Because My Tears Are Delicious to You 13: A Voice Out of Ramah by Lee Killough

[james_davis_nicoll]

Lee Killough may be comparatively obscure now but in the 1970s she was one of a cohort of hard SF writers discovered by Del Rey. Later on she turned to horror and what would have been called urban fantasy if she had written it 20 years later but it was her SF that I loved.

Five centuries ago, Marah was settled by slower than light ramjet. The devout colonists were seeking isolation from a corrupt society and so made no effort to stay in contact with the other human worlds via radio [1]. Now the other worlds have come to Marah in the form of a ramjet bearing emissaries of Intergalactic Communications offering to sell Marah a “shuttlebox”, a device that will allow instantaneous travel to the other worlds.

Thanks to poor judgment on the part of liaison officer Alesdra Pontokouros, she and a male companion named Thors Kastavin encounter settlers on the surface before formal contact is made from orbit. Alesdra notices right away that the gender balance on Marah is peculiar, ten women for every man, but it is not until it is too late for poor Thors that she finds out why: a now extinct race of aliens managed to wipe out their whole clade with a disease that targets males. Humans are similar enough [2] that the virus affects us as well; the difference is one in ten men survive the disease.

Sadly, Thors is not one of the 10% who survive. Also, Alesdra is not allowed to return to her ship, as the men on it are quite keen on not dying.

The patriarchal religion of the settlers reacted to the dearth of men by setting up a society where men are in charge, as far as they know, and protected from all danger. All the physical work is done by the women, held to be more expendable. All this is clearly ordained by God or so the male Shepherds will happily explain.

The obvious question is “why, if there is a population of natural immunes, has that trait not been selected for?” The answer, as a rather horrified Shepherd Jared learns very early on in the book, is that of course it has, which is why the Shepherds now poison nine out of ten boys when they hit puberty. Who lives and who dies is determined entirely by chance and therefore represents God's will.

The hierarchy on the planet is horrified to hear the offer from IGC because they realize immediately that the off-worlders will discover that the disease no longer kills male Marahns (although presumably it could do a number on the men of other worlds – happily Galactic bio-science is advanced and shuttleboxes are well suited to tight border control). Obviously, they have to turn the offer down, although they plan to make it look like a hard decision.

What the rulers don't reckon with is that Jared got to see Thors die slowly and horribly; custom dictates that only women sit with the infected and so he had no idea how terrible the process is. That and the fact his sister's son Isiah is just old enough to be subjected to the Trial convinces him that the system is wrong and something needs to be done about it.

The church has a system to deal with Shepherds with theologically unsound qualms about murder; it adds them to the roster of people the church has killed. In fairly short order, Jared is disguised as a woman and on the run, with the whole of the ruling classes turned against him.

I had not reread this in decades and was a bit surprised to see how small Alesdra's role is in this, basically the catalyst whose poor judgment helps Jared decide to overthrow his society. The real focus is on Jared and his learning experiences, which include the startling (to him) revelation that when the men are out of earshot the women are not nearly as respectful of men and their unrequested advice as he had previously assumed and also that being the subject of unrequested advice is not nearly as much fun as he believed.

I did wonder how early in his flight Jared's unfamiliarity with how women do things flagged him as a man in drag to the women he was traveling with. That sort of thing must have happened before, if only teenaged boys escaping the prisons of their childhoods to try to do something interesting before getting cut down by the Trial.

I've always assumed this, the Maxwell and Brill books and the stories in the collection Aventine were in the same time-line but I am not sure that is actually the case. There is one curious difference between the Maxwell and Brill books and this, which is that in The Dopplegänger Gambit there are straight people, gay men and the ever convenient for place settings bisexual men but no lesbians and no bisexual women; here there's lots of same sex relationships between women, situational and otherwise. The two books seem to have been written in succession so I am not sure why the difference.

This is one of those books I would rather have done as a Rediscovery but as far as I can tell it saw one printing, back in 1978; some of her other books are available on Smashwords but not this one. The novel is darker than I remember – in the long run Jared may save a lot of lives but in the short run his actions produce violence and death - but as far as I can tell, this was the author's first novel and it is a reasonably solid effort. If there had been a Tiptree Award in 1978, this would not, I think, have won it but it probably would have got a honourable mention from the judges.

1: Of course, in STL setting like the back-story's, radio is often under-appreciated.

2: AUGH. Although she was a veterinary radiographer and presumably was more conversant with the biological sciences than is the norm for SF.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This is early because I won't be around on Sunday until late.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

If you get eaten by a bear this weekend, I solemnly swear I will take in one of your cats and raise it as my own.

[jwgh]

The setting reminds me in some way of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Matter of Seggri, where women also outnumber men by a similar ratio (though in Seggri it's a result of an imbalance in birth rates and is not intentional). The Le Guin came out in 1994, according to Wikipedia, so well after the Killough.

