Kathleen Ann Goonan's novel Crescent City Rhapsody

Booklist
April 15, 2002

Humanity's long, difficult, painful journey to a new mental and physical
state began in Goonan's Queen City Jazz (1994) when a random pulse from
somewhere else in the galaxy disrupted communications on Earth and
produced the Silence, attended by mass confusion, despair, and physical
changes in babies born during the pulse. Governments desperate to
understand the signal seized many of those children, but others' families
took them into hiding in remote settlements and cities protected by deep,
comprehensive nanotechnology. Now in the moon colony, the floating
environment Crescent City, and the Flower Cities around the world, people
are awakening to an inner drive that almost lets them understand the
signal as a blend of light, music, and information. Following that drive,
a man and woman flee Crescent City to the Houston Space Center, a mother
follows her son from a ranch in Argentina to Paris, and a woman and an
autistic teen splash down in the Pacific after abandoning the lunar
colony. Each driven person has a vital role to play in the transformation
that will end humanity's 200-year-long journey. Archetypal
characters-Coyote the Trickster, Cowboy, Caribbean pirates-join in as
Goonan deftly weaves music, literature, and science in the brilliant
conclusion to a tetralogy as consequential in sf as Kim Stanley Robinson's
Mars trilogy.