The novel “Convergence” by Charles Sheffield was published for the first time in 1997. It’s the fourth book of the Heritage universe and is the sequel to “Transcendence“. It’s also part of the omnibus titled “Transvergence” together with the previous one.

Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial are back from Genizee, the Zardalu homeworld, but they find something strange. The Artifacts have an estimated age in millions of years but they seem to have suddenly started becoming active. To understand what’s happening, they look for Darya Lang, an expert of the Builders, because they already worked with her in various adventures.

Darya Lang has just returned from Genizee when she happens to see a part of a conference of Quintus Bloom, another Builders scholar. Bloom thinks that those mysterious aliens are actually the humans descendants who have sent the Artifacts back in time from a distant future. To discover the truth, Darya Lang and some old friends go back to study some Artifacts but the changes taking place are making them more dangerous than ever.

“Transcendence” told the adventure of the protagonists on Genizee, the Zardalu homeworld. They managed to survive another encounter with a species whose name strikes terror millennia after it was thought to be extinct. For this reason the Zardalu submitted to Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial, recognizing their superiority.

The beginning of “Convergence” marks a significant change within the Heritage series because the Artifacts left by the mysterious Builders are beginning to change. There are no more isolated activities and contacts with individual entities left in an Artifact but a general phenomenon.

For Darya Lang this change represents an unwelcome surprise after her return from Genizee because Quintus Bloom, another Artifacts scholar, seems to know more than her about it. Academic rivalry and research on the Artifacts are mixed and the novel is also a mirror dance between the two of them that shows the similarities but also the differences between them.

The presence of two Artifacts scholars and the various comparisons that take place between them in the course of “Convergence” allow Charles Sheffield to provide new information on the Builders and their work. In the previous novels, a lot of information was inserted through extracts from the “Lang Universal Artifact Catalog” and other fictional essays and witnesses. This time the author used a way that didn’t slow down the pace of the narrative.

Another difference from the previous novels is that in “Point of Convergence” the protagonists are separated much more in space and time. After meeting in the first books of the series, typically they worked together, even when the circumstances separated them. In this novel however there are some real subplots in which they work separately.

Nevertheless, in some ways the personal relationships between the protagonists, which must include Quintus Bloom, are more important than ever. In “Convergence” changes at that level proceede almost parallel to those in the Artifacts. The result is a half ending, meaning that they a new balance is established in the relationship between the protagonists that are not necessarily stable and are not at all the mysteries around the Builders are solved.

Precisely because of this half ending I was half satisfied of “Convergence”. The big changes seemed made exactly to give a conclusion to this series, instead Charles Sheffield left once again the story open to further developments. The author could have written more novels set in the Heritage universe because there were many more possibilities but he chose the worst one to do it.

I can’t say that “Convergence” is a bad novel because in terms of quality I think it’s as good as the previous ones. My problem lies in some dissatisfaction about its ending. If you’ve read the previous novels of the Heritage series you might as well go ahead with this on but without expecting too much.