Children of Arable

by David Belden

After 20 years of pleasant, egalitarian, genderless civilization on the thousand plus planets of the Collectivity where babies are made only in baby labs, nine people decide to make their own babies in their own bodies. Eight can. One can not. So the concepts "woman" and "man" regain flesh. Only "woman" can. And so men had to start controlling women all over again, didn't they? The birthing circle would have remained a cozy elite fad but for Martin. Born on a green world, transferred to a metalbound city planet, she wanted to bring love and freedom to the whole galaxy. Jomo, the humble soy processor, who loved her, saw her astonishing transformation into a revolutionary. This is his story about her, told to their grandchildren. Martin is catapulted from her home farm into a galactic web of holie ghosts, pirates, buttoned-down followers of the Space Code, anarchists, sexless wraiths whose telekinetic powers spin the spaceships across the galaxy, spherical aliens and MAN, the virtual guru who keeps everyone under control. Gendering is a trilogy of stories about gender and God, revolution and religion. First published in 1987, Children of Arable is fully revised for this new edition as the first of the Gendering series.

Genres: Science Fiction

289 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 6, 1987

Reviews

[Sol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary:
On the agricultural planet Arable, a young woman Mariammo attains high marks on a galactic economics exam, and is chosen to go to Tarcuna, one of the of central planets of the Collectivity. This would separate her from her forbidden lover, a young man in her peer group, Mesfun, and they have sex one last time. An old woman Pao, who believes humanity must find a new way to live outside of the Collectivity's Space Code in order to thrive, advises her to run away with Mesfun. Mesfun accepts his punishment and refuses, while Mariammo contemplates suicide in the wilderness, but is found and sent off.

On the way to Tarcuna, Mariammo meets a wraith named Jagdish, who calls her Havuswai, acting as though he had already met her, and creates artistic images of Arable using his psychic powers. Upon arriving at Tarcuna, Mariammo finds that her name is mysteriously missing from the registry, and she is renamed Martin upon arrival. Taller and stronger than normal, she has trouble fitting in among the extremely homogeneous Tarcunans. She embarrasses herself in a bathhouse by coming onto a young man Jomo, who is horrified by her touchiness.

The story of Martin talking to a wraith reaches the actors of Tarcuna, who invite her to the premiere of a new "holie" movie. There she sees the pregnant actor Chiamay, and faints in shock. She is awoken by Xidas, a high-ranking bureaucrat and associate of the actors, who tells her of how Chiamay took method acting to an extreme by having her sterilization reversed to portray a pregnant mother. Martin runs off in shock, going to MAN, but manages to keep some secrets from it. Afterwards, she attempts to enter the gathering place of the actors, the Top of the Planet Café. She is refused entry and sneaks in, but is eventually captured.

She is awoken by Xidas, and they have sex. Reawakening afterwards, she meets Sunal, a psychologist associate of the actors and the genetic daughter of the highest ranking person in the Collectivity, Rosa of the First Committee. Sunal explains more of the situation, and reveals that she too is pregnant. Xidas catches up with them, and Martin exclaims that she also wants a baby, causing him to slap her.

Martin approaches Jomo in the softroom and begins having sex with him, and tells him of her past. Xidas is apologetic to Martin, transferring her to the Precious Metals department, and the two continue having sex. After Martin elaborates her theory of how the Collectivity's stasis and constant expansion is endangering humanity, and that familial and emotional relationships must be reintroduced, Chiamay is reluctant to induct Martin into the Birthing Circle, but goes into labour immediately, and Martin assists in the delivery. Afterwards, Martin is inducted. Jomo has a dream of giving birth, and is invited to a dinner with the actors, but humiliates himself when he announces his intention to have a baby, exposing his ignorance, and afterwards has a dream of Martin expanding into the size of a galaxy, and himself shrinking into a featureless stick man.

