The Book of Rack the Healer

Synopsis

From the back cover of the Award Books first edition: The doomed planet evolved four distinct mutations. These telepathic humanoids lived in symbiotic harmony, striving toward a common goal - survival. Keepers - unintelligent computer-beings, pleasure-giving females whose duty was to store all knowledge and to satisfy the sexual needs of the Far Seers. Far Seers - eyeless, all -sensing males, sexually avid but unable to reproduce, ultimately responsible for social and environmental balance. Healers - fertile males, able to travel in the hostile atmosphere by regenerating damaged cells, ramblers whose duty was to collect the raw materials that fed the population and to mate - only once - to create new life. Power Givers - capricious, fragile females, mates of the healers, mothers of the face, gifted with the power of flight at fatal expense to their body substance. It was a rigid society, based on thousands of years of unquestioning obedience to tradition - until Rack the Healer defied the most ancient of laws in a daring quest for knowledge. This is his story.