Confessed, Tolerated, Compelled

We open with the stunning revelation that her current room is where Jared lives when he’s not out doing stuff. She freaks out because Jared will kill her for this and says as much.

“I can do what I want with my room,” Jamie muttered rebelliously, but then he bit his lip. “We won’t tell him. He doesn’t have to know.”

There is really just no good way to read that.

Finally, Jamie brings up the whole Melanie still being inside her, to which she is mute.

“I didn’t know that could happen. Does that happen?”

I can’t believe no one would have wondered this before. It’s just so dumb to be treating it as a brand new idea they invent.

Anyway, in response she’s mute, then she’s mute, then, for a change of pace, she’s silent. Melanie tries to break loose but apparently the whole rebellious host thing has fixed itself for good and she’s unable to even annoy the brainslug with her futile attempts to take control. So I guess the brainslug just needed to wait it out a bit longer.

But she decides on her own to tell anyway, and just wouldn’t let Melanie through because, and instead sounds totally like she’s lying:

“She promised she would come back, didn’t she?” I murmured. “Would Melanie break a promise to you?”
Jamie slid his arms around my waist and clung to me for a long time. After a few minutes, he whispered, “Love you, Mel.”
“She loves you, too. She’s so happy that you’re here and safe.”

Actually telling the truth and showing all the evidence for why it’s true would have been a terrible idea, but agreeing to something after they brought it up and made it clear it’s what they want to be true, only to say vague comforting things that sound horribly manipulative will totally not make them kill her.

Jamie wants to know if everybody’s like that, to which she says that no, Melanie’s just special, despite the fact she doesn’t know any better than we do if the consciousnesses actually remain in existence, only how many of them take over out of the ones that actively struggle. The brainslug’s explanation for crushing the kid’s hopes that maybe he can get his dad back is that his dad didn’t fight hard enough to not tell where they were, because clearly you’re either all the way there or you’re gone forever.

She emos about how everyone’s right to hate her, and although Jamie tries to excuse her by virtue of not being there initially, the book doesn’t suck for a moment and has her point out that she’s still a brainslug who’s been doing this for ages and aiding her society to the best of her abilities the whole time.

Oh, also, when Jamie asks she learns Melanie no longer hates her, despite her still possessing Melanie’s body and preventing her from taking any action no matter how small.

“She’s happy to be here. She’s so happy to see you. She doesn’t even care that they’re going to kill us.”
Jamie stiffened under my arm. “They can’t! Not if Mel’s still alive!”
…
“They won’t believe that, Jamie,” I whispered. “They’ll think I’m lying to trick you. They’ll just want to kill me more if you tell them that. Only Seekers lie.”
The word made him shudder.
“But you’re not lying. I know it,” he said after a moment.
I shrugged.
“I won’t let them kill her.”

The book made a point that the doctor guy has woken up to hear all this and yes, he is probably edging toward the gun right this minute. He’ll kill her now and then call a meeting to warn everyone that the seekers have adapted and become outright skilled at lying and they should expect a trickle of family members stranding themselves in the desert from now on. They’ll have to decide what to do – kill them? Just leave them to die of dehydration and exposure?

(Also seriously enough with the damn flinching! How do they even know so much about seekers? Why would brainslug jobs be a big deal to them rather than just assuming any brainslug will turn you in?)

Once we got to the big plaza cave, we started passing humans. They all stared, infuriated, as usual. I was beginning to recognize most of them: the middle-aged woman with the long salt-and-pepper braid I had seen with the irrigation team yesterday. The short man with the round belly, thinning sandy hair, and ruddy cheeks had been with her. The athletic-looking woman with the caramel brown skin had been the one bent to tie her shoe the first time I’d come out here during the day. Another dark-skinned woman with thick lips and sleepy eyes had been in the kitchen, near the two black-haired children–perhaps she was their mother? Now we passed Maggie; she glowered at Jeb and turned her face away from me. We passed a pale, sick-looking man with white hair whom I was sure I’d never seen before. Then we passed Ian.

So I think these are the only nonwhite people we’ve gotten confirmed since the seeker’s slightly ethnic skin tone. So…yay for the end of humanity not being super racist? Yay.

Actually, I wonder what the racial composition actually would be for survivors of some sort of thing like this. Crazy paranoid militia seems to be a pretty white occupation and stockpiling expensive boltholds requires a reasonable amount of disposible income, but the brainslugs seem to have gone after the upper class first, and they’re pretty white too. I’d think they’d want to go for whoever’s best off more generally, since they’re so cowardly and pretty wussy about other stuff too.

They also theoretically have a good number of women around, it’s just they don’t matter. They mention women and they mention people with skin colors other than white and suntanned, but the men are her family (and she’s suntan white) or her boyfriend (suntan) or Kyle and Ian (white white, apparently).

