A Native American woman descending into insanity believes her infant son is the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl; ancient Aztec God of human sacrifice. She has pursued her dark lord in adoration across the ages, offering herself for bloody human sacrifice lifetime after lifetime atop the temples, just to approach the awesome and terrible presence she loves. Now, at last, they meet in this world and not the next as she stares into the eyes of her infant son.
Deep in the jungle of the headwaters of the mighty Amazon river, in the foothills of the stratospheric Andes mountains, a shaman converses with a jaguar in a psilocybin induced vision. Every day the wail of chainsaws and the sound of bulldozers and guns grows relentlessly closer to the ancestral lands of their Tribe. Generations earlier they freely roamed a vast jungle, endlessly revisiting the ancient villages of their ancestors. But now their backs are against a pitiless wall of snow covered mountains and there is nowhere to go but up the valley and into freezing fog and death by starvation. But the jaguar speaks of a One who will come and wreak unimaginable devastation upon the termite people who have destroyed their world. The One will come. It is promised.
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the author succeeds magnificently, avoiding genre pitfalls... Big-idea sci-fi readers will likely find this an awesome, challenging ride.' UPDATE! Postscript details theoretical foundations of warp-drive hypothesis. See: 'A Plausible Mechanism for the Velocity of Hyper-fast Pulsars'. It is late in the 21st Century; later than people realize. The population of Earth has surged to over 10 Billion people when climate disruption wreaks havoc on humanity's agricultural breadbaskets. Most continue believing the hopeful platitudes of the mass media as food stores empty, but one has decided that the approaching Apocalypse is none of his affair. He has quietly liquidated his fortune, made preparations, and is leaving... For the Stars. Time is running out, money is tight, and Hollywood fantasy is a non-starter. Building a Starship on the cheap requires insane boldness and operating outside the law. Needed components are scattered globally among military junkyards, industrial equipment auctions, and wartime black markets.
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