Yonder Comes Other

In this pendant volume, published five years after And Then There'll Be Fireworks, Elgin finally ties up the last dangling plot questions of the Ozark Fantasy Trilogy, and also brings the series together with her other major effort, the Coyote Jones novels (Communipath Worlds: The Communipaths, Furthest, and At The Seventh Level, Star Anchored, Star Angered). Coyote, for those who haven't met him before, is a redheaded, iconoclastic Special Agent for the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service, specializing in tracking down and neutralizing "rogue" telepaths; he's also the most powerful projective telepath in known space--and deaf as a post mentally, which makes him immune to most psionic attacks, an important qualification for the job. His culture is literally knit together by psionics (the "communipaths," who provide an Earth-based culture flung across three different galaxies with a instantaneous and unfailing method of communication between worlds), and when an incredibly powerful mental message is detected emanating from what is believed to be an empty sector of space, it's Coyote who's sent to find out more. His mind-blindness allows him to detect the source of the message--the Planet Ozark--but the natives aren't very happy at being discovered, and he soon finds his flyer crashed and himself a guest (or is he a prisoner?) at Castle Brightwater, home of the very powerful but not-very-easy-to-get-along-with Responsible. Coyote's attempts to get Planet Ozark to join the Communipath worlds form the meat of the book. It's in this volume--set nine years following the events of "Fireworks"--that we finally learn the true nature of the "Garnet Ring" and the "Out-Cabal" that threatened Planet Ozark's freedom in the previous trilogy, and also learn once and for all that the Ozarkers' "magic" is really psionics, just as I suspected (although the Ozarkers themselves aren't ready to admit it). We discover that their particular brand of Christianity is leavened with concepts of karma and reincarnation, though where the original colonists picked *those* up is never explained, and we get a glimpse of the Ozarkian legal system at work. We even learn that the Ship which anciently brought their ancestors to Ozark had no conventional fuel at all--it was powered entirely by "magic"! At the end, as we might expect of the notoriously independent Ozarkers, they refuse membership in the Tri-Galactic Federation (a decision heretofore unheard of), but enough hints are left open to suggest that this may eventually change; when Elgin may address the possibility (her last novel was published in 1993) remains open to question, but as a resolution of several much-needed issues, this volume is indispensable to anyone who enjoyed the Ozark books.

ROGUE TELEPATH! The comminipaths have traced a mind message of incredible strength to a seemingly empty sector of space, and now Tri-Galactic Federation agent Coyote Jones must find an invisible planet and bring back the unknown telepath who threatens to disrupt the entire Comminipath system. Bursting through a Spell of Invisibility and straight into Brightwater Kingdom on the planet of Ozark, Coyote discovers a realm ruled by an iron-willed young woman named Responsible - perhaps the very telepath he seeks. But on this world where Magicians of Rank can call up a storm or cure a wounded and unwelcome offworlder with equal ease, will Coyote's psience or Ozark's spells prove the stronger?