So Menelaus Montrose, waking with the strange sensation of joy without a name, sat naked in a tiny pool of rapidly evaporating white fluid in a little pond smaller than a bathtub and poked his head and shoulders and chest out of the surface of the moonlit, diamond world. He looked like a chick emerging from an egg or like an arctic sailor smashing desperately upward through thin ice for air. He peered left and right, blinking like an owl, and saw the landscape coated with a substance smooth and shining as glass, a world as blank as creation on the second day.

And he uttered a single swear word.

2. The Patrician Rassaphore

Montrose stepped out of the hole where he woke and watched dubiously as it filled itself in and closed up behind him. That he was standing on the surface of some self-aware cognitive substance he had little doubt, but how to signal to it, he could see no way. He pounded on the ground and shouted at it for a while, more to amuse himself than in hope of establishing contact. Smashing at the diamond with his fist bloodied his knuckles, which was a sensation as familiar to him as the crannies and irregularities of his teeth were to his tongue. One diamond fragment of the radial cracks was a triangle long and thin enough to act as a toothpick, so he took up the diamond shard and picked his teeth as he walked.

He decided to travel toward the western cliffs, on the general theory that following the land downward was the best way to find a river, and a river the best place to look for people.

Counting his footsteps and watching the stars turn, Montrose walked for two hours, rested, walked for two hours, rested, and so passed the night. The river fog (or whatever those clouds might be) rising from the lower plain grew taller as the night passed and the sky overhead grew pink with the promise of dawn. He estimated that the globe was rotating at roughly half the rate it had known in his youth.

The rising sun behind him ignited the mountains, which were made of glass. Montrose stopped walking to gaze in awe at the sky as it slowly grew bright. The level beams of sunlight shining through the translucent peaks sent a series of nimbuses like the serried lances of rows of celestial pikemen streaming across the sky, painting the high clouds and thin mists with royal purple and rich Prussian blue, turquoise and emerald bright as burning copper sulfate, with narrower bands and darts of rose and cerise, carnelian and citrine, gamboge, smaragdine, and saffron. Soon, the whole sky was a peacock’s tail.

A motion in the distance drew his eyes downward from the wonder of the twilight of the dawn. A long shadow was reaching from the burning mountains behind. It was cast by a figure, slender and graceful, with long snow-white robes fluttering about like wings, who was skating across the diamond surface toward him. Something in the posture and the motion of the legs and hips told Montrose it was a male.

As the other man came closer, Montrose could see the slight feathers of haze appearing and disappearing around the man’s slippers as his slid forward. The ice-hard substance was flexing and re-forming with each footstep, no doubt forming a frictionless surface. The oddness was that he was not bent over like a speed skater would have been, but his speed was much greater than the rather casual motion of his legs could account for. Perhaps the substance was also moving of its own accord underfoot, like a conveyer belt, imparting additional motion.

The sun rose higher, and the darker hues cast across the overhead clouds turned bright and began to mingle into a dazzling whiteness, like the hueless sky seen above a desert or above an arctic tundra.

The sun cleared the mountains before the man arrived, and suddenly the mirror-bright surface of the Earth was gorgeous, but also blinding, dazzling, disorienting. Montrose put his hand before his face, but there was no way to turn to escape the fiery dazzle.

The man ceased to move his legs and stood upright as he approached. For the last hundred yards or so, he slid, looking almost comically poised and serene, white cloak waving behind, like the mast on a sailboat with sails spread, or like a tall pine tree with the wind blowing snowy streams from its branches. The friction properties of the surface changed in the last ten yards, and the stranger slowed to a halt without a jar.

They stood regarding each other. Menelaus was naked, and he was picking his teeth with a sliver of diamond.

The other man had skin that gleamed like metallic gold, as if a statue had sprung to life. He was beardless, but the jet-blackness of his eyebrows and long dark hair made a startling contrast with his bright skin. The white garment was classically draped, and a hem of purple traced the edges of the skirts and cloak. He wore a coronet of green, but whether it was ivy leaves or emerald stones, or some other substance entirely, Montrose could not detect.

When the man smiled, his teeth were diamond, perhaps the same substance as the ground beneath or the distant mountains. But the strangest feature was his eyes. They were silver-gray, pupil and iris and sclera and all. His face was young, but these eyes were old.

Without a word, the man held out his hand, offering Menelaus a small fruit the size of a plum, so purple it was almost black.

Menelaus shrugged, figuring that if anyone meant him harm, there were easier ways to do him in. The first bite of the fruit let a gush of juice sweeter than wine flood his mouth; in the second bite, the pleasure was doubled; the third was ecstasy. He wolfed it down with unseemly haste, crowing and slurping at the sheer physical gratification of the thing, as if every nutrient need of all his hungry cells was being deluged with satisfaction.

At the same time, his senses sharpened. Every nuance of the air on his bare skin could be felt separately, and he could now distinguish a riot of buried colors in the semitransparent layers of the ground beneath. Also, the white cloak of the other man now could be seen to be a combination of many slight nuances of shade, silver and dove gray, white and ivory and milk and snow. The man’s skin was even more complex; it was now a pattern of veins and dapples of topaz, chartreuse, tawny, sulfur and primrose, ochre and icterine.

Best of all, the light no longer dazzled him. It had not grown less bright. Rather, it was as if his visual nerve was stronger, more flexible.

The stone of the fruit was small, hard, and wrinkled like a peach pit, and clear and bright like a diamond. Montrose offered it back to the man, but, with a smile, as if he bestowed a gift of great value, the man gestured he should keep it.

The man now drew out a drinking horn from his shoulder belt, knelt, and plunged the horn beneath the surface of the diamond ground, which obligingly turned to liquid at his touch. When he raised the horn, it was filled to the brim with a golden fluid thicker than honey. Still kneeling, he proffered it to Montrose. Once again, fearing no evil, Montrose threw back his head and drained the horn.

This time, there was no physical sensation. The fluid seemed to evaporate in his mouth, leaving his tongue feeling cool. He in no way became intoxicated, but his thoughts grew clear and sharp, as if he were waking from a half dream, and at the same time, his emotions surged and seemed to grow unknotted, as if pains and fears long held in check, long buried, were in one moment excised.

Montrose sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “Can’t say as I care for the taste, as it sneaked out of my mouth, but it is sure a great pick-me-up. What is it called?”

The man, without rising, answered in flawless English. He had no trace of an accent Montrose could detect, but his rhythm and inflection were oddly musical, almost a singsong. His voice was a pleasant baritone. “What you quaff is called glory. Now in your blood is a sign, which none dare deny, of the honor in which all living creatures behold you on this, your utmost day, and the dignity you are owed.”