It’s a future time. A time of extremely long life spans, almost perfect health, human colonization of planets throughout the galaxy–and dreamlessness. It has been over three hundred years since any human being’s sleep has been disturbed by the anarchy of dreams. Centuries earlier, at the time of the first alien contacts, humanity made the proverbial trade with the devil–its basic freedoms in exchange for security and safety. An unexpected side effect of this swap was the gradual cessation of dreaming. Then an S3 fully armed starship disappears through a hole in space–A GATEWAY. All that remains of the huge vessel is a scattercast message heard throughout the galaxy:

YOUR MACHINES ARE USELESS HERE. YOUR WAY OF THINKING IS OF NO VALUE HERE. FOR BEYOND HERE LIE DREAMS!!

The Dreamers are in trouble. Cas never made it off of Moscovy and is shortly going to be a prisoner of a powerful Russo matriarch. The other four dreamers are dealing with Mama (the AIU) who seems to have lost her mind. They land in order to get Mama a doctor and stumble across cave drawings–and a blind painter– who is clearly one of them. Meanwhile back on New Omaha Beach, Danazir Yi Qal breaks out of the ether dome and tries to find the Outlanders–the only ones not infiltrated by Cyrus Malone and his S3 thugs. Slowly it’s coming into view for Mickelmast that Homer’s great poem The Iliad somehow holds the secret to all of this–to the Gateway–to Dreaming–to everything.