Sterling: The Master of the Aviary

Mellow Julian Nebraska is a perpetual bachelor, philosopher, and master of the aviary of the title. He has lived simply and alone for most of his life, focused solely on intellectual pursuits and surrounded by students who attend upon him as if he were a postmodern Socrates. His lives in “Selder”, in Colorado or possibly Nebraska, a corruption of the Old Proper English word “Shelter”, and it is the only city its inhabitants know of that has been built from scratch since the greenhouse effect turned nasty and the new Dark Ages fell. Selder is ruled by “the Godfather” and his council of 40 men in red, much like a Mandarin emperor and his circle of Confucian scribes and advisors—or perhaps more appropriately, like the Greek oligarchs of Athens, including the seemingly nonexistent social status they award to women. The setting is (nominally) 1000 years after the fall of our civilization, and all that remains of that civilization are ruins and long-abandoned grassy highways, lurking beneath the encroaching vegetation like the Roman roads of Europe. Along those roads come few travellers, mostly vagrants from the west, savages from the east, pirates from the north, and nothing from the baked deserts of the south. Along one of those roads comes a small group of Chinese refugees, presumably from Oregon, fleeing war and plague. Bili, one of Julian’s students, takes pity on his master’s solitary life, and despite Julian’s protests, purchases one, a starving but still healthy older woman, to serve as Julian’s servant.

[Spoilers] Julian names his new assistant House Sparrow Oregon, and Sparrow, initially illiterate and fearful, gradually becomes his domestic servant as he teaches her the tasks of daily life, including caring for his aviary of birds. She also learns the most sacred of tasks, transporting “grey” (used) water from the town’s cistern to an uphill reservoir so that it can run downhill through canals and filters until it arrives, clean again, in town. Citizens are entitled to one bucket of clean water for every bucket of dirty that they pump uphill. Ironically, in a world where the greenhouse effect destroyed civilization, it is greenhouses that now sustain the citizens of Selder: all crops are grown indoors to protect them from extremes of weather, ranging from baking hot summers to dust storms, and from the hordes of locusts and mice that invade the town whenever their other food supplies wither. But despite her growing comfort, Sparrow remains illiterate and largely unable to speak the local language, other than a few words of Old Proper English. Possibly this is because Julian doesn’t care enough for her to teach her anything, let alone to take her (or anyone else, for that matter) as his lover.

When the current Godfather dies, possibly of natural causes, a succession struggle begins. Julian has long tried to distance himself from the corridors of power, where he once served as a valued scribe and orator, but it seems unlikely he’ll succeed, since he wields considerable influence among the sons of the wealthy and powerful and will therefore be courted by the contenders. When asked to enlist on the side of the favored of the two oligarchs, a weak man who nonetheless has the potential to replace the old Godfather in a peaceful transition, Julian refuses to get involved; he hopes he’ll be seen for what he really is (a harmless scholar) and simply left alone. But like Socrates before him, that seems unlikely at best. The more militaristic of the oligarchs soon seizes the throne, having rallied the people (and their police) to his cause by inciting them to fear and hate foreigners, both the street thieves who have no alternative but thievery if they are to survive and the wealthy established foreigners who are more interesting targets because there’s more booty to be had. Like many a demagogue before him, the new leader follows the oft-repeated historical pattern of choosing the low road and demonizing a minority to unit the populace rather than trying to win on his own merits.

Julian is arrested and imprisoned—and is reminded that the victor’s family once suffered at his hands. Julian’s eloquently written condemnations led to their execution; indeed, they were such good rhetoric that the new Godfather will be using them against Julian and his students. The new Godfather has a long memory and no fear of using the nastiest tricks he can imagine to repay those who once harmed him: Sparrow will be executed as a foreigner, but Julian has a choice of execution, a tour of duty in the new army that the Godfather is raising (which is likely to kill him), or, if he wants to save Sparrow, he must endure having his hand maimed so he can never write again or he must marry Sparrow. The lack of courage that was only hinted at by Julian’s earlier actions now emerges fully into the light: he selects a tour in the army as the easiest path, leaving Sparrow to an unpleasant fate. Two years later, he goes AWOL and eventually finds a village that will give him decent employment as a scribe and bureaucrat. But then he is “rescued” and commanded to return to Selder by one of his students, who remained behind, patient and subtle and invested in local politics until he found a way to inherit the throne from the evil Godfather, who died while campaigning against a neighboring community. Under its enlightened new leader, Selder is undergoing a renaissance and becoming a place of culture, research, invention, and respect for knowledge—even women are being given a say in the new society.

