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.