Basil was a successful filmmaker and the golden child of an ordinary, middle class family until the day he was found naked and staring in his apartment one morning. No one knows how long Basil has been in this catatonic state. There is no indication of drug use or violence, so he is taken to a special institution to recover. What his family and the doctors dont realize is that Basil is on a supernatural journey of the subconscious, fraught with challenges, danger, and mystery. Somehow, Basil unleashed innumerable horrors on the world, and the only way to fight them is via his mind. If only he could remember how it all started Basil believes that if he could go back to the beginning, he could reverse his own decisions and therefore obliterate the evils he has produced. He is not alone on this voyage into the subconscious. Two major adversaries hope for his failure, as they, too, want control of the evil that threatens mankind.

When Cyril Hadrian still considered truth knowable and virtue measurable, he had charge of a great fortress of learning and scholarship called the Lord Institute. Those within the fortresss thick walls had gathered together to battle common enemiesignorance, illness, and poverty. Hadrian, a man committed to rationality and to the notion that science in the service of humanity could accomplish at least a limited happiness on earth, did not then concern himself with philosophical questions or with those seemingly unanswerable questions regarding God, time, and purpose until his wife, Melanie, took her life. After Melanies suicide, Hadrian found his old life of power repugnant, and it gave him a glimpse of the underside of nature. For the first time in his life, Hadrian allowed himself to admit the possible existence of forces, relationships, and complexities that he had never before even considered, like the utter, stark certitude of death. Forced to resign as director of the Lord Institute, betrayed by trusted and esteemed colleagues, and abandoned by the woman he thought loved him, Hadrian set out with his infant daughter, Mica Stella, on a quest to find and experience what he calls sigmathe ultimate sense of connectedness between God, himself, and the universe. Hadrian hopes that even a pale facsimile of the symmetry glimpsed by saints and magi would in that instant of insight free him from his dread of death and that he would achieve the serenity that some men seemed to possess by nature. But the ultimate moment that Hadrian dubs the sigma experience from the mathematical sign meaning a sum or a total, this elemental flash eludes him. He wanders for years in search of sigma, ending up among a tribe of Indians called the Gigantes, where he transforms himself into their enchanter. One day Hadrians old enemies from the Lord Institute find themselves in the gardens of the enchanter. Hadrian, seeking revenge, puts them on trial for judgment and sentencing.

The Ten Thousand were a band of aristocratic mercenary warriors who fought for the losing side in a war far from their own country. To escape their enemies in a now hostile foreign land, they set off to return home, but the journey is treacherous. One of their formations is separated from the main body and now must makes its way alone. The lost wanderers, near starvation, stumble out of a mountain pass into a miraculously fair land on the bank of a river. They refresh themselves with the abundant game and fish found there and call the land Arkadia. However, they are not alone. One night, a host of wild barbarians called the Bem appears on the banks of the nearby river and attacks without mercy. After the battle, the lost ranks of the Ten Thousand are almost annihilated, yet they resolve to stay in their new paradise, as opposed to traversing the dangerous mountains to find their way home. They are the First Founders of Arkadia, and no matter the cost, they will survive in this strange new land, already seasoned with the blood of their comrades.

Philip Francis Parkman, Democrat Congressman from the 14th District of New Jersey, fortified by his unexpected victory at the polls and motivated by high ideals and good intentions, embraces his perceived role as not only spokesman for his constituency, but also as caretaker of the Constitution of the United States. However, intervening reality soon crushes his idealism and vanquishes his hope he can make a difference. Thus begins his slide on the greasy griddle as he calls it. He turns to alcohol to alleviate his disappointment. On his way down, forty-eight-year-old Parkman falls under the spell of a precocious teenage seductressCatherine Taylor Quinter, the beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter of his political mentor. Parkman is, at the same time, falsely charged with campaign fraud and faces disgrace before the Ethics Committee. His long-suffering wife, Elaine, embarking on her own personal journey to secure her identity while professionally experiencing success, finds she must choose to save her own life or her husbands. Parkmans slide lands him in a mental institution, called the Facility by the inmates, where he meets the enigmatic Winslow whose wisdom provides him with a new vision on life.