Anyway, they spend the day breaking the soil of a cavern that they meant to plant in, which…how much real estate do they have in this place? They must have been here for years. It’s been four since Melanie met Jared, she was on her own for years before then, before which her dad was with them where they appear to have been hiding out since she knew it was a brainslug returning and not her dad, and then even before that, at the very beginning of the invasion, is when her uncle warns them and leaves the clue to finding this place.

Next chapter she gets a bath. There’s a pretty unglamorous description, but really, it’d have counted for more if she mentioned it at any time other than right before she’s finally getting a bath. The soap stings, which is a good detail to remember – homemade soap is generally pretty unpleasant stuff.

After a few days of her helping out with planting, people stop being so quiet and hateful around her. Ian is hanging out being weird the whole time though. Jeb tries out leaving her alone with the others, as usual without asking her how she feels about it (she is utterly terrified) and they don’t murder her, so things are improving except in the sense that Jeb is pretty terrible and smug.

She’s super dumb, though, so after a while of this stuff happening, she goes to him to do sad puppy eyes and ask why he’s trying to kill her when he was acting like they were friends and she’s so confused :( and he explains the fucking obvious with the boiling a frog metaphor, which is hideously morbid, but the brainslug doesn’t blink because her paralyzing hate of violence and suffering doesn’t apply to gruesome amphibian deaths.

And he admits that he’s interested in being friends because he’s been observing souls a lot but he’s always wanted to know more about them.

Plus, I’ve always thought that if a person wants to, he can get along with just about anybody. I like putting my theories to the test. And see, here you are, one of the nicest gals I ever met. It’s real interesting to have a soul as a friend, and it makes me feel super special that I’ve managed it.”

This, though? Really dumb.

The ability to get along with terrible people is not a virtue, and neither is going on about what nice people they are. Even if we ignore the fact the brainslug has taken part in murdering planets of intelligent creatures, even if we say that her imposed obsessive love for Jared and Jamie are somehow a sign she’s a good person and not that she’s laboring under imposed sentimentality for a few individuals…there’s still the fact that she could save Melanie by releasing her brain and letting the humans kill her, not “her” the combined Melanie/brainslug entity. She has absolutely no hope of survival and she whines about how also this will kill Melanie, and yet she doesn’t offer herself up. If she and Melanie were actually fused, this might be somewhat forgivable, but as it is, it’s not even asking her to sacrifice herself for someone else, just step out of the way so they aren’t caught in the crossfire.

Hell, she doesn’t even let Melanie out. Even after confessing to Jamie and removing the excuse of it being for their own good that she was keeping control, she’s still holding an iron grip on the body.

So, he tries sending her out on errands on her own after this, and she spends that in blind terror as well. This is starting to sound more like what I’ve heard about Fifty Shades of Grey – did Twilight also have the constantly being forced to do stuff by the male characters that the main character utterly doesn’t want to do?

She ends up having a heart to heart with Ian about why he doesn’t kill her either.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Ian finally said. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I can’t see how killing you would make anything right. It would be like executing a private for a general’s war crimes. Now, I don’t buy all of Jeb’s crazy theories–it would be nice to believe, sure, but just because you want something to be true doesn’t make it that way. Whether he’s right or wrong, though, you don’t appear to mean us any harm.

Actually, we do in fact believe that privates who commit war crimes are doing something wrong. She doesn’t even have the excuse of being pressured into it the way the army demands soldiers obey orders because brainslug society doesn’t appear to even have a chain of command. (Despite acting like the seeker is oppressing her, she never actually says anything suggesting the seeker has any power to do anything to her.) And while they seem to think it matters that she wasn’t awake until someone else put her in this body, she’s the one who picked this world and gave them her specifications for a body when she arrived.

Furthermore, we know the brainslugs have a bizarre concept of not meaning people harm, and we know they know because Melanie was not at all confused by brainslugs desperately begging her not to hurt herself. They know the brainslugs abhor violence, and also that they don’t consider brainslugging a person and killing who that person was to be any sort of harm.

Bear in mind also that brainslugs missing their host’s family is apparently normal, and Jeb confirmed they stay in the family units if they can, so a brainslug going crazy with grief and wandering into the desert to find them is not actually proof of valuing the personality involved – it would be completely consistent with Melanie II for her to have been willing to risk dying or being a prisoner among humans if it meant being back with her husbando but also to have viewed the best case outcome for them to be brainslugged so they could all live together in harmonyjoy brainslug society. She hasn’t made any attempt to explain why/how she changed her mind about the last part, let alone what it means to her when her species doesn’t seem to have any concept of the idea a host body’s consciousness can have any value of its own.

Anyway, he confesses that actually, he and the doctor are around because they want to be sure no one hurts her while Jeb is letting her run around.

