The first expedition to Rakhat, the world that is sending the music, is organized by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), known for its missionary, linguistic and scientific activities since the time of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola.

One of them, a gifted young technician, was the first to hear the transmissions; another, Sofia Mendes, a Turkish Jewish artificial intelligence specialist, has the connections and aptitude to obtain a spacecraft and help pilot the mission.

Sandoz, who has often struggled with his faith, becomes convinced that only God's will could bring this group of people with the perfect combination of knowledge and experience together at the moment when the alien signal was detected.

Sandoz and his friends, along with three other Jesuit priests, are chosen by the Society of Jesus to travel in secret to the planet, using an interstellar vessel made with a small asteroid.

Upon reaching Rakhat, the crew tries to acclimatize themselves to the new world, experimenting with eating local flora and fauna, then making contact with a rural village, inhabited by a peaceful tribe of herbivore gatherers, the Runa.

When the Earthlings finally meet a member of the culture that produced the radio transmissions, he proves to be of an entirely different species from the rural natives, a Jana'ata.

When Sandoz returns to Earth in 2060, his friends are dead, and his faith, once considered worthy of canonization by his superiors, has turned into bitter anger with the god who inspired him to go to Rakhat.

Due to relativistic space-time effects, decades had passed while he has been gone, during which popular outrage at the United Nations' initial and highly out-of-context report on the mission, especially Sandoz's role in the tragedy, had left the Society of Jesus shattered, nearly extinct.

Initially bent on discovering the truth, the other priests eventually recognize the great personal cost at which the journey came, and accept Sandoz's epic struggle with his faith.

He continues that she is successfully updating the stories of other important Jesuits who have sent men to distant lands or went themselves to foreign cultures to represent Christianity.

"Russell subtly raises concerns about the ways in which sophisticated cultures tell themselves cover stories in order to justify actions taken at a terrible cost to others".

This is also reflected in the way that Sofia has to buy her freedom from what she describes as an institution of intellectual prostitution; as well as the differences between the simple Runa who live in the countryside and the Jana'ata, who are the sophisticated city dwellers that created the beautiful music which triggered the mission originally.