In a self-contained city high above the Earth, four thousand permanent residents come to the startling conclusion that their orbiting complex is far from the utopia they had believed it to be. Original.

The author returns to the universe of Lightpaths, his critically acclaimed, best-selling debut, where the human inhabitants of an orbiting space station confront a vast new intelligence so strange it defies the term, "alien." Original.

With his astonishing future vision, Howard V. Hendrix has emerged as one of the new masters of science fiction, drawing extraordinary praise from his debut novel Lightpaths and the follow-up, Standing Wave . Now he meshes virtual reality, deep-space exploration, and human nature in a novel starkly breathtaking in its portrayal of the quest for meaning, against a backdrop of scientific and spiritual chaos. During the first, turbulent decades of the twenty-first century, an artifact that resembles an angel’s shoulder blade is unearthed from California’s La Brea tar pit, a startling discovery that will forever alter the lives of five people—and send them reeling toward one blinding moment of transcendental light.