The pallid man with the white hair was Walter. He was sick, but Doc didn’t know what was wrong with him–there was no way to find out, not without labs and tests, and even if Doc could diagnose the problem, he had no medicine to treat it. As the symptoms progressed, Doc was starting to think it was a form of cancer. This pained me–to watch someone actually dying from something so easily fixed.

In another book, this would be an actual issue. She would have decided that maybe humans can live on their own without being brainslugged, started to view them as people in their own right, only to be faced with human suffering and become all the more horrified by it this time around. She should want to get him to a seeker so they can fix him, maybe just being willing to risk the brainslugs finding out about the place or maybe relapsing completely and believing they should all be brainslugged, this time because the thought of her friends suffering is too much to bear and she knows they’ll get such better treatment among her own kind.

Anyway, there’s thirty-five people and if anyone’s gay, they’re deep in the closet or the brainslug’s just totally oblivious to it. Instead, the gossip is strictly about proper babymaking relationships.

Sharon was not the girl I’d seen in Melanie’s memories. Was it the years of living alone with the dour Maggie that had changed her into a more brightly colored version of her mother? Though her relationship with Doc was newer to this world than I was, she showed none of the softening effects of new love.

Yeah, book’s been bitching about glarey Sharon and her superglarey mom constantly and how they hate her more than anyone else. The brainslug/Melanie thing is apparently not a sign the book is willing to give up the standard setup of every other women being evil. Even the comforter way back when didn’t exactly have a good showing, it’s just more noticeable now when there finally is a big supporting cast and it’s all fucking guys.

Oh, also it’s because of her that the two of them are there – Jared somehow found Melanie’s note in the building that she was caught for entering, at which point he decided to search for Sharon himself because obviously continuing the plan that’d already gotten one person caught was a great idea. Obviously when the brainslugs are alerted by finding a wild human it’s the best time to go on continue the search yourself! And of course unlike Melanie, he succeeds, being merely hampered by the fact he didn’t even know who he was looking for rather than the presence of two X chromosomes.

One night Jamie asks about his sister, and she says that yeah, his sister’s been really quiet. Will she go away? Dunno maybe, she says. She claims she doesn’t want it to happen, but she certainly doesn’t seem to care much. It’s not like she talks to Melanie or otherwise seems to care about her presence when it is there. She also adds she used to be afraid of Melanie.

Jamie laughed. “You were afraid of her? ”
“You don’t think your sister can be scary? Remember the time you went too far up the canyon, and when you came home late she ‘threw a raging hissy fit,’ according to Jared?

No examination of what she was afraid of – her personhood wiped away – let alone the fact that it’s ironically the very thing she and her kind do to others all the time. No, instead, let’s remember that women get upset about stupid things and it’s the duty of adult males to belittle their feelings about it, and haha, isn’t it scary when they act all shouty?

They ask her to try teaching.

My refusal sent an unexpected pang of guilt through me. I’d never refused a Calling before. It felt like a selfish thing to do. Obviously, though, this was not the same. The souls would have never asked me to do something so suicidal.

Except previously the whole calling thing was what a soul felt like doing, not what other souls wanted them to do. If this is true she absolutely had recourse against the seeker, just making the argument to whoever is in charge of asking people to do stuff that the seeker following her around clearly isn’t doing anything useful (or that good at finding humans) and should be asked to do something different.

She also says that what they’d really want from her is a way to win and there is none and the brainslugs have no weakness or enemies, except presumably whatever her secret is. Turns out they apparently never considered that she might know something, although frankly, after her explanation that she had no clue how any healing stuff worked maybe they just assumed that obviously, she in particular hadn’t been entrusted with any information whatsoever.

Anyway, they naturally respect this as much as they’ve been respecting her feelings about anything else, and decide to trick her into talking about the stuff they want everyone to hear during mealtime.

At least it’s more worldbuildingy stuff.

“Well, I was wondering.… Of all the different planets you’re familiar with, which species is physically the closest to humankind?”
…
I guess I’ve been thinking about your Healers… Where do they get the knowledge to cure, rather than just treat symptoms, as you said?”

Doc foolishly thinks their medical knowledge has any connection to how biology works, you see.

And we learn about the bears, who are warm blooded furred creatures.

Their blood isn’t exactly the same as yours, but it does essentially the same job.

Yes. Yes, blood is probably going to be doing the same basic job. Maybe next you could have such stunning insights as the fact the spiders’ legs aren’t the same as human ones, but both are used for locomotion.

Also, they’re social and creative like humans. She has Jamie tell the details.

