Fifteen-year-old Catherine Berendt lives with her aunt on the rain-soaked Earth-like planet ELP-27. She believes her father has been killed in a war. Her mother, unable or unwilling to take care of her, has left her in the care of her aunt and vanished.

Catherine’s plan for her life is simple. She wants to be a musician. A violinist. She takes a job at a dusty bookstore to pay for lessons. On her first day, a man comes into the shop claiming to be her father. At first shocked and skeptical, she is ultimately convinced, and they set out across the universe to find her mother. Her father believes she is enslaved on an icy mining planet.

Their path is long and dangerous. Her greatest challenge, however, comes when she is caught up in a struggle to destroy the computer Fortran. Fortran, made up of a network of millions of human brains on the planet Dal, has declared himself to be God, killing those he considers to be transgressors by turning the planet on which they live into stars.