What is the silver? Eventually I decided it must be all the things players claimed it to be. It was a remnant of the world's creation: that was how it was able to disassemble solid objects, breaking them down into its gleaming fog while it compiled new objects in their places. It was the memory of the world, mapping the structure of everything it touched, so that it could bring ancient objects forward in time--to create meaningless follies in the wilderness, or to deposit veins of valuable ore in the exposed rock of the Kavasphir Hills. And it was the mind of a dreaming goddess, or at least of some savant of an ancient world far more learned than ours. This I allowed only because of a handful of legends. Mostly the silver acted in a way that seemed random, and unaware. Now and then though, there were stories of some tool or talisman brought forward through time, dehvered at a crucial moment, as if someone beyond the silver sought to move the pieces...

Acclaimed hard-SF author Linda Nagata introduces a new world, where the sky is bisected by an arch of light, and the mysterious "silver" rises from the ground each night to completely transform the landscape--and erase from existence anything it touches.Young Jubilee is devastated when her brother Jolly is taken by the silver. But when a forbidding stranger with the power to control the silver comes seeking Jolly--and claiming that Jolly knows him--Jubilee flees. For she has learned an impossible secret: Jolly may still be alive!

Jubilee's flight will lead her to discoveries she could never have imagined, from the secret history of her civilization, to the awesome forgotten memories within her. And with these she will forever alter her world's future.., unless the dark stranger, relentless in his pursuit,achieves his goal of destroying it.