Kex is the administrator of the Eidon Academy, a college with an interdimensional porthole on campus, and the intellectual center of a recently seceded Southern California. Roberto and his wife Sasha are busy acting out a bad campus novel, with infidelities and academic intrigues, when the known universe undergoes some fundamental changes. Kex is more than a human being, it appears, but also an avatar around whom mandala-like emanations revolve, frequencies whose meaning Roberto must discern if he is to legitimize his new Department of Cartography . . .