The Miracle Workers (part two)

Unfortunately, the "too much going on, nothing gets enough attention" issue only gets worse throughout the rest of the story, and it applies as much to characters as it does to worldbuilding. On top of that, the quality of the worldbuilding itself gets...I wouldn't say bad, but definitely not up to the standard I've come to expect from Vance.

I'm more sure than before that "The Dragon Masters" was a refinement of this story's concepts. Or at least, of some of its concepts. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that there's another later Vance story that refined the rest of them.


After making sure his men aren't riding high on victory because he's allergic to joy, Lord Faide consolidates power, appoints one of his family members as governor of the conquered fiefdom, and starts bringing his army back home to Fade Keep. It turns out that the first folk have set new traps and raised new obstacles in the path that the army took through their new growth the last time, and are no longer interested in negotiation. Not that Lord Faide even bothered to try; despite clamping down on everyone else's exuberance, he seems to have let victory go to his own head behind the mask.

...honestly, maybe they actually WOULD have been willing to talk again. Probably not, but maybe. They didn't even bother to check lol.

It turns out that the first folk have learned some new tricks that catch the humans totally by surprise. New tactics. New weapons. New psionic techniques. The first folk have figured out how to do something similar to the humans' demon-summoning, fortifying the bodies of their forward troops enough to temporarily shrug off arrows and darts and forcing Faide's army to close into melee. First folk are too small and weak to use bows that can match the humans' range, but they've come up with a truly brutal combination of bioengineered weapons to make up for that. Turns out they've gotten almost as good at manipulating animals as they are plants.

First, they've got these wasp-analogues that are trained to fly in a perfectly straight line when released from their sealed tubes and sting whatever they hit. Paralysis follows within seconds, and death within minutes. The wasps are foiled by metal armor, but only Faide's elite knights are wearing that, and the men in cloth and leather (not to mention the horses being ridden by the armored knights) drop left and right. Then, when the knights move to the front and come closer (delayed by the need to search for booby traps every step of the way), the first folk shoot them with these gumwads infested by flesh-eating mites that spread out over their armored bodies, find cracks and visor slits, and start burrowing into skin. The agony of this infestation is such that the stricken knights are compelled to tear off their armor to get at the mites, at which point there's a wasp-bullet already coming their way.

Combine that with the first folk having learned to use their own bodies' natural ability to produce an expanding foam as a weapon rather than just a defensive screen, blinding the soldiers when they get close and then disappearing backward in a defence-in-depth strategy, and, well.

There are first folk casualties. For all his many faults, Lord Faide does get to show off his chops as a tactician, quickly adapting to each new weapon of the first folk and managing to dish out some damage in return. He's a very accomplished military commander, and Vance manages to let him show that while still keeping him overwhelmed and disadvantaged due to sheer unfamiliarity with what he's facing.

The solution comes in the form of a suggestion by Sam Salazar, though it needs to be relayed by chief jinxman Huss in order for Faide to take it seriously. Back when Faide was getting mad at Sam for pushing buttons of unknown function on his hovercar's control panel, Sam briefly caused the car to levitate much higher off the ground than it normally ever does. If they do that again, and have the car drop flammable oil on the forest strip from outside of wasp range, maybe they can set a fire that the first folk can't put out in time. Granted, the only person who knows which buttons Sam pushed is Sam himself, so once Huss has talked Faide over to trying it he's forced to let Sam fly his ancestral vehicle again. And, it works. They burn a path through the forest barrier, and the first folk can do naught but contain the blaze at the sides using their foam spray, giving the army time to get through.

They still take a ton more casualties when the first folk attack their tail at the end. They DO manage to smother the flame and close again near the end of the humans' passage. When all is said and done, Faide has lost a third of his entire army; much higher losses than he suffered during the actual conquest. But they get through.

Lord Faide is enraged at the humiliation he suffered, and fearful of what comes next. The first folk have now learned that their new tactics and weaponry are indeed effective. Additionally, his loss of so many troops - including members of his own clan, who in typical feudal fashion make up the upper echelons of his command structure - has weakened his hard-won new status as emperor. As soon as they hear about his losses, some of his conquered territories begin eyeing Lord Faide with a new calculation.

Not that it's especially easy to sympathize with him or his loyalists because of this.

I lol'd. Maybe if you weren't still referring to them as "savages," they wouldn't still be thinking of you as "invaders." I dunno, it's just a thought.

