| Author: | Colin Kapp |
| Copyright: | 1977 |
| Date Reviewed: | 12/29/85 |
| Rating: | 7.0 |
Synopsis: Some enemy, different from the aliens that the Federation has been battling for so many years, has declared war. One by one, all of the great leaders and scientists are being killed by natural causes - avalanches, falling rocket ships, etc. But the rate at which these disasters are claiming important people is much too high for this not to be a premeditated attack. To combat the enemy, Chaos Center was set up to predict when disasters would occur. The predictions are made on the basis of entropy variations.
Space Marshal Jym Wildheit is assigned the task of finding the enemy and destroying his weapon. There are only 12 Space Marshals in the Federation. They are typically more powerful than local tyrants and kings. They are responsible for keeping the peace. Each Space Marshal has his very own god sitting on his shoulder; Wildheit's is called Coul. These gods are multiple dimensional creatures. They can stop time when their symbiont Space Marshal is in trouble, and they can communicate with other gods across any distance. The gods are very old - they've been in existence since the big bang.
Wildheit's first task is to go to Mayo. During the great exodus from Earth, Mayo was inhabited by people dedicated, through selective breeding, to creating the next species of man. On Mayo is a seer whose special talent is detecting variations of chaos. The Chaos Center would require many days of computing power to detect what this seer can do in seconds. Such a seer would be a great aid in finding the Chaos Weapon. On Mayo, Wildheit meets Dabria, a man of power, who after capturing him allows the Space Marshal to escape with Roamer, the 15-year old chaos seer. It's a trap though and Wildheit's ship is destroyed. The pair is just barely saved when they are picked up by space gypsies. The Rhaqui are an interstellar motorcycle gang but they are dying out because their women can no longer bear children. They keep the gang going by amindumi - the capture and multiple rape of women who are then ceremoniously killed by the cheated wives after they give birth. This is what the Rhaqui have in mind for Roamer and when they attack, most are killed - two by Roamer's hands alone.
Wildheit and Roamer leave the Rhaqui's ship in a lifeboat just before it's destroyed by the Chaos Weapon. Almost immediately they are picked up by a spaceship that is several thousand years old and piloted by humans. The captain is Kasdeya. It seems that he and his shipmates and Dabria and Saraya (who sent Wildheit on this mission) have been around for several thousand years. They come from another universe which runs backwards from our own. They're universe will end when all the galaxies merge together. They were sent to prepare our universe for invasion but instead they mated Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal and created the human race. This invoked the Great anger in their old universe. The Rebels used time dilatation to check on the progress of the humans every few hundred years.
The rebel ship is attacked almost immediately by the common enemy, the Ra and with Roamer's help, Wildheit destroys the entire armada. The pair joins forces with the rebels and go on to destroy the Chaos Weapon. The weapon is located in the region between the two universes where normal laws of physics don't apply. Wildheit comes upon the Chaos Weapon and sees the futility of his plans to destroy it. The weapon is over 200 kilometers long and is powered by 10 black holes. When the Chaos Weapon turns on the small ship they try to escape, are attacked, and captured by a Ra ship. The crew is coated in gold as a humiliation and tortured a little bit. Wildheit shames the captain by pitting Roamer against three of the strongest Ra worriers. It isn't a fair fight - she could easily handle ten. After the fight, the prisoners are given a little more respect and are taken back to the Chaos Weapon.
The Ra know that Wildheit is the center of some future catastrophe and they try to use him to determine the nature of it. Meanwhile Kasdeya and Wildheit destroy the research station they are on and steel a ship. The Chaos Weapon is turned on the little ship and blasts it clear into the old universe. The ship survives but the blast is to much for the old universe and it begins to coalesce and destroy it itself. The end comes while most of the Ra are still in the old universe so there is little chance the Federation will be overcome. They have their work cut out for them since many thousand Ra ships did make it through. Wildheit and Kasdeya are resigned to die when the ship is pulled back to the new universe by the Mayo's. That ship is needed because it is the only one that can penetrate the barrier between the two universes. Wildheit recovers from his wounds and goes back to the interspace to rescue Roamer and finally destroy the Chaos Weapon.
Review: "The Chaos Weapon" is an acceptable novel but no great achievement. For the most part it kept my interest although it didn't seem to know when to end. Once the Ra and the old universe were destroyed it was hard to get excited about going back to the Chaos Weapon and finishing the job. I did like the concept of the gods (especially being around for such a log time) and would have liked to have learned more about them. I also like the explanation of the rise of human kind (reminiscent of "Inherit the Stars" by James P. Hogan) but it's not clear why the Ra would have sent in that mission in the first place. Some of the science in this book is questionable. I don't believe the old universe could have contracted so fast. To do so those stars would have to have been traveling much greater than the speed of light. And how did the people of Mayo ever find the power to bring the ship all the way back from another universe. The Chaos Weapon starts out as a means of holding off disasters but soon becomes a rather simple weapon of destruction.