The Quantum Rose

This is one of those stories about a buncha Mayans being abducted by aliens, genetically manipulated and given super far future tech and left on a new planet, exploring space and doing their own genetic manipulations to populate lots of planets while starting an empire run by a family of super telepaths, then losing everything with all the worlds regressing to Iron Age tech until Earth catches up with the space Mayans and everyone starts traveling the stars searching for lost weird humans again.  Ok, really it’s a story about one space Mayan falling in love with one abusive guy and one alcoholic guy and the author pretends it has something to do with quantum physics.

Meet Kamoje. She’s a far descendant of space Mayans.  She has grown up on one of the planets that has not been rediscovered by spacefarers and so it has Iron Age tech for the most part.  Her family has been genetically engineered to be the perfect slaves.  She is tiny since her family skips adolescence and goes directly to adulthood, and she has empathy.  Not “I’m so sorry your dog died” empathy but “OH GODS I FEEL YOUR PAIN FOR REALS” empathy.  They are also programmed to be resilient to both mental and physical abuse and they come with the Stockholm Syndrome, inability to learn complicated subjects,  and heightened sexual response already installed!  Yet somehow Kamoje and her family are the governing family of a province.

Now meet Jax.  Jax is half slave stock, and half slave-owner stock.  This makes him the archetypal abusive boyfriend.  One moment he’s sweet and tender, the next moment he’s whipping Kamoje with a riding crop.  He is also the governor of a different province, and Kamoje was promised to him as a very young girl.  On their planet they call a marriage between two governors a “corporate merger” and the rule is that if a man offers the woman a dowery she has to either offer him better to make him go away or accept it.  Kamoje has accepted Jax’s dowery even though he hits her because while she could beat his offer, it would cause her people to suffer and she couldn’t live with herself if she did that.

And the last player in our cast is Vyrl.  YES HE IS QUITE VIRILE THANK YOU FOR NOTICING THE AUTHOR’S CLEVERNESS. He comes from a different planet and is a member of the telepathic empire, whose telepathy has been broken by trauma.  To cope with his trauma he drinks.  He’s 70 years old but looks younger thanks to nanobots, and he has 40 great-grandchildren.  He spies Kamoje frolicing nude in a lake and decides that instead of raping her on the spot, he will misunderstand local tradition and send in a huge dowery that no one can match since he has access to future tech and the resources of 3 trillion space-faring humans. Kamoje has no choice but to marry him.

Just as she is discovering that her space alki is good natured and willing to help her jill off if their lovemaking doesn’t satisfy her, Jax kidnaps her.  Then he starves her, beats her, rapes her, massages her temples and gives her gifts.  You know, abusive boyfriend crap.  He declares her previous marriage null and signs a new one for her.  For a while she decides to go along with this since she is afraid Jax will hurt her people if she tries to free herself.  Eventually the space police get involved, who end up finding that Vyrl is the legitimate husband and that Jax is a horrible person.

So there’s three factions in space.  There’s the people of Earth, there’s the slave-owning Traders, and there’s the other space mayans who aren’t total dicks.  Now there’s a lot of far-future tech that no one has remembered how to use yet, since it takes one of those telepathic empire folks to work it.  So all the factions are trying to find sites that has some of that tech and then capture members of the telepaths.  This is delicate since apparently they still have formal titles and people regard them as royalty even though they recently caused a huge war that made everyone hate them.  So no one can be too abusive, though we find out that the Earth faction made twins have sex so they could have barely-functioning inbred kids.

Most of the remaining members of the empire live on this one planet that the Earth faction has control over even though they signed some treaty god knows when saying they’d bugger off.  So they plan to slip Vyrl and Kamoje, who is necessary since her slave empathy lets his broken telepathy work, on to the planet and then make Earth make themselves look like dicks on TV.  They do this by turning Vyrl into Space Ghandi and trying to recruit every single person on the planet to go have a big party in this big plain.  Beknownst but not considered by the telepaths is that everyone on this planet is genetically engineered to be either a 1 or a 0 in the binary code of a biological computer.  So the more people gather, the more Earth gets pissed off, and the more some sleeping technology under the world starts whispering to Kamoje since it can’t talk to Vyrl.

Earth ends up abducting Kamoje and trying to threaten Vyrl with her, and Kamoje overcomes her slave programming so she can be mad at the Earth commander instead of trying to make him feel better.  They end up giving back Kamoje when it turns out she is pregnant and abducting her is going to be a bigger PR problem than it is worth.  When they are giving the big speech about how they won and the planet is free, Kamoje feels the technology again and tells it to wake up.  So it sings a pretty song for the whole planet and puts on a light show that only the telepaths can see.

Later, Kamoje meets Jax once more.  He makes a half-hearted attempt to win her back, then agrees he will drop his culture tampering charges against Vyrl if she will drop the rape charges against him.  And then they all live happily ever after.

There’s an afterword to this book that explains how the primary relationships in this book between Jax, Kamoje, and Vyrl are inspired by quantum physics and molecular behavior.  This explanation is utterly unnecessary because it could also be explained by any love triangle ever.  The fact that Jax’s behavior has to be explained by conflicting genetics is bizarre since it occurs in our normal human environment, ditto Kamoje.

I’ll admit that I found the setting interesting as well as ridiculous.  For instance, Vyrl’s home planet is the sole planet orbiting a dual-star system, with two moons. Everyone has two thumbs and two fingers on each hand except Vyrl because you don’t want the romantic lead to be too weird.  Their plants all reproduce by blowing colorful bubbles full of glittery pollen and everyone is described as being constantly covered in glitter.  This detail amused me on multiple levels.  I was picturing a Lisa Frank-inspired landscape where shirtless men rub plant semen on their bare chests and ask women if they dazzle them.

I will leave this recap with the worst sentence in the book.  “If he became any more masculine, she would have to take him up to their bedroom right now.”