
Gareth Mitchell is about to learn that the legendary "Builders" have returned to her planet, Xilan. The problem is that these visitors on a survey expedition from Earth don't even know that she and her colony exist, let alone that they have been on Xilan for 500 years. As high-tech...

After being lost for several hundred years, a space colony is rediscovered by an exploratory expedition from Earth whose technology threatens to destroy the colony's painfully constructed civilization.

Of the original population that colonized the planet Xilan five centuries before, a mere handful of descendants remain, including Gareth. Despite disease, starvation, and hardship, they survived. Much, including their technology, was lost as they learned to adapt to Xilan's primitive...