| Author: | Colin Kapp |
| Copyright: | 1982 |
| Date Reviewed: | 10/5/86 |
| Rating: | 6.0 |
Synopsis: Maq Ancor, Sine Anura and Cherry, the A-Team of Solaria, are exploring again. It all begins when their benefactor, Land-a, links with Zeus for rejuvenation. Land-a senses the inner conscience of the great artificial intelligence and there he finds fear. Something or someone has usurped his power on the Neptune Shell and has virtually stopped the outward flow of immigrants from the over populated inner shells.
While pretending to be rich business tycoons on the Saturn shell, our crew secretly readies their tiny but fast ship, the Shellback, for another expedition. They leave just before the law finds them. Before reaching the Uranus shell, the crew encounters what appears to be an escaped cageworld planet in deep space with some sort of field around it. They go in to investigate but are violently thrown back into space. The planet is made of antimatter and the glow surrounding it is the destruction of the interstellar hydrogen around its atmosphere. They can't land there.
While searching for the volcano structure of a Cageworld on the inner face of the Uranus shell, the Shellback crew finds a small colony of about a thousand people. There is no gravity on the inner surface of a shell. These people are trying to prove that it can be made self sufficient for future generations. The situation on the other side must be very crowded for a such a desperate attempt. Unfortunately numbers are much too small to make much of a difference.
The Shellback finally finds a cageworld and reaches the other side only to be fired upon by the inhabitants who want the knowledge of the only ship that can travel between shells. Such an attack is common by now and the crew defeats the aggressors with ease. A truce is made and they land on the shell to find it overcrowded like the Jupiter shell they visited on their last mission. It is on this shell that immigration has almost stopped because of some force further up the line. Marq relays the dire situation of the other shells to one of the local presidents who comes to a most terrible decision. In order to reduce the population, he's going to have to launch a nuclear war. It is the only way a few can survive.
Back in inner space, towards the Neptune shell the crew encounters a giant eye in space. The eye is ahead of them and tracking them. Marq launches a diffraction meson weapon which explodes on contact with the eye. The eye blinks, becomes bloodshot, and withdraws. The Tyrant on the Neptune shell can build a giant telescope/microscope powerful enough to study one tiny ship in the immense regions of inner space. The Tyrant's power must be even greater than Zeus's. Finally, the inner shell is reached and we learn that there are many more Exis fields here than on previous shells. It seems this shell is much more difficult to maintain and there probably is a limit to how big the Solaria shells can be built.
The Shellback is made to dive into a cageworld volcano to reach the other side but half way down, the Exis field that protects the shape is turned off. The walls collapse onto the spinning cageworld creating a fire-storm that sends the Shellback back into inner space. They were very lucky to live through that one. Whoever is usurping Zeus's authority will stop at nothing to destroy the hand of Zeus - even if it means destroying whole sections of its own shell. The crew soon finds another safe cageworld. On this world there is a poisonous layer of ozone with and plants and people living on the surface. Everything is white.
The Shellback crew doesn't investigate but goes straight on to the outer shell. Here they find no people. Instead of the swarming cities or huge expanses of farmland, whole areas are natural forests. Even the Exis spokes are planted in wilderness regions instead of being in the center of huge metropolises. The ship lands and the crew meets an unusual man named Carim Carim who wears a red hat. Back at his home, Sine and Carim go to bed. For Carim to try and control Sine through sex is a mistake. She soon comes to control him and with him, all of Neptunia. When Carim can't complete his mission, Sine becomes angry and knocks off his hat to find electrodes embedded in his skull. Whoever the usurper is, he has full control over all the people on Neptunia and all the people are in contact with each other. Carim is killed when the crew escapes.
On their way to the nearest Exis spoke, something unusual happened. The ship's altitude from the grounds seems to be decreasing yet their distance from a protostar remained the same. It was only at the last moment that they are able to escape a whole section of Neptune shell that had become free and was shot into space. Again, the Tyrant.
At the spoke, Marq and Sine are captured and given a glimpse of what it is like to be a part of the Tyrant. Apparently this is the same kind of treatment most arriving immigrants receive and they usually choose to keep going. Marq and Sine are placed in separate dark rooms with some sort of non-destructive machine over their heads. They can communicate with each other by thinking. Before the wardens can operate and make the connection permanent, Marq breaks out of his mental prison and frees Sine along with about 300 immigrants and their new leader Kyns Ala. The immigrants decide to stay on and fight for their right to live on this world.
The time finally comes for the crew to take on the Tyrant directly. The Tyrant is actually all of Zeus's local executive centers which revolted and wrote their own programs for how this shell should be managed. En route to one of the centers, Marq discovers in is computer a store of information sent by Zeus. This is new programming for one of the executive centers. If one of the centers can be reprogrammed, they'll all fall into line and back under Zeus's control. The only way to download the information is to do it manually and for that Marq and Sine must brave a storm with 200 mile per hour winds. They are successful and the tyrant is defeated. Now the immigrants can start arriving but in 70 generations this shell too will be filled and after it there may not be another. There must be a better way.
Review: I'm beginning to get bored with the "Cageworld" series although I'll eventually read the last - that being the first purchased. They've become boring because they are the same stories over and over again. Adventure stories always with the same theme. The author has a good imagination for technology but can only put it together adequately. I also get tired of the moral that is repeated ad infinitum. It seems that every 20 pages or so in each of the first three novels, the author calculates available land, population densities, total populations, radio lag delays, etc., always in an effort to show how enormous Solaria is and how bad the population growth is. Colin Kapp must love simple arithmetic.