Young Andre, with his severe visual disability, experiences years of alienation, frustration, and abiding sadness in the face of human beings' cruelty to one another. At his boarding school for the blind and then later at college, his sources of joy are few: good food, music, and computer science-and eventually, the arms of his lover, John. Only in middle age does he learn that he and a very few others have been chosen by two far superior alien races to deliver a crucial message to all of humankind. The story is told primarily in the form of a long account of Andre's life: from his very...