Gideon Grant is a computer lawyer involved in the explosion of technology in the late 1990s. Dedicated to his clients, he has grown his firm at an astonishing rate but his life is no longer his own, with frequent twenty-four hour days. He decides to sell his firm, build a boat, and sail to the South Seas. Far off the coast of California, a wind shift causes him to encounter a sinking yacht, apparently abandoned. He boards it and pumps it out, and because of what he discovers, he is compelled to return it to its home port of San Francisco. There he becomes embroiled in the society he left...