in doing it. 

One morning, a week later, his mother called: Hemming had died. When he was in graduate school, they died, in the same year: his father of a heart attack in January and his mother of a stroke the following October. The rancher who had employed his parents had long ago died, but his son, who now, owned the ranch, had always treated them well, and it had been he who employed them long after he might reasonably be expected to, and he who paid for their funerals as well.

His feeling for Jude were complicated. He loved – that part was simple- feared for him, and sometimes felt as much his older brother and protector as his friend. They all loved Jude and admired him.

Malcom Irvine, an Architect
Race had always been a challenge for Malcom, but their sophomore year, he had hit upon what he considered a brilliant cop-0ut: he wasn’t black; he was post-black. Malcom had convinced that racial discomfort he felt was temporary thing. He had never felt any particular agita about or pride in being black. His father had been the third black managing director at this investment firm, the third black trustee at the very white boys’s preparatory school that Malcom had attended, the second black CFO of a major commercial bank.

In fact, it wasn’t until college that he was made truly confront the different ways in which blackness had been experienced by other people, and perhaps more stunningly, how part his family’s money had set him from the rest of the country. Even today, almost a decade after meeting him, he still had trouble comprehending the sort of poverty that had been raised in- his belief when he finally realized that the backpack Jude arrived to college with had contained. Race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college.

Money he set aside. He would inherit a huge amount, but he would like to make money, he would. He wasn’t one of those rich kids who tortured himself about it. In his early twenties, he had tried falling in and out of love with various people. He often thought that being gay was attractive mostly for its accompanying accessories, its collection of political opinions and causes and its embrace of aesthetics. He fancied himself already half in love with Willem, and at various point in love with Jude too. He had gone to architecture school for the worst reason of all, it seemed: because he loved buildings. He was twenty-eight; his imagination had deserted him; he was now a copyist.

Jude Saint Francis, a Lawyer
Side in a town house not far from Malcom’s parents, where he tutored a twelve-year-old boy named Felix. The boy’s father was a friend of Malcom’s parents, and it had been Malcom’s father who had gotten him the job. Mr. Irvine’s law school friends, who know over one of the city’s more powerful firms. That person was Howard Baker, who hired him after interviewing him for fifteen distracted minutes to tutor his son in Latin, math, German, and piano. He felt sorry for Felix. The loneliness of Felix’s life, of a Saturday spent sitting with a cripple nearly thirty-year-old lawyer who was there to earn money, and who would go out that night with people he loved.

Jude knew French and German, he was good in math, and he could play piano and sing. He knew how to help birth a calf, rewired the lamp. He had never been to a movie. He had never owned a computer or a phone. His silence was both a necessity and a protection. He admired all of his three roommates, but Willem was the one he trusted. At home, he had quickly learned there were three types of boys: The first might cause the fight (this was JB). The second type would join in, but wouldn’t run to get help, either (this was Malcom). And the third type was would actually try to help you out (this was the rarest type, and this was obviously Willem).

It had been Ana, a social worker, and the first person who had never betrayed him, who had talk to him about that he would get in. The surgeon told him, that the injury like his was an insult to the body, and one the body would never recover completely. He knew she was a social worker, who assigned to him, but it wasn’t until more than a month had passed. She oversaw his transfer into new home, his final home: the Douglasses. The family were evangelical Lutherans, but they didn’t make him attend church with them. But it was Ana who took him to most of his doctor’s appointment. Ana finally got him to write down what happened with Dr. Taylor and kept him from having to testify in court.

When he was accepted with a full scholarship. Fourteen months after they had met, she was the one in bed, she was in her illness and so weak. She said that he had nothing to be ashamed of and none of it has been his fault. It was the last thing she said before she was dead.

He had been the first to arrive in their room, when the second boy came in – it had been Malcom. It was only Ana that knew who he was, but now she was gone. His records were sealed.

Harold Stein, a Lecturer
Harold was a lecturer and the author of three books. He was trim and tall. Jude couldn’t remember anything particularly interesting he said in class, the paper he wrote that interested Harold and which led conversations with him outside the classroom, and eventually, to an offer become one of his research assistants. He began working for Harold on three afternoons and evenings in a week – on the rest of the days he had afternoon seminars at MIT, where he were getting his master’s and worked at the law library at night, and on Saturdays he worked in the library in the morning and in the afternoons at a bakery.

