Tales from the Arm & Bar

Tales from the Arm & Bar begins four years after Henryk Burgred, illegitimate genovariant child of a deceased patrician military officer and a slum prostitute, goes to the family homeworld Plum Grove. Having been rescued from almost certain death on Edom by his uncle, and having earned the wrath of the Irredente hegemony by killing a senior naval intelligence official, Henryk for the first time in his life finds a pastoral place of peace and comfort at the Burgred family estates on Plum Grove. There he settles into his privileged but duty-bound birthright. The reactionary eunuch priest Hersey has traveled to the Beyond (the Bar End). There, Hersey -- accompanied by his symbiant companion Tildy -- has visited the many strange, genovariant-populated worlds organized under the authority of the Mediant, finally landing upon the world of the Mediant itself, where Hersey is forever changed. He is commanded by The Mediant to return to the Irredente hegemony to spread a gospel of toleration for all life -- including inorganic sentient life driven into hiding by the Irredente prohibitions on technology. Tales from the Arm & Bar follows the separate trajectories of Henryk and Hersey through hundreds of pages of adventure, peril, revelation, and redemption until the lives of many individuals begin to converge upon a single, mysterious point: the doomed, degraded planet Innisfree.