ISBN: 1-58715-123-5

Publication date: April 15, 2000.

The fleeing gengineers have established a colony on First-Stop, Tau Ceti IV. Among the first things they did was to turn their skills to giving local raccoon-like creatures, the Racs, sentience. Now they are growing a vast tree atop which they will put a repository of their knowledge for the new species to use once it has developed enough to climb the tree.

But they cannot leave First-Stop until they have found or designed a creature to pollinate the plants aboard their starship. When Pearl Angelica, a human-plant hybrid, journeys back to the Solar System in search of bees from an Earth dominated by the anti-gengineering Engineers, she is kidnapped and imprisoned. But she finds unsuspected friends, who help her call for a rescue attempt. Will it succeed?

This is the fourth book in the series.