It had been Harold who encouraged him to apply. Judge Sullivan was known among his fellow circuit court judges for always hiring one clerk whose political views diverged from his own, the more vividly the better. Jude when to Washington for interview to be Sullivan’s clerk. Malcom had given him two of his old cotton suits, which he’d tailored and worn throughout both of his summer internships, but he had borrow his roommate’s suit for the Sullivan’s interview. Harold bought him a new suit, the generosity of Harold’s gift unsettled him. 

Harold lived in a three-story house in Cambridge, he bought the house just before he got divorced. He invited Jude for dinner. Julia was from an academic family from Oxford and had lived in America since graduate school at Standford; she and Harold had met five years ago through a friend. Harold wanted to know how he had been raised, he was greedy for information. Yet despite his discomfort, Jude kept coming back to Harold and kept accepting his dinner invitations. He was introduced to Harold’s best friend, Laurence, who was now an appellate court judge in Boston, and his wife, who taught English. 

As the months and then years passed, they developed a friendship in which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken. A year after Harold’s son, Jacob, died, they had their first conversation. The divorce was very clean, very easy. His ex-wife, Liesl, moved to Portland, remarried. She was teaching at medical school. And then one day, she called him. It had been sixteen years. She was in town for a conference, and asked him if he wanted to have a lunch. She told him about her husband, an epidemiologist, and he told her about Julia. She had another child, a girl. When her daughter graduated from college, she sent him an announcement. He loved Julia, she was a scientist too, but she was always so different form Liesl.  

Andy, an Orthopedic Surgeon and a Friend
A few years after meeting Andy, when he was in law school. Andy was the only person he had been naked in front of as an adult, the only person who was familiar with every physical of his body. Andy had been a resident when they met, and he stayed in Boston for his fellowship, and his post-fellowship, and then he moved to New York within months of each other. He was an orthopedic surgeon, but he treated him for everything, from chest colds to his back and leg problems. He knew that he and Andy had gone to the same college, and that Andy was a decade older than he, and that Andy’s father was Gujarati and his mother was Welsh, and he had grown up in Ohio. He had met Andy’s parents as well.  

The fight had concerned what Andy had retroactively come to consider a botched a suicide attempt. This had been right before New Year’s and he had been cutting himself, he had cut too close to a vein, bloody mess into which he had been forced to involve Willem.

Jude’s Childhood
Before New York there had been law school, and before that, college, there was Philadelphia, slow trip across country, and before that, there was Montana, and the boys’ home, and before Montana was Southwest, and the motel rooms, and the lonely stretches of road and the hours spent in the car. And before that was South Dakota and the monastery.

It was Brother Peter, who taught him math, and was always reminding him of his good fortune, who told him he had been found in a garbage can. Later, Brother Michael claimed that wasn’t true. He was next to the trash bin. He reminded him, he came, and he was there, and he should concentrate on his future, and not on the past. The state couldn’t find anyone to take him. He was lucky they had found him. None of local hospitals had recorded a recent live birth that matched his description. So there were none, clearly. He was alone. Brother Luke was his favorite of the brothers, who rarely spoke and scolded him.

Brother Luke was responsible for the monastery’s garden and green house, and in the warm months, he would help him with small tasks. He knew from eavesdropping on the other brothers that Brother Luke had been a rich man before he had come to monastery. But then something happened, or he had done something. It was Brother Luke’s money that had paid for the green house. Mostly the other brothers avoided Luke made him think he might him be bad, although Brother Luke was never bad, not to him. He stole Brother Peter’s comb, he stole food, and he stole more and more. He had been beaten, Father Gabriel had hit him in the face for screaming.

When he regained consciousness, he was back in his bed. He was caught again, he was made to go to Father Gabriel’s office every night and take off his clothes, and the father would examine inside him for any contraband. And later, the things got worse, he would have tantrums, throwing himself against the stone walls of the monastery and screaming as loudly as he could. They hit him, they started keeping a belt looped on a nail on the school room wall. He started wetting his bed, and was made to go visit the father more often, and the more examinations the father gave him, the more he wet the bed. The father began visiting him in his room, and so did Brother Peter, and later Brother Matthew.

The year after he arrived in Montana, when he was thirteen, the home had participated in a tristate adoption fair. He had no tricks, he had no skills, he couldn’t charm. Mrs. Leary was fat, but her husband was simply big. They chose him, they said, because he seemed quite and polite; they wanted someone hardworking. The beatings got worse, the sessions got worse, and the lectures got worse. Increasingly he was becoming convinced that the brothers were going to get rid of him, and he was terrified, because the monastery was the only home he had ever had.

