The groundbreaking novel that launched Cherryh's eponymous space opera
series of first contact and its consequences
It had been nearly five centuries since the starship Phoenix, lost in
space and desperately searching for the nearest G5 star, had encountered
the planet of the atevi. On this alien world, law was kept by the use
of registered assassination, alliances were defined by individual
loyalties not geographical borders, and war became inevitable once
humans and one faction of atevi established a working relationship. It
was a war that humans had no chance of winning on this planet so many
light-years from home.
Now, nearly two hundred years after that conflict, humanity has traded
its advanced technology for peace and an island refuge that no atevi
will ever visit. Then the sole human the treaty allows into atevi
society is marked for an assassin's bullet. The work of an isolated
lunatic? The interests of a particular faction? Or the consequence of
one human's fondness for a species which has fourteen words for betrayal
and not a single word for love?