Prologue Summary

Scientists explore a long-ruined Earth to learn secrets to enrich the Straumli Realm—if they can keep the Powers from stealing them. As the intelligence that they have inadvertently created nears its "great flowering" across interstellar space, some humans realize that they have played with fire. None guesses that they have changed the future of trillions of star systems. Sensing that something has been lost, the new Power frantically probes the archives as the humans make off with a quantum data container. The Power has only milliseconds to prevent their making an ultradrive but, infiltrating the ship's code it shuts everything down, dooming these humans. A second vessel jumps successfully. Horrified at how it has been fooled and how close it has come to dying, the Power looks forward to things being different this time.

Prologue Analysis

The Prologue offers an analogy...