Run Away from Monastery and Brother Luke
He thought Brother Luke was his only hope. In his nine year old, they left the monastery. The brother promised him a new life to build a cabin in Texas. After they crossed in Nebraska, Brother Luke changed his appearance, and he also made Jude looked like every other boy now.

Brother Luke had been a math professor before he came to monastery, but he wanted to work with children, and so he had later taught sixth grade. But he knew about other subjects as well: history and books and music and languages. He knew so much more than the other brothers. Brother forbade him to watch television as long in the motel room. He brought a piano keyboard in his car and practiced him. They run out money, the brother told him to do what he did to Father Gabriel and the other brothers. Luke had gone to the bathroom, Jude and the man had had sex and then the man left. Brother Luke brought him more clients. Sometimes there was just one, but sometimes there were several.

Months passed. After many motels and many clients, they moved every ten days. He had volunteered for this, it was for cabin in the woods, where he would have his own loft. Now one bed was used for clients, and the other was theirs. Brother promised wanted to marry him, make a family, and raise kid. He had no longer thought of the cabin, he wanted back to monastery. He would sometimes cry and pray to be taken away. They left Texas together, the brother told him the forests in Washington was better. For months, years, he had struggled with clients. The brother told him have to show a little life when he was with client.

He was tiring and growing. He began throwing himself into walls. After the fall, he was returning himself to something pure. He got the bruises, the brother worried about the clients. The brother said he would teach him secret. Brother Luke was right: the cutting made him feeling better. When he did it, it was as if he was draining away the filth, the rage inside him. He was so dependent on Luke: for his food, for his protection, and now for his razor.

They were in Montana, when a police caught Brother Luke. The social worker, Ana told him that Luke was a monster, a pedophile. Before he turned fourteen, the counselor not only hit him, but also raped him, then he had been hospitalized. Not so long, he discovered Luke was dead. 

He run away from the shelter, the boy’s home, after he did self-defense from another counselor. As an adult, as a crippled adult, he run away. He had no roof, only street prostitute, he had gotten sick, he hadn’t know if it was from his time on the road. A man saved him from the street. Dr. Taylor gave him food and heal his illness. But the psychiatrist did worse thing to him, not only sex slave but hit him badly. No longer would he trust people so quickly. He was brought to hospital and Dr. Taylor was arrested. 

Ever since his first day of college, he had feared that someday someone from his past-a client; one of the boys from the home-would try to contact him. The people who knew him most, who had witnessed and made it-Brother Luke; Dr. Taylor; even Ana- were dead. He was safe.

The Adoption
After a decade, Harold wanted to adopt Jude as his legal son to inherit his wealth. JB made a lot of unfunny jokes, Malcom asked increasingly granular questions that he couldn’t answer. Andy said parents are pains but of course great too. Willem agreed. 

He felt wonderful, like a different person. He was someone’s son, and the times the knowledge of that is so overwhelming that he imagined it was manifesting itself physically.
Now, fifteen years after the four of them graduated, Jude had begun using the wheelchair regularly, the first time he had to in four years, since he was thirty-one. He had infection in his leg and it made it painful for him to walk long distances. Since he bought the apartment a year ago, he had spent a total of six weeks there.

JB did drugs but he was not an addict. When he was thirty-two, he had had his first show. He had become a genuinely, a star. There were articles written about him in the art press. But his friendship with Jude and Willem had been ruined. He had done something bad, and Willem had taken Jude’s side. The two of them, Jude and Willem had been their own unit, united against everyone. Malcom had eventually started dating a girl, and they made their own unit. He had always known he would be the first among the four of them to be a success. He worked harder than Malcom, he was more ambitious than Willem. (He didn’t count Jude in this race, as Jude’s profession was one operated on an entirely different set of metrics, one that didn’t much matter to him.)

Before the adoption, JB had warned him about the possibly really bad physical abuse. They noticed he never took off his clothes. The next day, he asked Laurence if he could find out if he had any juvenile records on his name. Laurence’s search turned up nothing. Malcom had been working on a project in Beijing. Willem had been in LA filming on his actual birthday.
The loneliness was a recent discovery, and was different from the other lonelinesses he had experienced. He now had nothing to fear. Now he protected himself: he had his own apartment with its triple-locked doors, and he had money. He had parents and he had friends.

