When the database on which human society depends begins mysteriously to implode, the finger of causality points directly to HuteNamid, an idyllic planet on the very edge of human-occupied space. The man pointing the finger is Stephen Ridenour, a young computer genius with a knife"s edge hold on his sanity. The man targeted is Wesley Smith, another computer genius with the keys to that database and, according to Stephen, a revolutionary new theory about the nature of space itself. Admiral Loren Cantrell of the Alliance starship, Cetacean, is given the task of delivering Stephen to HuteNamid....and keeping him sane--and alive--at least long enough to confirm or disprove his suspicions. But HuteNamid holds more than just a singularly attitudinal programmer. Cantrell finds herself up against a log jam of Native American Ethnic Reconstructionists and up to her oft-decorated collar in lies, plots, and deception. For within HuteNamid itself lie the answers to some of the oldest mysteries of the universe.