Orphaned and rescued from a beating by the academic Fath family, Jaro grows up haunted by a gap in his memory and a single unanswered question: where he truly came from. His path to becoming a spaceman leads him to Fader, an isolated world where an aristocratic society still clings to status built on the engineered slave races of its faded golden age. Jack Vance's Night Lamp follows Jaro's search for the truth about his mother's death into a society built to keep such truths buried.
Summary by Loreful, from public sources