Lord Faide thinks his best bet is to figure out how to make the first folk vulnerable to human magic. That might be theoretically possible, his jinxmen tell him, but practically impossible. Not only due to the physiological distance between humans and firstfolk, but also because of complete unfamiliarity with their lived experience, culture etc. Hein Huss lets Faide in on some secrets of magic that the jinxmen don't typically share with outsiders, regarding the degree to which "demons" and "curses" require the target's ability to understand a mental suggestion and willingness to believe what their subconscious is telling them. Notably, the effigies containing hair or skin flakes of the target to be cursed aren't actually strictly necessary; they just make it easier for the wizard to concentrate on the right person when they aren't physically in front of them, largely due to the wizard making an intuitive mental connection between doll and victim based on human tendencies to associate symbols with objects and body parts with living bodies.

Basically, under the ritualistic aesthetics, the magic of this setting is what a lot of science fiction calls "psionics" and provides technobabble justification for. Which means that this actually could be literally set in the same universe as "The Dragon Masters," since the Sacerdotes in that story had pseudoscience telepathy of a similar kind iirc. But anyway.

Hein Huss thinks that this entire idea should be dropped, but asshole Isak Comandore is eager to succeed at something that Huss refuses to do in the hopes of taking his place as Lord Faide's chief jinxman. So, both wizards - along with Sam Salazar, who asked to come along and help them make camp and stuff - end up going to learn more about first folk culture in the hopes of learning how to get their hooks in. And...here's where the worldbuilding and the pacing both kind of take a nosedive.

On the former: apparently, there are "forest markets" where firstfolk and humans trade with each other. This has been seemingly going on for centuries. Peaceful contact and trade, with livelihoods apparently being based on it. And yet, in all that time, no one has ever travelled to the first folk's own villages further out in the woods? Their culture is still a complete black box to humankind, despite the literal generations of friendly contact?

Now, this *could* be justified. We soon learn that the first folk are more innately psionic than humans (there must be something on this planet that encourages that to develop), and because of instinctive low-grade telepathy throughout their species they have much less sense of individuality. Their superhuman persistence comes from them essentially having a continuity of purpose that transcends lifetimes and local groups. Almost a hive mind, but not quite. So, with that factor in play, one could imagine that the first folk might be able to keep up trade with the humans for centuries while still coordinating to keep the rest of their society secret.

Except...they just let Huss, Comandore, and Salazar travel to one of their deep forest villages unopposed. They actually let them hitch a ride on a trade barge and bring them there themselves as long as they don't get in the way. And, when asked, politely tell them "oh yeah, we're planning to wipe you all out."

Yeah, apparently the humans didn't know about these giant water beetles that the firstfolk have bred over the last millennium and a half either. It comes as a total surprise, along with the rest of the selective breeding and psionic bioengineering projects that they've been conducting for centuries on end. Despite them literally using these engineered creatures to pull their trade boats to the market while hidden just underwater.

The loose-lipness of the first folk, by the way, is justified by them supposedly not seeing individuals as important, due to their more collective hive-ish perspective. But...it's also established that they've learned to communicate messages from individual to collective and disseminate information that way, so shouldn't that make them even MORE reluctant to let any human see what they're up to? Shouldn't they be paranoid about the human hive mind letting any of its eyes near them, to a degree that humans can never even experience paranoia at all?

Yeah. Sorry. No. I'm not buying it.

The pacing, meanwhile, suffers from the three wizards' time among the first folk being completely offscreen and told entirely in a few pages of retrospective summary from Huss when he makes his post-mission report to Lord Faide. The most interesting piece of worldbuilding in the entire novella, and it's just...mostly not in the novella at all. Genuinely jarring.

Vance also starts getting really, really heavyhanded about how antiscientific the current human settler culture is. Like, cartoonishly so.

Their word for "science" and their word for "irrationality" are literally the same word. Yeah, I'm not buying this either.

We do learn some interesting things about the first folk's militarization, at least. For instance, their bioengineering and more advanced toolmaking was inspired by seeing the sophisticated machines of the original human invaders, the very things that the humans themselves have come to dismiss. Likewise, their equivalent of demonic possession was inspired by human magic, but they can use the concentrated will of the hive itself to soup up their vanguard instead of making up "demons," making it much simpler to initiate the process and coordinate the possessed individuals.

