Eighteen years have passed since the first manned mission to Earth
arrived from Venus. With the first colonists already establishing
themselves across the bright, sunny world of clear blue skies and
wonderlands of towering mountains and ice deserts, Kyal Reen arrives to
join the Venusian scientific and archeological teams that are working to
reconstruct the story of the mysterious and enigmatic extinct Terran
race that once flourished there. Studies of Terran geology, scientific
works, and ancient records show that Earth's early peoples witnessed
terrifying cataclysmic cosmic events in skies very different from those
seen today. In his travels among the Terran ruins, Kyal meets a
biologist called Lorili, who is attempting to explain certain baffling
similarities between some Terran and Venusian life forms that are
irreconcilable with the established fact that Venus is a far younger
planet than Earth. Formerly aligned with the ''Progressive'' activists
back on Venus, Lorili admires the qualities of tenacity and
determination written through Terran history. She constructs a theory of
Venusians being descended from Terran ancestors. However, even allowing
for the greatly exaggerated time scales that Terran science assigned to
the processes of biological and planetary evolution, further research
shows that there could have been no overlap. The Terrans were extinct
long before life emerged on Venus. But there is a different, unexpected
answer to the riddle. Lorili and Kyal will have to fight for their
theory--and their lives.