I wonder if The Matter of Seggri is at all a response to A Voice Out of Ramesh? If anyone's read both, I'd be interested in hearing what you think of that.

I really thought the Le Guin was great. I encountered it in the Crank! anthology, but I see it's also appeared elsewhere since then.

Seggri

[(Anonymous)]

IMS in Seggri it was deliberate -- it had been genetically engineered into the population.

There'd be a natural counterselection over generations for people to produce sons, since in a world with a grossly skewed sex balance, having sons would give you a lot more descendants. But presumably, advanced genetic engineering could work around this.


Doug M.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I read Doppelganger Gambit but I thought Marca showed interest in both Janna and Mama.

I'd assume the difference was simply because of what she felt the plot required but of course I'm just speculating on that.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Huh. Maybe I just missed it.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I really could be wrong about that. I'll need to glance through the book and see if I can find the scene I'm thinking of.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Or maybe the author intended the narrator to?

I've worked somewhere where at least half the female staff were (I thought) obviously out as lesbian in orientation, and the older male staff were either totally oblivious or pretending to be very well, so it seems plausible that a different narrator could notice different social things.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

A silly question probably, but... why is the name of the colony "Marah" while the title says "Ramah"? I recognize the biblical quotation in the title, Ramah being a place name in ancient Canaan. Marah, however, is a humour (in the ancient greek sense of the word).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The obvious question is “why, if there is a population of natural immunes, has that trait not been selected for?” The answer, as a rather horrified Shepherd Jared learns very early on in the book, is that of course it has, which is why the Shepherds now poison nine out of ten boys when they hit puberty.

This is the point of the review where I went O.O in surprise.

1970s SF getting basic science *right*, and then making it a plot point? The magic virus that magically kills 9/10 male humans had me assuming this was not a book that would grasp evolved resistance.

That is really dark. Now I want to read this.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Good luck finding a copy at a reasonable price...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"57 new and used from $0.01"

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

$4 seems to be the going rate.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There are other worlds that have skewed sex ratios but the methods used are more humane. It takes a special kind of holy man to decide the way to keep a 10:1 female to male ratio is painful murder.

But did no family ever set up a homestead away from the church school system?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Also, Jared's not a great hero. His first instinct is to cheat to save his nephew, but other shepherds prevent that. And the outcome now that the women know what is going on will likely not be pretty.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

I'd expect an underground faction of men in this world that is cut off from the rest of the community, in some terrible place no one would think to live. Unless you're living in a panopticon, people will slip away from society.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Is the colony a bottle city? I mean, is homesteading possible?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Aside from some issues like the plague and Satan trees and the carnivores, it seems to be a nice enough world. And there are only three million people living there, so lots of room.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And the recent mass extinction might make the place more vulnerable to invasive species like humans.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

How would you know you needed to?

And then, from the sounds of it, Sheppard-class men (all the men?) would have no idea how. I'd be wondering why the women don't use their overwhelming majority more than I'd be wondering why there aren't remote non-Church settlements.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Lots of people do it now, not because they need to but because they want to.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

Tepper's Six Moon Dance plays with a similar idea, and does include homesteaders. (It also exhibits excellent economics, which is even more unusual in SF than accurate biology.)

[vr-trakowski.livejournal.com]

Califia's Daughters uses the virus gambit, though it's on Earth and the event isn't far enough in the past for resistance to have built up. It was, of course, written much later.

The ending seems set up for a series, but I don't think it did well enough. It's a pretty good story, though.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

I remember reading this....I liked it, but I don't think I ever re-read it.

I know I've read the first Maxwell and Brill book, but I don't think I even knew there were others. And I think I read another of her books....a planet of telepaths discover they have a need for cops, so they hire some from Earth.

I remember reading a book, more of a novella really, Stopping at Slowyear by Frederick Pohl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopping_at_Slowyear .
A slower than light trading ship enters the system of Slowyear, a planet colonised several generations ago. The inhabitants of Slowyear welcome the trading ship and the whole crew comes down for shore leave - making friends and lovers, trading with the people....generally being treated like celebrities. When the crew discover that the colonists have a disease that takes out one in five of their children, they offer all the medical information they have on board to the colonists. What the colonists didn't tell the ship's crew is that when the planet was first colonised the disease took nineteen out of twenty. The entire crew succumb to the disease (a really nasty brain-eating thing), and the colonists are philosophically disappointed that there were no immunes 'from this ship either'. It's chilling. On re-reading you realise all the clues were there.....

[khavrinen.livejournal.com]

The other two Brill/Maxwell books are "Spider Play" and "Dragon's Teeth". While it may be unclear whether Ramah and Aventine are in the same timeline as Brill & Maxwell, it's pretty obvious that the other one you refer to, about the telepaths who hire Earth cops ( "Deadly Silents" ), does share the timeline.
I'm also rather fond of "The Monitor, the Miners, and the Shree", which is basically a counter-argument to the philosophy of Star Trek's "Prime Directive."