Cager first loved Lovely Pebble, who was a virtual being descended from a long-gone race of whales. He then was best friends with Arlie, who turned out to be a girl. Then he loved Ell, who was just a copy of Lovely Pebble. The relationships were weird. There were a lot of other strange and gruesome bits, but it was rollicking along fairly well when suddenly there was 100 or so pages on attempting to build a time machine which were incredibly dull. Then an ending that I didn't really understand and didn't care enough about to try. All in all, a fairly-well written but odd book that didn't quite do it for me.