issa Windholm and her alien partner, Karl, who resembles a scaled-down T. rex, are scientists exploring the planet Jonna. They come upon an artifact of the Forerunners, a mysterious race of galactic beings, long extinct. Eager to disseminate news of their find to the rest of the current-day galactic community—which includes such races as the reptilian Sausians and the catlike "anthropards" called the Rikhans—they are temporarily stymied by the appearance of two freebooters, the human Torben Hebo and the anthropard Dzesi, who claim discovery rights to the Forerunner object. But Lissa's firm ways and Karl's foreboding massiveness win the day, and when Nebo and Dzesi fall in need of rescue from a flood, the position of the victors is assured.
From here, Lissa and Hebo go separate ways. The latter ends up on an Earth transmogrified by artificial intelligence and human modification into a kind of enigmatic, paradisal resort. There he purges the less relevant of his 900 years of memories in order to become a smoother operator, with thoughts of a rematch with Lissa. Meanwhile, Lissa has returned to her homeworld of Asborg and met Orichalc, a renegade Sausian. Orichalc informs Lissa of a unique cosmological event his people have been monitoring secretly, and an expedition is mounted to spy on the Sausians. What Lissa and Orichalc and their fellow crewmembers—including their captain with a past, Gerward Valen, and a duplicitous physicist named Esker Harolsson—discover is an imminent collision between two black holes, sure to result in valuable new cosmological insights. After undergoing some dangerous trials, including a rescue of the Sausians from their damaged ship, Lissa and company bring home the prize.
Jumping forward five years, Orichalc and his sympathizers have established a colony on Asborg's sister world, Freydis, where Hebo now runs a business. Finally, the rejuvenated rogue and the familially beholden Lissa cross paths again, leading to a return trip to the system where the black holes collided, there to encounter the biggest Forerunner artifact yet—one that is alive and dangerous!
Unfortunately, a Forerunner fix-up
Essentially (disregarding his fantasies), Grand Master Poul Anderson, who passed away in 2001, wrote two kinds of novels: big, ambitious, sprawling, groundbreaking sagas—such as the recent cycle that included Harvest of Stars (1993)—and small, competent, cleanly delimited adventures, such as The People of the Wind (1973). In both could be found Anderson's trademark bardic language, his masterful worldbuilding and a mixed melancholy-romantic view of life. It's just that in the more ambitious books, all the elements are ratcheted higher and presented in larger quantities. The smaller books read almost like test runs for the larger ones.
This posthumous book is one of the less grandly conceived types, and in fact it is a "fix-up" of sorts, whose seeds were two stories Anderson contributed to the Asimovian shared-world volumes known collectively as Isaac's Universe. As a patchwork, the present tale has been stitched together pretty well. After all, Anderson was a veteran writer of some 50 years, and knew precisely how to do such things. Still, such awkward features as the big early buildup for Karl the T. rex, followed by his total absence from the rest of the book, as well as the start-and-stop-and-start-again nature of Lissa's adventures, go a long way toward dispelling any sense of organic wholeness.
What Anderson does provide is some minor yet credible worldbuilding (his alien environments not only make ecological sense, but are conveyed with bright sensual strokes); some fairly realistic yet overall rather tepid romantic interludes for Lissa (with both Hebo and Valen); and some standard-issue human-alien realpolitik. But even in its high points, there's always something a little bit off. The collision between the black holes is fairly vivid—but does any SF reader in this day and age really need a page of infodump explaining the basics of what a black hole is? Moreover, although this is purportedly a future of massive nanotech, very little of this infrastructure is visible, and the spaceships and cultures have the old-fashioned feel of vintage Star Trek. On the plus side, Anderson does manage to convey both the Lazarus-Long world-weariness of the ancient yet virile Hebo and the expectations for a practically unlimited lifetime of the younger Lissa.
Finally, unlike the recent Heritage Universe series by Charles Sheffield, Anderson never comes to grips with the nature of his Forerunners, leaving them just a MacGuffin in this amiable but ultimately inconsequential jaunt.