Sterling sets us up neatly for the shock of Julian’s betrayal of Sparrow. Descriptions that initially seemed to paint him as an amusing and generally inoffensive eccentric suddenly take on far darker import in hindsight when Julian is finally forced to make a stand—and fails the test. “Master” is a striking reminder of how a safe, secure, pleasant civilization can turn into something far nastier almost overnight if a despot with no scruples has enough of a brain to manipulate the majority who would prefer to sit back and watch. To succeed, the despot requires that potential opponents provide a textbook example of Burke’s maxim that “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Had Julian possessed the courage to support the less-violent oligarch early in the struggle, and throw the weight of his students behind that support, a peaceful transition would have ensued and poor Sparrow might have lived. In the context of the anthology’s theme, it’s also a reminder that those of us who sit by the sidelines and watch things go to hell instead of taking arms against our host of troubles may prove to be as culpable as the true villains in the end. Sterling may also be taking a covert poke at the last decade or two of American politics, but that may just be my prejudices talking.

Sterling is clearly preaching, but he does it so well you might not notice if you’re not paying attention. He also has a gift for slipping in the occasional memorable phrase. For example, when Julian describes one of his more annoying students, he notes “Bili had never been the kind of kid you could hit just once.” Julian is also far too clever for his own good, and less wise than he should be in using that cleverness. This may be part of what blinds him to his responsibility to act in the story’s events instead of watching from the sidelines. Later, when he pleads for his life with the Godfather, he notes how useful he would be if left alive to immortalize his patron, but goes a step too far:
Julian: “Someone will [speak for you to future generations] and they’ll need great skill.”
Godfather: “I hate a subtle insult... I can forgive an enemy soldier who flings a spear straight at me, but a thing like that is just vile.”
The accumulation of such lines is entertaining in its own right, but more importantly, it gradually builds a picture of just how self-involved Julian is, and how rarely he turns his intellectual power to pondering anything important. Early on, in an amusing and seemingly throwaway line about the kind of Socratic dialogue his students want him to engage in, he raises the cynical question: “What is a gentleman’s proper relationship to his civic duty, and how can he weasel out of it?” That proves to have far darker meaning when he turns away from his own civic duty.

Sterling gets the science mostly right. His description of a post-greenhouse world seem reasonable, and the details of sustenance seem right; for example, there are no dogs or large domestic livestock, and most meat comes from rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice, all animals that take little space and can survive neatly on scraps that humans can’t use. (Indeed, it’s been suggested by some proponents of urban farming that hamsters and guinea pigs would be the perfect meat sources for an urban civilization.) The use of the village grey water to dispose of (recycle) the dead and all other wastes is a great idea in a climate where water and other modern resources (such as fertilizer) are scarce. On the other hand, the lack of cats seems unlikely, since cats have a long history as our allies against rats and other vermin. Dates are always tricky, but if the claims of 1000 to 3000 years post-collapse are correct (and they’re probably vague and exaggerated estimates), it seems likely most ruins and and highways would long since have vanished, leaving traces visible only to archeologists. Our building materials are far less durable than those of the Romans. Given some of the relics that have been carefully preserved for the puzzlement and amazement of Julian and his students, such as an aeolipile and magic lantern (these of all things!), it seems likely that no more than a couple hundred years have passed. It’s an open question whether the climate will have begun to recover hundreds of years in the future. With no large-scale civilization burning fossil fuels, the natural cleansing mechanisms of the world’s ecosystems would begin rapidly removing carbon dioxide from the air, removing much of the impetus for climate change. But if the world’s systems tip into what ecologists call an “alternative stable state”, the consequences may last very long indeed.

“Master” succeeds on many levels, including as an entertaining story on the surface and morality tale beneath, but it’s also a masterful example of characterization that isn’t what it seems until suddenly, with perfect hindsight, Julian comes into unpleasantly sharp focus.