The price of greater life is death . . . . In an age of exploding stars and other cataclysmic galactic events in which Homo sapiens has long since split into different kinds, Mallory Ringess becomes a pilot of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame. His quest to find the Elder Eddas – nothing less than the secret of life embroidered in humanity's oldest DNA – will lead him from Neverness's streets of colored ice into the deadly manifold, the "space beneath space" whose topology writhes and twists with hideous complexity like a nest of psychedelic snakes. Journeying in his lightship The Immanent Carnation far across the Milky Way, Mallory enters the Solid State Entity, a nebula-sized brain composed of moonlike biocomputers analogous to neurons. There is he tested; there he asks about the Ieldra, a mythical race of aliens said to have seeded the galaxy with its DNA eons before and to have initiated the evolutionary cycle.Mallory returns to...