His name was Jai Vedh; he was an Earthman. But his ship had blown up on a star voyage and now he was a castaway on an uncharted Earth-like planet. There were people here: humans, apparently an Earth colony that had lost contact with the home world centuries before. They had developed telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation - and the damnedest social system you could imagine had grown out of those abilities. Jai Vedh gradually came to understand what they were... but it took him much longer to realize what they were doing to him.