Jomo and Martin have several missed connections, and Martin's sterilization is reversed. Before Martin can get a custom MAN program for Jomo, he goes to MAN and exposes what she has been doing, and Martin is punished with a year-long stint of inspecting mining colonies on the ship Joy of Space. Jomo goes to the actors' quarters to try and apologize, and meets Chiamay and her infant daughter Victor, and helps take care of her. Neerja, the Birthing Circle's medic, finds that Martin's sterilization implant had already been non-functional for several months.

Martin finds the monotony of ship life almost intolerable, and is unable to get any real information from the mining colonies. She is brought down to one, Copper Six ("Old Gory") due to a miners' strike. While the crew attempts to negotiate, Martin is led away by a group of miners, who she attempts to talk to, but is gang-raped instead. She is rescued by Suresh, a leader among the miners, and he nurses her back to health. She begins falling in love with him. Xidas arrives to quell the rebellion, and promises that if they agree to a lesser set of concessions, he will remember them when he is more powerful and direct resources to their planet. The strike is ended, but Suresh disappears, and Xidas cuts her punishment short by 10 months. After vomiting on him, Martin is able to remain on Copper Six to recuperate from illness rather than return with Xidas, but she realizes she is pregnant, thinking Suresh is the father.

Eventually, Martin is able to catch up with the Joy of Space, but it is attacked by pirates. Martin takes up arms, killing pirates and grievously wounding Suresh, who is among them. Though the shipboard pirates are defeated, Suresh informs them that wraiths of the planet Starlight have teleported the ship away, and that they can either surrender, or remain on the ship until their supplies run out. Martin asks Suresh to take her to Starlight, but he tells her he has a wife and child on Starlight and made a monogamous vow to her. Martin tells him her whole story, and elaborates a plan to give birth to Xidas' child, introduce childbearing to the Tarcunan elite, and give her a close connection and leverage with Xidas.

Martin and a Collectivity wraith, Prakash are sent back on a lifeship, with a cover story of being the only survivors of the attack. Though initially unable to communicate with Prakash, who is dying due to close contact with a normal human, the two bond over art, and Prakash gives Martin a psychic vision of her son in utero. The two return to the Collectivity, and Prakash prevents Martin's pregnancy from being discovered by a medical scan, allowing Martin to become famous on the military planet Karp, though her pregnancy is discovered on Tarcuna. This prompts Rosa to end the Birthing Circle, sever the parental relationships and abort the pregnancies.

While Martin was away, Jomo and Chiamay falls in love as the two parented her daughter Victor, and Jomo has his sterilization reversed, planning to have a child with Chiamay. Martin returns to the Circle just as Jiang Qing, leader of the actors, implements Rosa's orders. Martin consents to having her 6 month fetus aborted, Sunal is separated from her son José, and Chiamay is separated from Victor, dying of suicide within a year.

Two weeks later, Martin contacts Jomo, and the two meet. She tells him of her plans to reshape the Collectivity, and Jomo attacks her, though Martin fends him off. She tells him of how the child was in fact Mesfun's and not Suresh's, and her plan to become married to Xidas, bear his children and how he has consented to give her a planet to run as an experiment in birthing. She and Jomo have sex one last time, though he does not tell her he is fertile.

Jomo does not meet Martin for 15 years, who leverages her fame into further political power, and gives birth to Jomo's son, Mesfun. Xidas becomes leader of First Committee after the death of Rosa, but proves infertile and has no children with Martin. Martin develops the experimental colony Pair o' Dice, where she and Sunal raise Mesfun. Martin secretly plans a wide scale rebellion against the Collectivity, using her contacts with Starlight to foment discontent on outlying planets. When shortages from these rebellions start to be felt on Tarcuna, Jomo takes part in a counter protest on Tarcuna, where he is injured but rescued by Martin. She takes him away on a ship to a space station where the final stage of her plan takes place, a strike of the wraiths. The wraiths of the Collectivity cease to move any ships, paralyzing its economy and leaving many worlds with only a few weeks of supplies.

