“In the center of the nebula, orbiting the binary named Kleinmann’s Anonymous Star, was a living Monument. One star of the binary pair was made of terrene matter, the other of contraterrene: magnetically channeled shocks of solar wind produce a region of hard X-rays between them. Neither man nor machine could survive there: we removed the Second Monument to a gentler region.

“But the Anonymous Star was not abandoned! We craved the contraterrene fuel source. There I saw a world colder than Pluto and larger than Jupiter conquered, and that Gas Giant’s core was burrowed through with nanomachine and picomachines and made to come awake. We called him Villaamil. He was our god, and the first of our pantheon.

“Next came we to where, long ago cast out from the epicenter of the Omega Nebula by the violence of its own explosion, the blue hypergiant V4030 Sagittarius soared roaring through space, two hundred twenty thousand times brighter than the sun. Here we made our throne world, and called it Tintagel, towing the Second Monument to become its moon, so that all our scholars need but look up after sunset to see its hieroglyphs.

“And when the stellar eruptions of V4030 Sagittarius periodically grew too violent, we would retreat for a time to its twin sister star, the hypergiant V4029. There we colonized bright worlds and dark, and dubbed them Avalon and Aachen, Trethevy and Trevena, and redesigned our bodies to accommodate the sixty-four-day flare cycle. But brightest of all was Golden Tintagel, Tintagel the Beautiful.

“Between those two powerful stars, like migratory birds, we would sail our worlds and worldlets as living ships, bright as pearls on a chain of office, letting the atmospheres turn to ice during transit, and seas turn solid. Both these hypergiant stars had hundreds of failed stars of ordinary size and superjovians in their planetary clouds, material enough to make ourselves Gas Giant Brains to read the Second Monument, and penetrate the secrets of its eleven-dimensional interior volume.

“For pantheons we made. Merlin and Malagige we christened them our deities, Archimago and Atalanta, Lorelei and Logistilla, Vivian and Virgil. These were sages larger than worlds, comprising a volume greater than a million Earths.

“Sol was forgotten: our ambition was to create a new human history, established on wiser cliometric foundations than Earthly history could produce, and spread rapidly from world to world in the Sagittarian Arm, leaving the indentured Earth and her woes to oblivion. We had infinite wealth from a star made of antimatter, and the secrets of a Second Monument for our gods to read and contemplate—what could we not accomplish?

“Many ventures were made, and in the Omega Nebula we found worlds remarkably Earth-like, suited for Swans and Men, with blue skies and bluer seas, and finding asteroid belts absurdly rich with minerals, apposite for Myrmidons. It was almost as if a race of unseen fairies had stocked the larder of the universe with good things for our consumption, arranging a stellar nursery where Earth-like worlds could not help but be formed. Ninety new earths for man we formed or found.

“How brightly flamed the midnights on any one of them, those emerald-bright earths! As the gigantic and multicolored suns set across the towering landing craft or space elevators and cast purple twilight across the self-aware gardens with fall of night would rise, adorned with stars like the uplifted limbs of an odalisque with gems, the auroras and auras of the nebula as arms of fire more splendid than a peacock’s tail! How poor and blank is Earth’s dull sky to eyes that drank such wonders!

“But in a single day of wrath, those colonies died, every one, to the last child, the last bloodcell. As we sailed back from Presterion, the most distant of the ninety worlds, to our golden home in Tintagel, forty years in a single night, I heard the colonies perish, for our vessel passed through the expanding shock waves of the radio messages calling in vain, years of pain overheard in half a dozen sleepless watches.

“It was a strange beam that caught and decelerated us. I saw the smoldering hemispheres of our gods, the dust cloud blackening fair Tintagel, and everything destroyed by the Furies of the Sagittarian Arm. Theirs was a vessel that seemed like a wheel of fire half a solar system in diameter, and wheels within wheels, and eyes along each rim and at each hub.

“The vessel was too bright on any wavelength for any of our instruments to behold, and all our lenses cracked and recording chips burned. The wheel of eyes created sunspots and dark trails in the surface of the sun and wrote in the signs and sine waves of the Monument notation, and they commanded us, in the name of the Archon called Circumincession, who was the living mind housed throughout the stars and empires of the Sagittarius Arm, to cleanse our ruins again with all our hands, to leave behind no trace of our false polity save those too fine for the patientest archeologist to find: gather up our remnants and our dead, and be returned to the jurisdiction of M3 in the Orion Arm.

“The worlds we had occupied were already set aside for races not yet evolved, and filled by caretakers we had not noticed nor understood. We were too stupid to know that the green land on which we walked was brain matter, or the still lakes through which we swam were thinking fluid. We did not detect the immense energy they used to signal their distant masters. All the years of the flourishing of the Second Empyrean was merely the interval while the swiftest of messages reached the nearest of strongholds of the fleetest living vessels of the Fury.

“Why so swift? So terrible? We learned that the Orion Arm is a region which Sagittarius regards with distaste, for we are tainted by some ancient crime committed by the Dominions here before the dinosaurs walked the Earth.

“The Ultimate White Ship was flung back to Sol on a beam of contempt, as a message for Orion not to interfere with the terrain claimed by the more civilized arms of the Milky Way.

“The caravan of lesser ships and worldlets we were allowed to keep perished in the journey, or fell behind, or starved just beyond our reach, or to this hour wander somewhere, populations frozen in eternal slumber, in the wide and starless interrupt separating that arm of the galaxy from this.

“Sagittarius did not even realize, or did not care, that we acted independently of Hyades. The Hyades is held responsible for the interstellar history issuing from the Local Interstellar Cloud and the surrounding volume of space. If events occur which Hyades did not anticipate, Hyades must amend. If tiny seeds from tiny worlds escape from the wild, weed-choked and untended garden of Orion Arm into the neat and well-tended fields of our neighbors, the farmer, not the mustard seed, is blamed.”

The squire raised his eyes to the dark heavens, the blue-green moon, the cold scattering of stars, and cried out in mourning.

“Alas for Tintagel! How I remember her! Tintagel the Golden-Bright; Tintagel the Fair! We called her Chrysolucent and Mater Mundi and a hundred other names. The entire world from pole to pole was a fortress, every fulvous tree held a siege-gun, all yellow blooms antennae, tawny grass ranging gear, and the statues of heroes were heroes indeed, white with slumber and awaiting a day of war. Never before had so much of the military arts been lavished on one small globe, nor has any palace of a warrior king ever been so fair.

“She was snuffed like a spark between finger and thumb. The giant planet Villaamil was shattered into asteroids, and the debris fell into the variable star, provoking outrageous solar flares like rivers of fire across the inner system. I do not think the Furies even saw the tiny world of Tintagel as she was destroyed.”

Beneath his mask, Norbert turned pale. “Mankind is a small matter indeed.”