This is a book about good intentions. But as the saying goes, hell is paved with them. New Earth Arbiter Henry m’Yama t’Nowak learns this the hard way when he tries to save humanity from a hostile force—and winds up coming very close to losing everything.
Czerneda drops the reader into quite the complicated situation at the beginning of the book. We learn that the inhabitants of the original Earth (i.e., our Earth) were evacuated to New Earth many years before. After that hasty move, humans had some time to adjust and send out ships of exploration to find other habitable planets.
And then the Kmet arrived. This was no clear-cut, take-me-to-your-leader first contact event. Rather, the Kmet—who resemble large blobs with flippers and antenna-like structures—appeared over New Earth in their ships via space portals and offered to share their advanced technology. In exchange, humans would enter into a partnership with them in order to ultimately achieve a “duality.” What that duality entailed wasn’t clear, but communication between the species was only painstakingly (and partially) achieved. Humans figured “duality” was just a fancy way of saying “friendship.” Despite this ambiguity, biologists, psychologists, linguists, and many others built a system for negotiating with the alien species. A figure to be known as the “Arbiter” was to be Earth’s representative to the Kmet in everything relevant to interspecies communication and technology.
Henry, the current Arbiter, knows the drill whenever he must communicate with the Kmet: step into a can-like structure, have wires strapped to his head and body, and get downloaded into a new body, which then travels into space to meet the Kmet on their ship. The thing is, the Kmet know nothing about this maneuver. They think they’re actually meeting with flesh-and-blood Henry, especially since they can’t distinguish between one human and another. For the humans, this set-up is partly for safety and partly so that the “new” body of the Arbiter (albeit bestowed with the real Arbiter’s consciousnesss and memories) can be fitted out with “oneirics”: implants that allow the Arbiter to consult a team of diverse experts on how to handle the Kmet during delicate talks.
Across all these decades, the humans of New Earth believed that the sleeper ships sent out to explore the galaxy had been lost or destroyed. Then a message arrives from one of those ships suggesting that humans may have successfully settled on other worlds. Henry and Earth’s representatives craft a plan to bring those pioneers home—and they bring the proposal to the Kmet, who freak out. The aliens insist that all “Humans-There” must be “Humans-Here” (i.e., New Earth) and yell about The Divider, who will destroy humans wherever they are living.
A plan is devised to visit the most likely planets harboring humans, based on the ships’ trajectories. Henry gets another new body, a tough-as-nails pilot named Killian, and a very versatile (sometimes too versatile to be believed) organic AI ship, and sets off to meet with the Kmet. The novel’s section titles of the book map against the various planets explored—“World I,” “World II,” etc. Henry’s and the Kmet’s ships travel to these worlds via a network of “space portals,” which are controlled by the Kmet, with some input from Killian.
This rescue operation kicks into high gear when each planet in turn explodes just after its humans have been evacuated. Henry and Killian (and their team) start to wonder if the Kmet are responsible, rather than this unknown Divider. The humans grow even more suspicious when they realize that the Kmet want to claim for their own all the humans on one planet—so that the “duality” can finally be achieved. Only at this point does Henry insist that the Kmet explain what they mean by that word.
As his suspicions grow, Henry continues to direct the evacuations, but also tells his pilot to quietly explore the strange Kmet ship as best she can without getting caught. What Killian learns, with the help of the AI ship (called “Flip”), makes Henry maneuver humanity into a more equal position with respect to the Kmet.
Sprinkled throughout the book are short chapters about a strange planet called “Doublet,” across which Beth Seeker travels in her attempt to communicate with the alien force that lives underground. Doublet turns out to be the last planet on Henry’s list, and what/who he and Beth find underground explains just why the Kmet are so desperate to achieve “duality.”
Czerneda prioritizes character development, and the characters’ relationships with one another, over detailed descriptions of space or ship technology. We spend the most time in Henry’s head, watching as he makes decisions based on a combination of instinct and logic. His pilot, Killian, is a kind of stand-in for us, observing him at first with suspicion that gradually becomes admiration, and even love.
This reader found Henry’s almost unimpeachable nobility a bit too much, but maybe that’s just because I’m cynical by nature. I was also a disappointed by the way everything was neatly tied up at the end (even with Henry’s ultimate situation ... which I won’t spoil for you). Nonetheless, To Each This World complicates the “first contact” trope—by introducing a second alien species that can shed light on why the initial species wanted humans in the first place—and asks questions about the limits of communication, what it means to call a new planet “home,” and how an alien biological process could drive one or more other species to extinction. In this way, it is an entertaining and addictive science fiction story that pulls you in and makes time disappear. Highly recommended.