"Who is Luciano Borgotta, nicknamed Tartaglia— a person with a difficult fate? A young maker of puppets, a mature master of contact impersonation, a junior executioner, a slave-oarsman in a galley’s propulsion compartment, a symbiont of cosmic fluctuation, a killer of a telepath-hired man. And then— a tamer of the mad anti-something, a phoenix burned and risen from the ashes, the terror of the Pompilian VKS squadrons, an inmate of the orbital prison "Sheol," a man who opened a direct road to space.
What happens next? The universe will never be the same…"