Helen, an all-round musician, academic, and actress, retires from the concert stage under a cloud of criticism from conservative evangelicals; she dared to sing Bach, and also act in a lesbian movie. She lived now with Marissa Brooks in a large old house in Philadelphia. It is now Summer, and her oldest child, an adopted girl, Gena, and her two college friends Krissy and Marcus, are due home soon. Also at home are her younger daughters Erin and Alison, thirteen and seven respectively, and her own little boy, James, who is six.

Helen is a regular on a popular prime-time TV series called The Galactic Voyager, about an enormous space ark, which has just discovered a marginally habitable planet. Helen plays a (fictitious) famous musician and performance artist Cecilia, who has just been cloned, to provide a cultural resource for the group that is determined to colonize the somewhat hostile planet.

This excerpt, taken from almost the end of the Helen saga, rotates around the adventures of Helen, her half-siblings Tomasina and John, her long-time friend Janet, her foster-child Gena, Janet's daughter (and Helen's adopted niece) Eleanor (Elly), and Marissa Brooks.