Rassaphore said, “Be comforted. You set in motion the love of the chaotic Fox Maidens for liberty and freedom; and they created us to carry out your will. We created Neptune based on your principles and mathematics, and he opposed Twelve of Tau Ceti, the plutonian ice giant, and Splendor of Delta Pavonis, the traitorous and mercurial fire giant. Altair followed Neptune when the Potentate called Covenant created the Power called Immaculate from their gas giant, and he in turn created the system-wide brain of Consecrate, who, in turn, was the opposition to Catallactic of Tau Ceti, who served the Beast. You see the chain of connection? We are your children. The Myrmidons, and Jupiter and Twelve and Catallactic were the children of the Nobilissimus del Azarchel. The opposing avalanches your pebble and his pebble set in motion could not have been stopped, nor aided, at this point, by any power of yours or his. This destiny has been set ever since you slew Jupiter in a duel, or even before, when the first generation of Swans ungratefully and ungraciously exiled you both. The fuse is long, the explosion reaches one hundred lightyears wide, and perhaps farther will expand, and perhaps never to expire. Such is the human spirit. A dramatic battle at the end of things may indeed be in your future, but not today.”

“Why did you put me in this body?”

“To honor you with simplicity. You cannot easily haul a node of murk the size of Mercury behind you as you sail on your honeymoon to many stars and worlds. So all your minds and selves were folded down into this body you wear now, with no need for external connection or remote brain storage.”

“That’s impossible. Or it was, when I fell asleep.”

“The knowledge, along with all knowledge of our society, science, lore, and customs, was embedded in that drink you quaffed and stands by in your memory at your call. I will speak only enough to stir those buried memories to light:

“This praxis is a gift from your bride. Rania has sent ahead of her the results of research she has made of her vessel, given in recompense for some wrong done her by the aliens of M3. It is an attotechnology ship, whose First Order secrets we lack the tools to analyze or reproduce, but certain spin-offs of the Second Order femtotechnology aboard can be examined by picotechnology—in this case, the means to perform the manipulation of quarks, quantum fields, and exotic matter. Her research enabled the Principality Zauberring to overcome certain limitations of the Pauli exclusion, develop a form of stable phenomena, neither matter nor energy properly so called, consisting of nucleonic strings about which electron energy levels are distributed in spirals rather than spheres.”

“String atoms rather than ball atoms.”

“If you like. These strings are analogous to elements and can be woven together in knots and sheets in a fashion analogous to molecules, but with distributed strong and weak two-dimensional interaction areas rather than zero-dimensional point sources. The material interacts with normal chemicals and photon excitement in a somewhat predictable way, but the number of fractal folds which can be made in a molecular sheet of the material is practically infinite. Hence, the amount of information that can be encoded and stored in the energy states of the subatomic particles, in the vibrations and waveforms of the strings, and then transferred by changes in the surface folds to chemicals released into neural systems greatly exceed what either molecular level storage density of logic diamonds or the atomic level storage density of murk.”

“Still sounds plagued impossible. You cannot stuff a planet-sized brain into a human body.”

“Your subatomic particles, variations in electron shell orbits, nuances of nucleonic organization, and so on can store as much information in a single atom as is coded in a large brick of murk technology by stringing the atoms together into binary sequences. It is as if an entire library were written on a silk sheet so fine that it could be wadded up and placed in the head of a pin. But come! These dry matters are no fit discourse for such a day as this!”

The man of gold raised his arm, pointing at the blue-white sky. “This is the hour of joy! Look upward. We have made your eyes like ours so that you can see her approach. We have devised that your eyes will return to their more traditional appearance when she more closely approaches, for then they will be needed to meet her gaze and speak all lovers’ vows which words cannot encompass. But for now, your eye must be stronger than human, to see her afar. Look where I point. There is her ship, the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum! There!”

“I see nothing but a blue sky, pardner. You jaspering me, is that it?”

“Not so. I merely overestimated the rate at which your mind would adapt to our neural formats. You should be able to penetrate the opaque day sky with eyes like ours. The knowledge you drank is not yet digested. It does not matter. We will blot out the sun for you.”

Montrose said, “Wha-what did you say?”

But he had heard right. Less than eight minutes later, a black bite seemed to be taken out of the sun. These new eyes could look directly at the sun without harm, and so he got to see something he had never seen with naked eyes before: a full eclipse. The black disk occluded the sun, and an eerie twilight fell across the landscape of forest, glass mountain, and purple wine-dark sea.

From the crescent of light at the edge of the disk, Montrose could tell this was a planetary body, not a sail nor an orbital mirror. How the technology of this era could maneuver another world into position between Earth and sun without shattering it was a mystery.

“You can move the planets?”

“Not I. That honor I granted to the living planet Pyriphlegethon, who well recalls aiding you in beforetimes to behold her. Now, by his shadow, he shades your eyes. Your sensitivity is greater far than you might believe, because each incoming photon can be separately analyzed into preons and entangled photon pair information deduced. The deeper your heart desires, the clearer your vision! Look, I say! Look!”

And he saw. At first in the night sky he noticed only that certain distant dots of light moved more rapidly than others. Then his eye resolved them into crescents waxing or waning, gibbous or full. Then he could see them as globes with continents, seas, swirls of clouds. One was green as a lime, covered pole to pole with layers of viridescent storm; the next was white and crisscrossed with fine dark lines and crater marks too evenly spaced to be natural. The next had a ring like Saturn’s, but made of a single band of exotic material, connected by dozens of space elevators to the equator; then a world entirely ocean with polar icecaps covering half the north and south hemispheres. To stare at worlds from space is like to stare at human faces, for each was individual, rich with secrets, handsome.

And on and on. There were two hundred which had lights, like the lights of cities seen at night, shining between the horns of their crescents. Then there were three hundred more, coated from pole to pole with the pallid yellow white of logic diamond, or with morbid indigo and black of murk, or else with the opalescent blue-white glass, like the landscape where he woke seen from afar. Half a thousand worlds altogether were here, ranging in size from balls smaller than Ceres to superterrestrials eight times the mass of Earth. Mars and Venus, far away indeed from the orbits they had known in his youth, were lost in the thicket.

The distant spheres of Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus were visible, but of the old asteroid belt, or Pluto and the outer planets, there was no memorial. Neptune was surrounded by an extensive artificial ring system equal parts murk and logic diamond: his Angels and Archangels, and moons to replace the ones he had lost in old wars, to house his Potentates.