He met a man at the party. Caleb just moved to the city from London, where he had spent the past decade as the president of a fashion label. He was forty-nine, and hadn’t lived in New York since he was in his thirties. He too went to law school. Caleb had recognized Jude’s face from JB Marion’s painting. The creative director at his last company owned it. A few weeks after they had started seeing each other, Caleb was disappointed to discover he was limp. But as much as Caleb hated his walk, he loathed his wheelchair. He didn’t like the fact that he was in wheel chair.

Caleb had come over in daylight, he had given him a tour of the apartment. He was proud of the apartment, and every day he was grateful to be in it. Malcom had kept Willem’s suite- as they called it-where it had been. And then there was the sex, which was worse than he had imagined. He liked Caleb’s solidity, his physical strength. He liked watching him moved like Willem.

The first time Caleb hit him, he was both surprised and not. He didn’t say anything, just whirled around and struck him. The next day his face began to turn colors, he made up a story. He was no longer human, he was a wolf. He was nothing to Caleb, he was prey, and he was disposable. In the weeks after the beating, he worked on forgetting Caleb. Willem had travelled a lot for his movies, he also had some girls. But it was Willem that expressed his feeling to him. Jude was so confused, but he realized Willem wasn’t Caleb. He was happy now, he had a little life, and he had Willem. But it was only in short term, both Willem and Malcom were in a car accident. He was so in despair, he cut himself again.

When he was younger, the cutting might took a few weeks to heal. But now it took months. He was back to cutting himself only once a week now. He was fifty-one, and Willem had been dead for eight months. It was a car accident that took Willem and Malcom. And now JB was sixty-one, Harold was eighty four, and JB had been dead for six years, and Jude had been dead for nine. JB’s most recent show was called “Jude, Alone”, there was fifteen painting of just him, imagined moments from the years after Jude died.

Harold cleaned out his stuff, he found an envelope. He should read his note from decade ago, from the first day adoption. It was eight pages long, and typed, and it was a confession; of Brother Luke, and Dr. Taylor, and what happened to him. All the answers he wanted about who and why he was, and now those answer only torment. He died so alone.

*****
May 6, 2017



Sekapur Sirih

Buku fiksi sangat bagus dalam segi penulisan, luar biasa sehingga sangat layak mendapatkan penghargaan dari Inggris dan menjadi nominasi dari tiga penghargaan karya. Kisah drama sentimen yang mengharukan. Persahabatan empat orang dari satu kampus, yang merantau dan akhirnya sukses pada bidang masing-masing.

Tokoh utama, Jude, seorang pengacara pincang, walau sudah sukses ia masih dihantui masa lalu yang kelam. Pelecehan seks yang dialami sejak kecil hingga remaja membuatnya berkali-kali melukai badannya dan ingin bunuh diri. Kebiasaan menyakiti diri sebagai pelepasan siksaan dan penebusan dosa dan rasa jijik terhadap dirinya. 

Karya ini menggambarkan persahabatan, kehidupan modern kota besar, percintaan, hubungan gay, kekeluargaan, keputusasaan, kebahagiaan, matematika, hukum, pelukis, arsitek, kekerasan, seks dan pelecehan seks, pekerja keras, keberhasilan, realita kehidupan, kasih, semua dirangkai dalam kisah memilukan, diterbitan dari Picador, Inggris tahun 2015, setebal 720 halaman. 


Ringkasan dalam Bahasa Indonesia: A little Life (Sepenggal Kehidupan) karya Hanya Yanagihara

Empat anak muda baru saja lulus dari sebuah universitas di Boston, merantau ke kota impian New York. Keempatnya baru saja sepakat menyewa apartemen paling murah. Keempatnya telah terbiasa satu kamar ketika kuliah, ada JB, pemuda keturunan Haiti yang berambisi menjadi pelukis terkenal. Jude seorang pengacara lumpuh, Malcom, sarjana arsitek, dan si tampan Willem lulusan sekolah akting yang ingin menjadi aktor ternama.

Dari keempatnya, hanya Malcom yang memiliki rumah apalagi di kota New York, ayahnya adalah seorang direktur pada perusahaan terkemuka, walau ia anak orang kaya, ia ingin menghasilkan uang sendiri. Sebelum masuk kuliah, ia tidak pernah bangga dengan warna kulitnya. Ia melabel dirinya sebagai hitam modern. Tetapi isu warna kulit meredup, ketika ia bertemu teman-teman di kampus. Apalagi Jude, walau berkulit putih. tapi dari ranselnya pertama kali masuk kampus sangat mengenaskan. Akhirnya ia pun mensyukuri apa yang ia miliki, orang tua, fasilitas yang dimilikinya sejak kecil. Impiannya menjadi arsitek, simple saja hanya karena ia suka gedung. Ia sekarang menjadi seorang tukang foto kopi di sebuah perusahaan arsitektur.  

