The future star-spanning culture that André inhabits has tapped the powers of quantum uncertainty, you see. "Entangled" technology underlies the Slide, which allows for teleportation of nonliving matter among all the scattered worlds of Rim and Core. (But the Slide is fatal to the quantum structures of sentient brains, and so passenger-carrying relativistic ships still ply the spacelanes as well.) But on the surface of planets, this probability tech—powered by tanglestone, a strange "natural" resource—is mostly employed by the weird class of people known as "coincidence engineers." By utilizing their skills as Heisenbergian observers, they can influence the very course of reality on levels small and large. No wonder André would like to become one.

He seeks to apprentice himself to Jean Gris, a master. He might have an in with Gris, after all, since André's data-miner girlfriend, Cricket Murphy, is working with Gris on some project or other. But then André has the misfortune to receive the assignment of killing Gris's lover, Lucienne Spivak! Hardly the proper introduction to his wished-for teacher.

André got his assigment from Josephe Greene and Timothy Closs, the profit-seeking amoral duo who run Greene's World and its tanglestone mines. The pair are concerned with a rebellion by the ranids, or "froggies," the "coolies" who serve as labor force. Lucienne, Jean and Cricket, it turns out, are fomenting this very revolt, meeting in secret with natives such as Tetra, Caetei and Gourami. André's choice becomes clear: stick with the establishment or join the rebels.

But what no one realizes is that the ranids possess ancient secrets that will possibly alter the whole universe.

Compact and entertaining

Bear's very neatly configured, compact and entertaining novel reminds me of the early novels of George R.R. Martin, back in the days when he used to write science fiction. Or, in a closer approximation to this book's exact blend of readability, action, speculation and characterization, let me cite the prime mid-career work of Poul Anderson. Excluding its postmodern trappings of wiredness (a trope that's well done, actually, convincingly showing us people who are used to being always online), this book might have come from the pen of Anderson during, say, the time he was writing The People of the Wind (1973).

Bear's ranids could stand in for Anderson's winged aliens. She digs into their culture—with several sections written from ranid point of view—with anthropological care and gusto. Her human characters are all proactive doers in the Anderson mode, not given over to angst or anomie. In fact, the ease with which Cricket accepts André's murder of Lucienne is almost too cavalier. But they're not insensitive dullards, either. It's just that Bear's concerned with keeping all her plates spinning in a surprising, vibrant manner, not with any kind of Weltschermz. And at this she succeeds admirably.

For the most part, her prose remains, as before, very well constructed, albeit not flashy, with minimal pyrotechnics. But a bravura depiction of a climactic "probability storm" does raise the stylistic bar considerably.

Bear is carrying forward honorably a long tradition of such tales, and that's a noble pursuit.

Bantam continues to deserve credit for bolstering Bear's career so intelligently in mass-market format, although it was rather boorish of them not to list her non-Bantam books up front, along with her previous Spectra work.