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The Hugo Award-nominated novel by "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive." --The Globe and MailTwo months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since--until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world.