Inheritor (First Foreigner Series #3) » (Reprint)

Six months have passed since the reappearance of the starship Phoenix - the same ship which brought humans to the world of alien atevi nearly two hundred years ago, leaving a small and vulnerable colony to struggle for survival in a hostile environment. During these six months, the alien atevi have striven to reconfigure their fledgling space program in a breakneck bid to take their place in the heavens alongside humans. But the return of the Phoenix has added a frighteningly powerful third party to an already volatile situation, polarizing political factions in both human and atevi societies, and making the possibility of all-out planetary war an even more likely threat. On the atevi mainland, human ambassador Bren Cameron, in a desperate attempt to maintain the peace, has risked alienation from his own people by communicating with the staff of the Phoenix as spokesman for the atevi, and has arranged for one human representative from the Phoenix to take up residence with him in his apartments, and for another to be stationed on Mosphiera, humanity's island enclave. Now, Bren has the difficult task of indoctrinating Jason Graham, a young man who has never before set foot on a planet, in the intricate, delicate, and potentially lethal maneuverings of the human-atevi interface. And this at a time when, thanks to the assassination of an atevi lord who had been one of Bren's primary adversaries, and the near-collision of Bren's personal plane with a jet manned by an unknown pilot, the relationship between atevi factions is becoming more strained by the minute.

Publishers Weekly

The human-alien tensions that marked Foreigner (1994) and Invader (1995) peak in this sophisticated conclusion to the trilogy. The atevi and the humans co-inhabiting the planet Mospheira are near the brink of interspecies war. The major hope for peace is Bren Cameron, the paidhi, or sole translator-diplomat between the atevi and the humans, who tries to bridge the inscrutable and unpredictable alien society and the small and paranoid human colony nervously marooned on its world. Bren's complex job is further complicated by the unexpected disappearance of the starship that had established the human presence two centuries earlier. Cherryh works entirely through the paidhi's eyes as Bren struggles to untangle the intricate relationships, shifting associations and convoluted motives of atevi, colonists and spacers. As he does, he realizes, to his dismay, that as his linguistic competence grows his heart goes out less to his own species than to individual atevi, even though the aliens are incapable of affection. Through her hallmark ability to craft nonhuman languages as the basis for alluring alien psychologies, Cherryh superbly resolves this epic trilogy's multifaceted conflicts, dramatizing again the idea that people can't truly know their own language-nor others, nor themselves-until they master at least one other tongue (Apr.)