Victory seems assured, but the wraiths decide not to complete the strike. Xidas orders nuclear attacks against Pair o' Dice and Starlight, and the wraiths send Jomo and Martin to Starlight, whose wraiths are able to create a psychic field which will repel the explosions. Appearing in orbit around Starlight, a ship shields Jomo, who lets go of Martin's hand, and she is killed. Jomo is taken to Starlight. Pair o' Dice suffers full nuclear attack, but Mesfun and some others survive. He revives patriarchal religion and mythologizes his mother Martin as Mary, and claims she was guided by God but was betrayed by the wraiths. He renames the planet Arable Two, and reinterprets its former name as Paradise. He has three children, Geishangdi, Tiannu, and Passarin.

After several decades, Arable Two is rediscovered by Paradise, and diplomatic relations are established. Jomo begins writing the story of Martin to his grandchildren, but the eldest Geishangdi rejects the tale as blasphemy, while Tiannu and Passarin are curious but only partially comprehending. Jomo sends more letters in secret, but the letters are discovered in Passarin's bedroom, and the final letter is never delivered. Consumed with guilt over the death of Martin, he kills himself. Years later, Passarin is rehabilitated and made ambassador to Starlight, where he discovers Jomo's final letter.


The first in a series with author's other novel, To Warm the Earth , the two can be read independently, and I read the second book without knowing it was part of a series. This one forms a perfectly fine "prequel" to that story, giving background to the events and backstory for some of the minor characters in To Warm the Earth.

While some superficial elements are similar to the second book (both feature a young woman from a backwater planet, who undergoes name changes and travels in the Collectivity, then works to undermine its system), the telling is very different. This story is told in a semi-epistolary format, presented as the writings of a man Jomo, who recounts the tale of the revolutionary Martin from a combination of personal experience, Martin's recollections to him, outside sources, and his own imagination. He occasionally interjects to relate his thoughts and feelings on events since, and receives letters from his grandchildren, the recipients of the main text. Though the telling is less straightforward, the events of Children of Arable are more conventionally science fictional, with less of the mysticism and feminism featured in the second book. The underlying story is more straightforward, with fewer of the occasional contrived turns needed to make To Warm the Earth's plot work. The characters are fewer, though about as well drawn.

The darkness of the overall story shocked me. Having read the second book, I was already aware that Martin's revolution failed, but the book ends with barely a glimmer of hope that Martin's ideals might inspire Passarin. The tragedy of Jomo's life and his suicide was the last thing I was expecting. I feel also that something was meant by Martin's manner of death. She works in favour of freedom in the abstract, but only according to a carefully managed plan of her own making. The old woman from TWTE also had a convoluted plan, which went very wrong. It was the unplanned actions of Mana and Passarin in the sequel that seem like they could lead to Martin's hoped for outcome.

There is a strain of punny wordplay throughout this book (the actors are "holie rollers", bureaucrats exiled from the central systems are "ex-centric", and the Pair o' Dice's name change) that was either absent from the sequel or somehow escaped my notice completely.

[James]

After 20 years of pleasant, egalitarian, genderless civilization on the thousand plus planets of the Collectivity where babies are made only in baby labs, nine people decide to make their own babies in their own bodies. Eight can. One can not. So the concepts "woman" and "man" regain flesh. Only "woman" can. And so men had to start controlling women all over again, didn't they? The birthing circle would have remained a cozy elite fad but for Martin. Born on a green world, transferred to a metalbound city planet, she wanted to bring love and freedom to the whole galaxy. Jomo, the humble soy processor, who loved her, saw her astonishing transformation into a revolutionary. This is his story about her, told to their grandchildren. Martin is catapulted from her home farm into a galactic web of holie ghosts, pirates, buttoned-down followers of the Space Code, anarchists, sexless wraiths whose telekinetic powers spin the spaceships across the galaxy, spherical aliens and MAN, the virtual guru who keeps everyone under control. Gendering is a trilogy of stories about gender and God, revolution and religion. First published in 1987, Children of Arable is fully revised for this new edition as the first of the Gendering series.