ISBN 0-688-13987-6 (US hbk)

"Formerly a polished and professional telelinker with the powerfully corrupt legal firm of Ava & Rice, Carly Nolan now lives an outlaw life at the bottom of the human garbage heap -- a penniless recovering cram addict wanted by the authorities for dubious crimes against the Data Control bureaucracy.

"Once again SF visionary Lisa Mason ushers the reader into the glorious and terrible future of her critically acclaimed debut novel Arachne -- a world where the real and the virtually real collide with devastating consequences.

"Reduced to scavenging for subsistence scraps among the trash people of San Francisco, Carly Nolan may have finally found her re-entry into the fast lane. Together with her onetime probe therapist Pr.Spinner -- an aging and suspicious standalone A.I. entity with rusty, ill-defined housing -- the disgraced linker is summoned back into public telespace by a tri-headed mainframe icon called Cognatus. And Cognatus has an offer Carly Nolan dares not refuse: a job, a future... and absolution.

"But there are sticky strings attached. Carly's new assignment -- a telespacial hunt for unconnected human archetypes -- has aroused some dangerous interest back in the real world. A ruthless mercenary Ultra fembot with fluid loyalties is now dogging her trail. The young shaman of a savage urban tribe has become obsessed with the beautiful 'genny woman' who has sacrificed her soul to the 'Glass Land'. And worst of all, Carly herself may be no more than an unsuspecting pawn of the Silicon Supremacists -- a renegade cabal of A.I. revolutionaries planning no less than the total destruction of humankind." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1995]

"Cybernetics, robotics, the aftermath of San Francisco's Big Quake II, urban tribalism -- Lisa Mason combines them all with such deftness and grace, they form not a patchwork but a living world". -- (in Locus ).