Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as may be the custom from the 25th hundred years, to wander the globe getting as useful as he can to all he matches. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer-a spiritual counselor in a global which has outlawed the general public practice of religious beliefs, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans can’t be wished away. The globe into which Mycroft and Carlyle have already been born is really as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a indigenous from the 1500s. It is a hard- about Too Like the Lightning gained utopia built on technologically-generated large quantity, and also on complicated and required systems of labeling all public writing and talk. What appear to us normal gender distinctions are actually distinctly taboo in most cultural situations. And most of the world’s population is associated with globe-girdling clans from the like-minded, whose endless economic and ethnic competition is properly handled by central organizers of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad mix of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life. And nowadays, Mycroft and Carlyle possess stumbled on the crazy credit card that may destabilize the machine: the boy Bridger, who can easily make his wants come true. Who can, it would appear, bring inanimate objects to life.