Love in Exile

When Herndon got into his cryofreeze capsule on the starship 'Presidente Lula' he should have had his wife with him and they should have been one of the leading couples on a planet Brazil would claim, terraform and colonize. Instead his wife decides to remain behind with his condo and pension, leaving him heartbroken and dejected as he goes to sleep between the stars. He awakens to find an expedition from a nation that didn't even exist when they left has already come and gone. That expedition found that the planet ahead is a biodisaster they were unable to colonize. That expedition had also been the victim of a big data hack by one of their crewmen. They also find a greeting from a cabal of wizards that was supposed to be part of that hack.

Ava had worked for years to find a way to get herself back into flesh on the planet below so she wouldn't be alone in the contaminated and abandoned biology module of the expedition she used to administer. Once in flesh on the surface she finds that the society is not what she expected. Everyone is young and beautiful, everyone keeps 'lists' of their frequent sex partners. Everyone is open and frank about their bodies and sexuality. Status and deception are not part of the average person's life.

Thrown together in an attempt to get electronics manufacture working on the world of their exile, they find each other to be the only island of normalcy in this vastly alien culture. Can they overcome his loss of his wife and her history of rape in the ruins of Reston to build a normal relationship? Can they escape the attention their alien 'mating ritual' brings from the local media? Most of all, can they overcome their own personalities, knowing they are each other's only hope?

The people and media of Kassidor Yakhan are fascinated by the antics of the couple from YingolNeerie as they try to struggle thru the cultural differences between them and their new home and between the nations they came from. Eventually the natives come to realize the importance of their 'mating ritual' in the light of being ephemeral, something they have not faced for thousands of years.

This could also be called 'The Report of the First Expedition to 61 Cygni' because it concerns the expedition of the Presidente Lula, a ship that was launched a generation before Gordon's Lamp. This is another look at an aspect of the differences between an eternal and ephemeral society. In this case it is the fact that ephemeral societies spread genes by reproduction and eternal societies spread genes by conjugation, and what that difference looks like in day-to-day life. Both sides start out by thinking the other is immoral, but some learn to take what good they can from each other. There is a lot of sexuality in this book, it is about the difference in sexuality between eternals and ephemerals after all. There is too much more than just the sex for this to be considered erotica however.