Summary: In the remote future, a few human colonists and xenologists amicably reside on a planet, Yan, that is populated mainly by intelligent and friendly non-human natives, who appear to be perhaps a little too regular in their habits and social structures for their own good. However, their folklore contains obscure references to a long-ago disaster resulting from hubris.

A human dramatist and impresario, Gregory Chait, arrives on this out-of-the-way planet. Chait's specialty, as a dramatist, is to study a decadent or weakened culture's history and then recreate some pivotal moment in it, specifically one that recalls its lost greatness, thus inspiring the audience to recapture that moment and to reverse the decline of their key cultural values. Chait treats the question of whether the effects of this recrudescence are “good” or “bad” with an aesthete's lofty indifference.

Chait has come to Yan because he has exhausted the possibilities of human societies and now wants to apply his art to the culture of the natives of Yan. He is undeterred by the fact that their language is rather subtle by human standards and their history very imperfectly known or understood. So he is quickly in over his head, with results that are, in the dramatic sense, catastrophic.