In the world of the novel, therefore, very few children are reared by their biological parents. Although the right to found a family currently recognized by the United Nations Charter of Human Rights is still cherished, it is almost universally accepted that in a world whose citizens have a reasonable expectation of living for a very long time, the right to found a family ought to be exercised posthumously. The novels central character, Damon Hart, is the biological son of Conrad Helier, who was born not long after his fathers death and raised by the surviving members of Heliers research team. When the novel begins, however, he is estranged from his former foster-parents, having rebelled against the expectations they had of the career path he would take.
The plot of the novel describes events following the kidnapping of one of Damons foster parents, apparently by members of a disorganized movement called Eliminators, whose modus operandi is to publish accusations that certain individuals are unworthy of immortality and call for their assassination. Among the allegations made on this occasion is the claim that Conrad Helier is still alive, in hiding because he was not only the architect of the solution to the final plague but of the plague itself. Damon sets out to make his own investigation of these allegations with the aid of Madoc Tamlin, a man only slightly older than he, who fancies himself something of an outlaw. Damon had befriended Tamlin during the most extreme phase of his rebellion against his foster parents and the surrounding society, and their friendship has survived the strain exerted upon it by their mutual close acquaintance with the volatile Diana Caisson.
With Tamlins aid, and the ambivalent encouragement of interested parties within the Hardinist Cabal, Damon contrives to arrive at the truth of the matter before various rival investigators, who include representatives of the Ahasuerus Foundation as well as the police. He and Tamlin are then faced
with awkward decisions regarding the uses to which they might put the information they have gained, and the new career opportunities that have opened up for them.
Another recurrent factor in the series future history introduced in this volume is a set of technologies gathered under the nickname gantzing, the reference being to a pioneer of biological cementation named Leon Gantz. At this relatively early stage, gantzing microorganisms do little more than stick formerly unpromising materials together in order to make building blocks, but as the series advances gantzing techniques become fundamental to all construction and demolition processes.
Volume three, Dark Ararat , complicates the chronological sequence of the series in being set three years after the arrival of the space Ark Hope in orbit around an Earth-clone world in a distant solar system (in 2817, according to the ships calendar). Hope had been built as a response to the ecocatastrophic Crash that occurred between volumes one and two; the Ark had been completed in 2153 and had left the solar system in 2178. The central character of the story, Matthew Fleury, is one of the would-be colonists carried by the Ark in cryonic suspension; from his viewpoint, no time has elapsed since he was frozen down with his two daughters, Michelle and Alice, in 2090.
While the Ark has been en route its crew-members have lived through several generations; during that time they have formed a new view of their mission and destiny that is at odds with the ideas of the Arks Hardinist builder, Shen Chin Che whose claim to own the Ark they fervently dispute. As a result of this difference of opinion the colonization project has gone badly awry. Many of the colonists taken down to the surface of the new world have concluded that the world is not a close enough twin to their homeworld to enable them to flourish there. The genetics of the new worlds ecosphere are peculiar, the native life-forms having cultivated a kind of natural emortality with the aid of a mechanism that echoes Morgan Millers ill-fated experiments. Further complications are added to the situation by the knowledge that Earth had not been utterly devastated by the Crash, and that the most recent news from the home planet which is more than eighty years old suggests that it is now a burgeoning paradise of near-emortals. (The Arks passengers are, of course, mere mortals.)
In the great tradition of Ark-staffing, Matthew was recruited to the human cargo as one member of a pair, in his case of ecological geneticists. He has been revived because his counterpart, Bernal Delgado, has been murdered while investigating the ruins of a city whose unexpected and rather belated discovery has added more fuel to the debate about the hospitability of the new world. The humanoid aliens who built the city may well be extinct, but if they are not they must have suffered a social and technological regression so extreme as to have given up on the domestication of fire. The citys investigators were about to undertake a trip down the nearby river to a peculiar plain, in the hope of clearing up this mystery, when the murder took place. The weapon used to kill Delgado was a crude nonmetallic blade modeled on those once used by the indigenes, but of recent manufacture.