There is a gentleman named Rusty Van Reeves, who is by way of becoming a gifted novelist. (He can’t help it. He was born and raised in Faulkner country, just down the road from where Eudora Welty lived and wrote. Whether it’s something in the water or something in the blood, Rusty has it.)

Rusty understands Christopher Pike’s dilemma. When he was fifteen years old, he broke his neck playing high school football, one vertebra below where Christopher Reeve sustained his now world-famous injury. What this means is that Rusty can breathe on his own and has some movement in his shoulders, but for more than a quarter of a century he has lived with a reality not unlike Christopher Pike’s.

There is no Talos IV for Rusty.

That hasn’t stopped him from running a business, writing a column for his local paper and a novel or three, drawing, painting, and generally being an interesting human being.

This novel is dedicated to Rusty, to the memory of Christopher Reeve, and to the too, too many others who share their plight, in the hope that, in the absence of Talosians, human medical research will transcend, and soon.

Acknowledgments

I want to especially thank Marsha Valence, owner of Tribute Farm, who raises Morgan horses and names them after science fiction authors. It was Marsha who explained to this city kid the best way to train a good saddle horse, and the way in which young Chris Pike gentles, not breaks, Tango is told in her words.

Much gratitude to Marco Palmieri, for asking me, “How’d you like to write the definitive Pike novel?” and making it so, as well as for suggesting the title when I was clearly stumped. The environmental theme was entirely his idea, and a natural fit for the character of Pike.

Special thanks to Keith R. A. DeCandido for gentling the manuscript as Pike did Tango, and for finding a way to save a scene I was particularly fond of despite my talent for muddling linear time.

Lastly, my gratitude, always, to Jack… for being Jack. Nuff said, my love.

I have learned that if one advances confindently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

- Henry David Thoreau