"Who is Luciano Borgotta, nicknamed Tartaglia— a person with a difficult fate? A young maker of puppets, a mature master of contact impersonation, who has traveled across half the galaxy on tours. Junior executioner of the Meige-Hile prison, director of the "Vertep" theater, a slave-oarsman in the propulsion compartment of a galley serving the pompiliан legate. And then— a gladiator-semilibertus, a symbiont of cosmic fluctuation, a watcher for whom there are no secrets, an object of interest for special laboratories, a hostage of terrorists, a provider for a blue-eyed idiot, a killer of a telepath-hired man… free, yet cornered by circumstances…
What happens next? The stars aren’t in a hurry to give an answer.