Isak Comandore thinks he can try and get into the first folk's minds now, but Huss still thinks that they don't know what they're doing and that this is a bad idea. Also, um. Huss and Lord Faide have this conversation:

Remember, the only notable thing that Sam has done so far is remember "hey, we apparently have a flying machine, let's use it as a flying machine."

:/

I can see that winning him a lot of respect. But deciding, based on that, that he's the herald of a new age? Sorry Vance, you've got the beats of your nerd wish fulfilment fantasy where you show all the dumb jocks and doddering conservatives who's dick is really the biggest of them all out of order.

Anyway. Comandore tries to do a psychic intrusion on the firstfolk hive mind, and only succeeds at enraging them and causing them to move up their war timetable. They start attacking the humans all across the map. As Lord Faide and his advisors try to figure out what they should be doing about this, Sam Salazar reads the script and realizes that the most important thing for him to concentrate on right now is figuring out how to dissolve the first folk's foam. Why does he decide to study the foam, rather than trying to find an antidote to the wasp venom, or a chemical that repels the burrowing mites? Well, like I said, he read the script.

Huss seems to know an awful lot about how science used to be done. Interesting. Not interesting enough to make up for everything else, but interesting.

So, the first folk send an army at Faide Keep. Like the other ancestral castles, it's made from the hull of one of the humans' original starships, which is a cool detail. Faide tries to use the ancient laser cannon on the first folk, but it turns out that the maintenance his family has been doing on it for centuries wasn't nearly enough to keep a weapon of this grade functional, and in fact may have been actively damaging it. The big laser fizzles out after less than a quarter second of fire, inflicting only a handful of casualties. The first folk advance, this time using giant beetle and centipede like creatures as well as the previously seen bioweapons as shock forces. They flow across the land and destroy all in their path as they draw the net around Faide Keep.

The first folk don't have any way of penetrating the hull. However, they work together like a hive of army ants to assemble a foam covering around the fortress, peppering any would-be defenders with wasp and mite ammo to keep them suppressed. They're going to cover the entire fortress in foam, and then let it dry and harden and become airtight, suffocating all the humans within.

Fortunately, Sam Salazar has determined that while the foam isn't especially easy to burn and isn't washed away by water or alcohol, it is fairly alkaline, and reacts with common acids like vinegar. Well, he doesn't use the terms "acid" and "alkaline," but he learns that vinegar melts it. It was earlier established that Lord Faide's home territory has a lot of grape-farming in it, so wine and vinegar are things they have in large supply in storage.

They melt an air tunnel through the foam and manage to defend it. And then...erm...this happens:

The first folk agree to negotiate; now that the two species are capable of hurting each other in something like equal measure, they can now treat with each other as equals. The firsst folk are given freedom of navigation in their ancestral lowlands, and arrangements for shared land use start to be made. By listening to his advisors in this matter, Lord Faide is able to repair his reputation, and with the humans now unified under his rule there is a good environment for Sam and Huss' reinvention of science to spread around. Everyone agrees that Sam's dick really was the biggest all along. The end.


I mean, it's preferable to "and then the settlers used their rediscovered science to slaughter all the natives and lived happily ever after." On that front, this story didn't go nearly as bad as I was afraid it would. And, to be fair, the natives making a show of force like this is indeed a vital component in how injustices like this can and have historically been redressed.

But...it also wasn't really foreshadowed. The story wasn't about making peace with the natives. It being the solution to the main conflict, after spending the whole story focused on this science versus tradition conflict, is just...what the hell was the point of anything that came before?

If this story was going to be nerd revenge porn about science beating muscle, then the conflict should have just been intrahuman, with Sam helping his faction rediscover the use of their lost technology while the enemies are still limited in using their own by ignorance and superstition. If the story was going to be an anticolonial narrative about how building native strength is a necessary precursor to good faith negotiations with the conquerors, then the first folk should have been the protagonists. The story's titular focus only barely interacts with the story's primary conflict.

This, and most of the other problems I have with the story, all seem to be symptomatic of it just having too much going on. There's great material in here ("bug-controlling gnome aliens vs medieval humans with the odd laser gun" is the RTS game pitch I never knew I needed), but it didn't have enough room, and the story didn't know what it wanted to be the centrepiece.

That said? I wouldn't dream of calling it bad. It's mostly good. Just, also kind of frustrating.