Orson Scott Card, best-selling author of Ender’s Game, teams up with Kathryn H. Kidd to launch an epic science fiction saga of space exploration - and a dramatic conflict between human and nonhuman intelligence.

On the Ark, a colonyship bound outward across the stars, not everyone is a volunteer - or even human. Lovelock is a capuchin monkey engineered from conception to be the perfect servant: intelligent, agile, and devoted to his owner. He is a "witness", privileged to spend his days and nights recording the life of one of Earth’s most brilliant scientists via digital devices implanted behind his eyes.

But Lovelock is something special among witnesses. He’s a little smarter than most humans: smart enough to break through some of his conditioning, smart enough to feel the bonds of slavery - and want freedom.

Set against the awesome scope of interstellar space, and like Speaker for the Dead and Xenocidebefore it, Lovelock probes the provocative interface between humanity and another sentient species.