In the beginning...Egan Drake was a wealthy but unhappy visionary who died early and left behind only a powerful dream. He proposed to spread mankind among the stars. Then there was Megan Drake. She took her brother's vision and made it real. At the Raven Foundation's New Mexico headquarters, she gathered around her experts in astronautics, biology, computer science, defense, and fusion propulsion. The project was simple in design yet grandiose in its aim: a thousand tiny ships would crawl to the stars; each that landed on an Earth-type planet would produce several dozen colonists; each colonist would be a product of the genes derived from Megan and her experts. Every ship would manufacture cyborgs for repairs and self-protection. But much of the technology was new and untried; no one could predict what might really occur at a millennia-long journey's end if, say, a cyborg fell in love or aliens were met or...