Note: Based on the previously published novelette For the Sake of Grace which is included as the prologue.

Synopsis: Sexual chauvinism was the foundation of that world's structure - Coyote Jones had never heard of Abba until he was assigned there. It was a remotely beautiful world, but one which had been admitted to the society of civilized planets only after it had made concessions on its degrading treatment of women. Until then, women were considered as not human, as a sort of necessary beast, but not more. The concessions had been slight - but as a result, one brilliant female, Jacinth, had risen to the very top of that strange society, to the Seventh Level. Thereby she had become the spiteful target of male fury, female envy, and finally of a deviously evil plot that might cost the world its status. What Coyote Jones found on Abba, the sensuality of the surface, the sexual terror beneath, and the meaning of human dignity, is a novel worthy of the talents of the most gifted new SF writer since Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny. (from the back cover of the DAW Books first edition)