Your guide--Tec, the alien robot with remarkable human qualities. The product of a long-dead civilization in a place lost to time . . . Your destination--the other side of a black hole, where the seed of a twin universe to our own is guarded by fantastic dragon-like apparitions, where a terrifying drama of cosmic creation and devastation is about to explode . . . where the beginning is the end--and the end is the beginning . . .