Six Moon Dance

By Sheri S. Tepper

At a time in the future and after humanity has spread to the galaxy, on a certain planet a new social order has been created. Females are more rare on this planet and thus are more valuable. A man wishing to marry must pay a dowry for his bride. Further, men are required to wear veils that hide their faces when in public lest their naked faces tempt women into uncontrollable lust.
When people first settled on to this planet, Newholme, extensive surveys has shown no intelligent life on the planet. But later, suddenly, intelligent natives appeared. Legally, people were forbidden to settle on planets that already had native populations. Frightened of losing their planet, the people hid the fact there was an indigenous population from the central authority, the Council of Worlds (COW for short).
But word leaked back to COW and an investigator was sent to Newholme. This investigator, part machine and part human and known as the Questioner, has the power of life or death over the people of Newholme. So the people are frantic to hide what they have done and they order all the native peoples into hiding.
What the locals don't know is that there are no native peoples. There is just one native person and all the little natives running around are just extensions of itself. Living everywhere, nothing occurs on Newholme that this entity doesn't know about. And it is pleased to learn of the arrival of the Questioner. Not because it wants the humans punished for invading its planet. It is pleased because it needs the Questioner's help and human help to solve a very big problem, a problem so serious that if not dealt with very soon will cause the annihilation of the planet Newholme.

This is a fascinating story. Tepper has some imagination. Her strange human society seems like it would work, in some weird, creepy way. Reading about the people of Newholme was very interesting. Also her aliens are very alien and yet not so alien that they are unsympathetic or incomprehensible. She tells an engrossing story with lots of detail and lots of mysteries to wonder about and discover the truth about later in the story. Especially intriguing was the fauxi-dizalonz, a part of the native being of Newholme, a pool where its old parts are melted down and reassembled good as new; and it so happens this pool works on humans too!
One thing I didn't like about the story was not the conclusion, but the ending. At the end of the story, the Questioner is given the opportunity to enter the fauxi-dizalonz and be reborn. It's pretty clear the Questioner will end up entering the pool but the story ends before that happens and we never get to know how it would affect the part-human, part-machine being. I would really liked to have known that!

New Words

Hispidity: Hispid means covered in short, stiff hairs; bristly. 'Haraldson further provided that persons must not only advocate but assure personal rights for all races, and that they must not discriminate against born, hatched, aggregated, or budded creatures on the basis of species, morphology, color, hispidity, gender, age, or opinion, except as species, morphology, gender, et al. provably altered the consequence of any given situation.'

Corpora callosa: The corpora callosum is the band of nerve fibers that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres of the brain. 'Because it [the Questioner] held three human brains and unlimited memory, complicated corpora callosa and storage units of enormous capacity were required, but the solutions to these and other problems of structure and design were uniformly inspired.'

Brachiate: Swing from one hold to the next (like a monkey). 'She [the Questioner] was enormously strong; she could swim, dive, fly, brachiate, crawl, or climb mountains.'

Miscible: Capable of mixing or blending. 'Clothing, ideas, fads, convictions, all had been transitory and miscible.'

Analects: Collection of moral and social teachings of Confucius, including the concept of the Five Relationships. '"I am memorizing whole book of Confucian analects."'

Marmoreal: Resembling marble or a marble statue. 'The seating area sloped down to an oval dais with a curved back wall against which stood the three effigies of the Hagions, marmoreal images four times the height of a woman, each the likeness of robes draped around a female figure, but with only an emptiness inside.'

Adits: Entrances or passageways. 'Instead he was in a maze of passageways that branched opening onto narrow catwalks that crossed open space to small, dark balconies from which, ascending or descending by ladders, one came upon narrow adits leading to crawlways the went hither and thither in all directions through the ancient fabric of House Genevois.'

Ramified: Divided or branched out. 'No effort had been made to map the ramified and interpenetrating layers.

Neap: The lowest high tide of the month. 'A two big-moon neap, full or dark, was low, but a three big-moon neap was lower, and an all-moon low sucked the water out of the bays to leave mud flats extending to the horizon.'

Squamous: Scaly. '"It's a scale," she said. "From some sort of squamous creature."'

Eidolon: 'She was a perilous eidolon, a symbol of marvel and romance.