BROTHER TERMITE

Reviewed 4/28/2012

Brother Termite, by Patricia Anthony
Cover art by Mark Smollin1
BROTHER TERMITE
Patricia Anthony
New York: Ace Books, April 1995

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN 0-441-00187-4 261pp. SC $5.50

Reen's in the White House; all's wrong with the world.

Things could be worse, though. The U.S. still has a president, and has had since Reen's kind took over fifty years ago, back when Ike held that office. Reen is only White House chief of staff. But, as First Brother of the 3,000 Cousins at Earth, he is in charge here.

Alarmed by the direction of the conversation, Reen leaned forward, inserting his body between the two Cousins. "You jump to conclusions, Brother Conscience. That there is a conspiracy is obvious, but perhaps the President, not the Cousins, is the target."

"Gullible Reen." Tali's vitriol stung. "You trusted Eisenhower. You signed his silly Vandenberg treaty. And you see how he lied to us."

Reen sat back, perplexed. "Lied to us? Eisenhower might have delayed our landing, but even as he signed the treaty he vowed his people would never accept our leadership. And so it is. It is we with our arrogance who misjudged the situation. The humans are thrown into chaos, Brother, even fifty years after contact."

Tali sniffed. "It is not chaos. It is anger you see. The humans rage as Eisenhower did the first time he saw our ships. The man smiled and smiled, but still he raged."

Reen recalled Eisenhower's fixed, tense grin; how the President's hands, held stiffly at his sides, had clenched with impotent, white-knuckled fury.

*
*
*

"But we were the ones who broke the Vandenberg treaty," Thural said. "We allowed the humans to think we could wage war against them."

"It is not our fault they jumped to conclusions. And who broke the treaty first, Cousin, when Kennedy plotted to have Reen killed? In the skill of lying the humans will always have the edge." Tali's gaze fell on his brother with the finality of a guillotine. "Find us a good man to take over the presidency, Reen-ja. Someone like J. Edgar Hoover. Someone we can trust."

– Pages 46-7

Trust. This novel is all about trust: The kind of trust engendered by friendship or love, and the tentative kind you find in someone whose motives (you assume) are sufficiently in accord with yours to make their actions predictable and dependable.

Reen is not really a termite; but he and his kind are descended from tunnel-dwelling insects. Their individual life spans exceed 300 years, and their civilization is the oldest in the galaxy. It is, in fact, the only civilization in the galaxy besides ours. Their ancestors ruthlessly exterminated the others.

Cousin technology is far superior to ours; their ships can outfly any terrestrial warplane, and they can infallibly jam any missile guidance with ECM. Despite this, they are vulnerable in many ways. Their bodies are smaller and more fragile than humans', and they are poisoned by carbonated beverages. If a Cousin doesn't sleep with a group of others, he will die in several days. They are dying as a species. They can breed only the barely sentient "Loving Helpers".2 That is why they are on Earth: they hope to combine their genetic material with ours and thereby produce a viable hybrid to carry on. (Humans will be extinct by then, if their program of biochemical sterilization succeeds.) But perhaps their greatest weakness is the one that dooms Reen: They develop empathy, even love, for humans they work with. Reen feels brotherly or fatherly love for the current President, Jeff Womack, who thanks to Cousin medical science has served for 51 years; but Womack, far more alert than he pretends to be, has his own agenda in play. Reen also loves Marian Cole, who he made CIA director; with her, through the magic of recombinant DNA, he has fathered the child Angela.

The human sterilization program is a great secret. The fact that the human fertility rate has dropped to 18 percent is explained by glib press releases claiming a natural downturn caused by culture shock. But Womack knows the secret and has evidence. Others know or suspect. And there are factions within the Cousin ranks; Tali thinks Reen has become dangerously human-influenced. Tali is right; but he too has been influenced, chiefly by FBI director Hopkins. Reen, as First Brother to the Cousins at Earth and White House chief of staff, struggles to master the interplay between these various factions, human and Cousin, while he tries to keep the fractious U.S. government and his own warring emotions in hand.3 The result is a gripping and dazzlingly written tale. As with Cradle of Spendor, Anthony has left some loose ends; but this plot is a sturdy scaffold that ably carries the reader along. I have no reluctance to give this novel top marks.

1 This cover with its pure white face, features impressed by bas-relief, differs from the one the ISFDB shows for this edition. The design is similar, but there the face is gray and has a more three-dimensional appearance.
2 Anthony is not entirely clear on this point, but I gather that only Loving Helpers are produced even if a Cousin breeds with the female. (Like ants, bees, and termites, Cousins have just one female per colony.) And, as with the praying mantis, breeding means death for the male.
3 Probably because they number only three thousand, the Cousins at Earth have chosen to leave Earth's governing structures largely intact. They clearly have the upper hand; apparently they achieved it through negotiations based on what they could offer Earth. What's unclear is the nature of what they offered, other than life extension. Also left unclear is how long the Cousins themselves have left as a species. Anthony compounds this at the end of the novel by positing something she calls "the Window" by which Cousins can reach their home planet Setis almost instantly. And Setis, judging by its First Brother Mito, who comes to the Cousin base on Luna to tell Reen that Angela and the other children are safe, is doing quite well. "We tunnel," says Mito with regal brevity.
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