“Well, see, they have these awesome hands.” Jamie was enthusiastic almost immediately. “Sort of double-jointed–they can curl both ways.” He flexed his own fingers, as if trying to bend them backward. “One side is soft, like my palm, but the other side is like razors! They cut the ice–ice sculpting. They make cities that are all crystal castles that never melt! It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Wanda?” He turned to me for backup.
I nodded. “They see a different range of colors–the ice is full of rainbows. Their cities are a point of pride for them. They’re always trying to make them more beautiful. I knew of one Bear who we called… well, something like Glitter Weaver, but it sounds better in that language, because of the way the ice seemed to know what he wanted and shaped itself into his dreams. I met him once and saw his creations. That’s one of my most beautiful memories.”

Ah, book, you’re tolerable again. And this one doesn’t even have any obvious biology absurdities like your million eyed immobile plants.

“They dream?” Ian asked quietly.
I smiled wryly. “Not as vividly as humans.”

I’m not clear on how memory would be working here, but surely there’s enough there that you could figure out humans don’t usually have dreams that are just reliving old memories in super detail.

Anyway point is the reason they know about humans is because they captured a bunch and scienced at them until they have perfect everything cures.

Then we learn about the origin planet! Finally!

“We still live there. It’s where I was… born.”
“That’s kind of special,” Jamie added. “It’s rare to meet someone from the Origin, isn’t it? Most souls try to stay there, right, Wanda?”

THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY GOING ALL CRAZY EXPANSIONIST?

So they’re barely able to even think about violence and especially terrified of it being visited on them, and also their home planet is ten thousand times more awesome than anywhere else they’ve found, but they’re conquering planet after planet at great personal risk anyway? She even just claimed that no soul would ask another soul to commit suicide, but it’s obvious that souls will die when they attempt a takeover, even if the number is very few, so they are in fact asking for some of them to die for the rest of them to get a planet that apparently they don’t even want that much.

The phrasing here also suggests it’s impossible to go there if you weren’t born to it. That and the bit about planets being closed to new colonists makes it sound like they have some weird stuff going on. Even if it’s a place in high demand, obviously some souls left and that should free up a slot or two. Similarly, full colony planets should still be able to take some newcomers, if only because of current colonizers deciding to check out a new species. This setup would make sense only from the bioweapon standpoint, where there’s no point sending a couple back to screw around on planets you already control and you just want them to expand outward forever.

“It’s a cool place,” Jamie went on. “Lots of clouds, with a bunch of different-colored layers. It’s the only planet where the souls can live outside of a host for very long.

And, as they outright evolved there, it’s plausible this means that unlike the places where they can’t survive outside a host for long, they can live fine there and not simply that they can survive somewhat longer than they would on another planet.

The hosts on the Origin planet are really pretty, too, with sort of wings and lots of tentacles and big silver eyes.”
Doc was leaning forward with his face in his hands. “Do they remember how the host-parasite relationship was formed? How did the colonization begin?”
…
“We were always that way,” I answered slowly, still unwilling. “As far back as we were intelligent enough to know ourselves, at least. We were discovered by another species–the Vultures, we call them here, though more for their personalities than for their looks. They were… not kind. Then we discovered that we could bond with them just as we had with our original hosts. Once we controlled them, we made use of their technology. We took their planet first, and then followed them to the Dragon Planet and the Summer World–lovely places where the Vultures had also not been kind. We started colonizing; our hosts reproduced so much slower than we did, and their life spans were short. We began exploring farther into the universe.…”
I trailed off, conscious of the many eyes on my face. Only Sharon continued to look away.
“You speak of it almost as if you were there,” Ian noted quietly. “How long ago did this happen?”
“After dinosaurs lived here but before you did. I was not there, but I remember some of what my mother’s mother’s mother remembered of it.”

Yeah, they are really sounding like a bioweapon to me. Maybe they’re just supposed to be a defense – if an alien species starts conquering other planets, they’ll run across one of the places where these things are native and get taken over and their empire neutralized. (The reason for them not being seeded on all planets is that there’s probably a limited number that they could be tweaked to survive on without losing other qualities.) Although that doesn’t explain the expansionism as well – perhaps that’s a glitch and this really is an accidental grey goo scenario. Or their empire has some sort of max size it can reach and they normally conquer up to a point, then die back.

Hm. That last one would actually work well for something that only works because it’s unknown. The brainslugs are much more obvious on the planets they’ve conquered. So – brainslugs replace the existing empire, conquer a ring around, then die back, leaving another honeypot of livable planets for other aliens to attack only to eventually blunder over the brainslugs and get taken over all over again.

(Also, how would they have any idea when things happened in comparison? Travel between planets would make it difficult to keep a consistent calender even without the fact they get a new language when they swap hosts.)

She ends by saying they’re functionally immortal and everyone gets upset, because apparently the fact the hosts would easily outlive all of them was tolerable but not the fact they wouldn’t die at all.