The story takes place not long after the end of the second civil war in America. The country has become a police state and the residual student communities (on the losing side in the war) an illicit group.

Jason Taverner is a world-famous star. A singer with his own TV show and an audience of 30 million. He is a six, meaning that he is the result of a genetic experiment to breed superior humans. One day, an angry ex-girlfriend throws a squid-type animal at him, which sinks its tubes into his chest. He is able to remove the animal, but following surgery, he wakes up in a run-down hotel, where it slowly becomes apparent that he is no longer recognised as a star. And in fact that he does not exist in this world. 

He does have a bundle of money, which he uses to purchase fake IDs from a woman (Kathy) he meets through the desk clerk at the hotel. It turns out that both the clerk and Kathy are police informants, so he comes to the attention of the authorities for whom he is a complete mystery. They cannot find his records on file, and start to think that he must be part of some super-powerful organisation. 

Meanwhile, he tries to connect with people from his past, esp. Heather Hart, but she has no memory of him (despite a long-term romantic involvement in the world that JT remembers). Heather is also a six.

The case comes to the attention of Felix Buckner, a very senior chief. Buckner is in an incestuous relationship with his sister Alys, and they have a son, Barney, in Florida. They live together as brother and sister, but they are secretly married. 

JT picks up with an old girlfriend (she obviously does not know who he is) and stays at her apartment for a while. The police find out he is there and come and arrest him. Buckner recognises that JT is a six, so he tells him that he is a seven (a lie he uses with sixes to gain a brief psychological advantage). Eventually, he lets JT go so that he can be followed and will reveal what is going on. 

JT is picked up by Alys (also a six, but off the rails – lots of drugs and phone sex and she has astrological symbols on her teeth), who takes him to the house she lives in with Felix. She tells him bout all her brother/husbands collections and gives him a dose of mescaline. With Alys, the old reality seems to be seeping back. She knows who he is, and she even has a couple of his records with her. He tries to play them but discovers that they are blank. JT has a very strange experience and ends up running away when he encounters Alys’s ancient skeleton lying on the floor of the bathroom. 

JT now encounters a shy potter, who he takes up with. The potter doesn’t know him, but in a cafe, they find on the jukebox a couple of Jason Tavener songs, and slowly he regains some of the recognition from his other life. He smashes one pot, but buys another from the potter. 

It turns out that Alys is actually dead. Worried that the news of their incestuous relationship will come out (that she killed herself because of it) FB decides with his chief of staff (Herb) to frame JT and his political rivals for the death. 

FB is briefed by the coroner that she in fact died from an overdose of a new experimental drug that dislocates the brain’s ability to fix one spatial world. It opens the mind to alternative realities which then come to replace the one in which the drug taker is living. It turns out that they have all been dragged into a powerful illusion created by Alys who has taken the drug and whose existing fixation on Jason Taverner warped everyone’s reality. 

At the end of the book, FB has a strange experience at a gas station with a black man he encounters at the pumps. He gives the man a drawing of a pierced heart, and then embraces him, before returning home to listen to the John Dowland song Flow my tears. 

The book ends with an epilogue, tying up all the storylines.