In a far-off future, two anthropologists--gross, powerful, dissolute
Emilio Rodriguez, and aspiring, young, naïve Allan Brenner, who,
unbeknownst to himself, carries ancient genes of a sort no longer
welcome on Home World--have been assigned to conduct a study on Abydos,
a deeply forested wilderness planet of little note whose only evidence
of civilization is a single enclave: small, rough, dingy Company
Station, a fueling station occasionally utilized by star freighters.
Within the forest, some days from Company Station, are the Pons, a group
of small, simian-type organisms that seem near the crossroads between
animal and rational creature, between nature and culture. They would
appear to constitute an ideal object of study with respect to the
origins and foundations of civilization. How it came about, so to speak,
that something once emerged from the lair, or cave, that was so
radically different? What lies at the beginning? The results of the
study have already been politically prescribed on Home World, that the
Pons are to shed light on humanity, that it is, in its original and
unspoiled nature, polite, sweet, kind, deferent, diffident, social,
noncompetitive, and innocent. Both Rodriguez and Brenner have a trait in
common, however, which may explain why they have been sent--exiled, in a
sense--to such an out-of-the-way locale. Both seek the truth. They enter
the forest.
