This is the third novel in what has become one of the most popular series in contemporary SF, now back in print from Tor. In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life-for profit, of course. It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus. One of these is Mendoza the botanist. The death of her lover has been followed by centuries of heartbreak. She spends a period of time in early twentieth-century Hollywood in the days of D. W. Griffith. Then Mendoza, in the midst of the Civil War, runs into a man disturbingly similar to her lost love. She is about to find love again, and be in more trouble than she could ever have imagined.