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commander Nakamura attempts a coup to seize control and force Asterome to remain in the solar system to aid in reconstruction, we witness the misuse of conservative power. The moral is that conscious life must be willing to take giant risks, to engage in acts of wild faith such as the departure of Asterome and the consequent birth of macrolife.
    Zebrowski adds spacious shells to the argument, just as Asterome itself builds shell upon shell of additional space. Panshin’s macroworld remains a rock with the hard ideology of a rock. Thus its own population must be culled in Darwinian fashion by the rites of passage of the title: the dumping of well-prepared youngsters upon dirtworlds to see whether they can survive the experience. Many do not survive, to a large extent on account of the hatred and contempt of the “mudeaters,” locked up on their hardship worlds, for the privileged star-commuters who control the void-spanning hives of human knowledge, wealth, and skill. Heroine Mia is helped to survive by an old radical of a mudeater who opens her eyes somewhat, though it is to a fellow macroworlder that she opens her legs on the planet, by contrast with John Bulero’s sexual infatuation for a native. In the end the whole world of Tintera is destroyed by the peeved macroworlders, who have lost more juniors than desired during the rite of passage there.
    Zebrowski’s macrolifers do hate the past and what a dirtworld stands for—a chain upon the human spirit—but they are by no means so dogmatic, and John’s voluntary rite of passage upon the surface is at once more lightly undertaken and more ambiguous in its lessons. The macrolifers wish to be neither philanthropists nor destroyers of worlds. The attitude they aspire to is one of empathy without overt altruism. Life must remain open-ended, all possibilities available. The macrolifers aspire to immortality—to life beyond life—whereas Panshin’s elite merely live longer lives than ours, and basically their society and their mind-set are closed. Certainly Zebrowski’s macrolifers do not inhabit a perfect Utopia. Boredom and suicide are rather too common for comfort. However, there is enough challenge to shake them up and spur them to continue on the royal road toward multivalent, cosmic intelligence.
    In the third section of Zebrowski’s novel, “The Dream of Time,” macrolife must reconjugate the unmodified John Bulero from out of the collective higher mentality of which he has become part, because by this late date only such as he can decide on the error-liable risk of trying to survive the collapse of the universe through into the next cycle. Like the original founders of macrolife, he can make a blind decision of transcendent potential.
    Bound up with this essential feature of the importance of error and of the capacity for error is the strange fact that the universe is both capable of being known yet eludes being known in its entirety. The universe possesses a built-in incompleteness. Were it wholly knowable, thought and life would become static. Consequently, those macrolifers who survive the collapse of the cosmos at last meet earlier, wiser macrolifers from a previous cycle of creation who suspect, for their part, that even higher, earlier entities exist. There are shells beyond shells.
    If this is the case, surely macrolife must already exist in our universe. Surely the universe today must be teeming with macrolife. Why, then, is there no sign of it? When human macrolife first encounters alien macrolife in Part 2 of the novel, that more mature civilization is already a million years old, adept at concealment until it chooses to reveal itself. In cosmic terms, even a million-year-old civilization is almost contemporary with us. As human and alien macrolife fuse and evolve, so do the old suns burn out and so are new stars formed, with new planets where new life-forms can arise and in their turn develop