FTL travel brings planetary systems together but with the cost of Chaos that no machine can navigate. Only the elite pilots or tezars of the Choyan race can reliably helm a starship. Palaton is one such pilot. Other races of the Compact would--and have--done almost anything to learn their secret. Palaton faces that danger as well as the strife and upheaval of his own planet Cho. Caught in a power struggle, he faces the inevitable burnout of his ability. He will turn to a secret experiment with a young civilization hoping to gain its own place among the stars, a race which calls itself "human".