Berbeda halnya dengan Jean-Baptiste (JB), anak satu-satunya dan sangat dimanja oleh bibi, dan neneknya. Ayahnya seorang perantau dari Haiti dan telah meninggal dunia saat ia masih kecil. Ia tidak sempat mengenalnya. Ibunya, seorang guru, berprestasi. Setiap Minggu, JB berkereta api pulang ke rumah, membawa cucian yang selalu dibereskan neneknya, menikmati makanan berlimpah dan gratis. Sekali-kali ia membawa temannya yang lain. Bibinya, adik ibunya seorang polisi di New York menyayangi dan mengajarinya banyak hal.

Willem anak pekerja dan pengelola peternakan di Wyoming. Ayahnya dalah perantau dari Swedia, ibunya seorang wanita Denmark, keduanya bertemu saat bekerja di sebuah pertenakan di Eropa. Ia adalah anak bungsu dari empat bersaudara dan yang masih hidup. Orang tuanya masih menggunakan bahasa Swedia di rumah, hidup pas-pasan. Willem seorang rupawan, sangat bersedih atas kematian kakaknya yang sakit bertahun-tahun. Tetap ia tidak punya ongkos pulang, Malcom memberinya ongkos pesawat, karena via kalau perjalanan bis memakan waktu tiga hari. Tetap ia tidak bisa menerima begitu saja, ia menggantinya secara diam-diam memasukkan setiap gaji mingguannya ke dompet anak orang kaya itu. Malcom tidak pernah menyadarinya.

Wajahnya tampan dan menarik, dengan kaki pincang, ia selalu menarik perhatian.  Ketiganya mengagumi dan menyayanginya. Jude, dia anak panti yang tidak pernah mengetahui siapa ayah ibunya. Dia sangat handal kalkulus dan mengambil kuliah matematika di luar sekolah hukum yang ditekuninya. Dosennya dan juga penulis buku bernama Harold merekrutnya sebagai salah seorang dari asisten penelitinya.

Masa lalu tinggal di biara Katholik, ia handal dalam mengerjakan pekerjaan rumah, pengalaman hidup berpindah-indah mengajarinya cara menolong sapi melahirkan, berkebun, bertani. Menurut Romo Gabriel, ia hanya ditemukan di dekat tempat sampah tidak jauh dari tembok biara. Walau sudah dilakukan penelusuran, polisi tidka berhasil siapaorang tuanya. Rumah sakit dan klinik persalinan telah dicek, tapi tak satu pun cocok dengan bayi Jude.  

Ia anak yang penurut, tetapi terkadang jahil mencuri sisir seorang Frather, ia pun dihukum. Karena sering kelaparan ia kerap mencuri makanan, dan hukuman semakin kerap pula ia terima. Kelapa biara, selalu memanggilmya ke kantor bahkan walaupun tidak bersalah. Ia tidak pernah mengetahui bahwa itu adalah sebuah pelecehan seks. Frater-frater lainnya pun melakukannya secara bergiliran dan dialaminya menahun.

Dia tidak sanggup melayani mereka dan pukulan-pukulan kerap diterima, tetapi ia tidak tahu harus kemana, biara adalah tempat satu-satunya yang ia ketahui. Apalagi para frater sering mengingatkannya: dunia luar sangat jahat. Frater Luke yang bertugas dalam pertamanan, memperlakukannya dengan baik, menurutnya ia adalah orang yang paling baik padanya. Frater lain sering mengingatkannya agar menjauhi frater itu. Karena yang mengingatkannya juga sering memukuimya, ia merasa lebih nyaman dengan Frater Luke: tidak pernah memarahi dan memukulinya. Ia dengar Frater Luke adalah orang kaya, hanya karena sesuatu atau ia melakukan sesuatu ia bergabung dalam biara.

Pada usianya mendekati ke sembilan tahun, keduanya berhasil melarikan diri dari biara. Hidup dari satu motel satu ke motel lain, terkadang tinggal di jalanan dalam mobil. Mereka pun kehabisan uang. Frater Luke memintanya melakukan seperti apa yang ia kerap lakukan pada Romo Gabriel dan para frater lainnya, tapi ini untuk bertahan hidup. Frater Luke selalu berdiam di kamar mandi, saat Jude sedang bekerja. Kehidupan ini berlangsung berbulan-bulan hingga menahun.

