finished 2/20/10. Spoilers below. This was another Nebula finalist, one of the 87 also-rans to the Forever War in the 1975 voting.
In story A, stiff british experimental linguist Chris receives a letter from his old friend Pierre who may be the father of his child. Pierre is French -- perhaps to more naturally explain his dalliance with a married woman? whatever -- and hanging out in the Brazilian rainforest with some natives who may hold the key to understanding some obscure poem with interesting linguistic properties. Chris just so happens to be trying to raise four children under conditions which might also create interesting linguistics. All right, can't wait to see what Pierre is doing directly and how the stories will converge. Next, in story B1, instead of going to Pierre, we see an American engineer with a checkered past in Nam (sigh, the book was published in '73) and ironically and amusingly named "Charlie" working on a dam to flood the Brazilian rainforest (which would wash away all the natives with interesting linguistics). Don't care! Back to Chris, where he badly explains his work on "self-embedding" to Tom, a slick car salesman-ish American linguist, who in turn wants to recruit him to talk to aliens. In New Mexico. Far, far away from his research on the children. Sigh, story C. We finally go to story B2 to see Pierre and his natives, and then flip back and forth between stories C and B2, with a little bit of connective tissue between B2 and B1 in the form of Brazilian terrorists who want to blow up the dam. Finally we check in on Chris's kids back in England to remind us they exist and that they could use Chris's help because they're starting to self-embed. Back to story C, where Chris discovers the aliens want "embedded" minds, and they offer some Brazilian natives in exchange for deep space flight technology. In story B1, the local authorities have captured and are torturing the Brazilian terrorists and Charlie goes apeshit. In story C, Charlie and Tom go to Brazil with some CIA-type spooks to get some natives and blow up the dam -- they don't want to flood the forest b/c the natives' "embedding" is partially based on some fungus that only grows in the rainforest, and they can't simply stop dam construction b/c only a few countries know about the aliens. Whatever. Quick updates on each of the stories as we build to climax, and, oops, the CIA-types blowing up the dam got their helicopter shot down in the process of blowing up the damn and a Chinese saw the tacnuke explosion from a spy satellite. Cut to story C1, where shadowy American government types decide to blame the explosion on "hositle" aliens, kill them all, and try to piece together their tech from the rubble. This happens. The natives are no longer needed, and so the gov't just picks up Chris, Tom, and Pierre from Brazil. Chris takes Pierre home, goes to see his kids at the research center, takes one of them (Vidya) home, his wife freaks out because she thinks he's punishing her by bringing his "real" kid home to show off to Pierre, Vidya's "self-embedding" has turned him into a powerful projective empath, and Chris has a serious head trip before Vidya breaks his own neck. In the aftermath, Chris is being taken back to the lab for observation while the other researchers talk to his wife, and Pierre has *completely disappeared* without warning from the story. Maybe he's up in the bedroom. He is French, after all. Whatever.
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