somewhere in the barbarous hinterlands of Central Asia in the nick of time, as the queen is deposed during their trip. Rhita's clavicle succeeds in expanding the test gate to a usable size, but it warns her that whoever opened the gate in the first place was not human. That night, the Jarts arrive on Gaia en masse. They begin the task of storing and digitizing all the data and life forms on Gaia to transmit down to descendant command. Rhita's consciousness is of special interest to the Jarts, particularly what she knows of Patricia. In the meantime on Earth proper, consensus has been reached to re-open the Way but not to destroy it. Mirsky disappears. Another entity who should not be there, Ry Oyu, the former gate opener for the Gate Guild, appears. He prods the president of the Hexamon into covertly ordering Korzenowski into destroying the Way regardless of the decision of the citizens. The backlash destroys the Stone. Ry Oyu, Korzenowski, Ser Olmy (who connived at the destruction), and the Jart controlling Olmy, outrun the Way's destruction and arrive at a Jart defense station located over Gaia. The Jarts respect the wishes of Ry Oyu as a representative of descendant command, and before the Way dies, transmit their accumulated data in a single immensely long fluctuation along the singularity/flaw of the Way to the Final Mind. Korzenowski has himself digitized and sent with the transmission. Olmy is dropped off on the homeworld of the Frants, a communal mind civilization whom he likes. Ry Oyu has Rhita's mind freed; her consciousness gives Ry Oyu the last piece of data needed to reconstitute Patricia Vasquez. Ry Oyu intends to make up for his failure to instruct Patricia properly when she was trying to open a gate back home in Eon; he correctly opens the gate, and bare moments before the Way completely disintegrates around him, finally sends her back home to an Earth where the Death did not happen. Rhita is also returned to Gaia, a Gaia where she never opened a test gate and where the Jarts did not invade. And Pavel Mirsky, still unsatisfied, returns to the beginning of the universe to witness all interesting events between then and the Final Mind, when he will return and report back to it. Reception Publishers Weekly stated in its review of the novel: "This slow, visionary tale is less