Janji mendirikan kabin di hutan Texas pun akhirnya terwujud, tetapi tidak membuatnya bahagia, ia lelah melayani tetamu. Ia menyesal meninggalkan biara. Dengan kelihaiannnya, Frater Luke menjanjikan menikahinya, membuat rumah dan keluarga kalau usianya enam belas tahun. Motel demi motel, ratusan tamu ia layani, membuatnya lelah dan jenuh, apalagi ia kini bertambah dewasa. Ia merssa senang melemparkan badannya ke tembok, saat terjatuh dan terluka membuatnya merasa lega dari rasa malu dan jijik pada dirinya. Frater Luke memberinya solusi dengan mengajari menyayat tangannya. Ia pun merasa nyaman.

Hingga akhirnya polisi berhasil menangkap Frater Luke, dan Jude dimasukkan di dalam rumah penampungan. Ia bersekolah, Jude adalah anak yang pintar dan berbakat, Frater Luke mengajarinya sejarah, matematika, piano, Bahasa Jerman, Latin, dan Bahasa Perancis. Sebelum masuk di lingkungan biara, ia adalah professor, ingin menjari anak anak, ia suka anak-anak.

Dalam penampungan, ia juga mengalami hal yang sama, bahkan lebih buruk dari para konselornya, siksaan membuatnya ia pincang. Ia pun melarikan diri. Ditemukan seorang dokter bernama Dr. Taylor dalam keadaan sakit, berbagai penyakit berdiam di tubuhnya. Awalnya sang dokter baik, namun ia pun disiksa, dan dijadikan budak seks. Dia nyaris mati, berakhir di rumah sakit, Dr, Taylor ditangkap. Pekerja sosial bernama Ana menolongnya. Ia pun ditempatkan pada sebuah keluarga yang baik hingga akhirnya ia cukup umur dan bekerja pada toko roti. Ana-lah yang meyakinkan ia harus kuliah di Boston.

Sekarang masa lalunya sudah aman, baik Frater Luke, Dr. Taylor, dan pekerja sosial, Ana, wanita satu-satunya ia percayai untuk menumpahkan segala kisahnya; ketiga telah meninggal. Dalam puncak karirnya ia masih saja dibayangi perasaan takut, jika tiba-tiba ada mantan tamunya mempermalukannya. Perasaan kotor dan bersalah tetap menghantui dirinya, makin sering melukai badanya hingga mengkuatirkan ketiga teman. Tetapi ia tetap tidak pernah berterus terang. Ayah angkatnya, juga dosennya, Harold; kekasihnya Willem, juga sahabat terdekatnya; serta dua sahabat lainnya yakni JB dan Malcom.

Karirnya pun meroket di New York, begitu juga dengan Willem, sahabat terdekatnya, menjadi aktor ternama. Nama dan foto dirinya juga masuk dalam berita, keduanya menjadi sepasang kekasih. Willem adalah orang yang sangat mengerti dirinya dan membuatnya nyaman, walau JB yang juga seorang gay sempat menggodanya, ia menolaknya. Dia sempat menjadi hubungan dengan Caleb Porter, seorang manajer fashion berlabel.

Pengalaman pahit kembali ia alami; siksaan dan pukulan kerap diterimanya. Lelaki modis itu tidak terima dengan kepincangan Jude, ia pertama melihat dan tertarik pada Jude saat ia posisi duduk. Kebrutalan itu membuat ia kehilangan beberapa giginya, dan dirawat di rumah sakit dan beberapa tahun kemudian ia membaca orbituri Caleb di koran. Secara tragis Willem dan Malcom tewas dalam kecelakaan, duka kembali menyelimuti hidupnya. Ia kembali melukai dirinya.

Kisah kelamnya ia tutup rapat, hingga pada akhirnya, setelah kematiannya dan tiga teman lainnya; di usia Harold yang ke 84, ia menemukan sebuah surat ditujukan padanya; isinya tentang sebuah pengakuan dari biara: Frater Luke, Dr. Taylor, dan perjalanan kehidupannya. Ayah angkatnya tidak sanggup dengan jawaban pertanyaan yang sering ia tanyakan selama ini, Harold merasa gagal dan sedih. 

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6 Mei 2017