Nebula Award nominee 2000.
A prequel to Queen City Blues.
This is how it begins...
...with the Silence, born of
mysterious, space-originated phenomena that render Earth's dominant
technologies useless – inspiring paranoia and alien invasion fears
within secret government agencies, which, in turn, inspire repressive
actions against a perceived enemy populace
...and with murder, as New Orleans mob boss and voudoun queen, Marie Laveau, dies in a hail
of gunfire – and is remade through the wonders of nanotechnology.
In
a new world that necessity has transfigured – an exhilarating,
seething stew of microscopic machinery and genetic engineering; of
totalinarianism, eco-terrorism and violence – Marie Laveau's hunger
for vengance is giving way to something greater.
For Destiny has
named her savior of the outcasts, the opressed, the crazies, the hunted
and the Silence's mutant children, who all flock to her dream of a
future as sweet as an Ellington riff... and a safe haven called Crescent
City.