Montrose said, “Point to the spot where I was standing when I gave the order.”

2. Stained-Glass Dyson Sphere

The little fairy figurine raised her tiny wand and pointed away from both of them, at the carpet of twigs and fantastically curled branches blocking the forward hull. As she pointed, dozens of other little darting fairies erupted from nearby clouds or beehives and danced across the branches and trunk segments, turning them white as ice, and a moment later, pulled them apart like a curtain.

The branches fell aside, revealing a glittering vista of space: occupying more than half of the visible universe was a giant curve composed of thousands and tens of thousands of overlapping translucent plates colored like stained glass, rose and crimson, scarlet and blood-red, lilac and lavender, fulvous gold, emerald and smaragd. Only after a moment could the overall shape be discerned: All the plates in their fleets and flotillas were perpendicular to an unseen central sun. Each rectilinear plate was a few hundred miles on a side, a few microns thin, albeit a few were much thicker, and had atmosphere and hydrosphere inside their hollow interiors, as well what might have been manufactories, energy stations, temples, radio houses, quays for docking shuttles. The clouds of plates were not orbiting at the same rate, but were arranged in concentric globes at various distances from the star. A nimbus of crepuscular rays poured out where the colored plates swarmed less thickly and glittered against what might have been escaping particles of gas or winged tools no larger than particles rushing to unknown tasks.

Where a gap in the plates occurred, the rose light of a hotter interior could be glimpsed, with a smaller and tighter curve of orbiting plates within, blue and blue gray, orbiting at an Earth-like distance to the star, and in its gaps, another even deeper, purple and indigo, perhaps the radius of the orbit of Venus.

In the middle distance, orbiting the great sphere at the same altitude as the vessel and off her bow, hung a ringworld the size of the orbit of Mercury. Five planets, large as Earth, orbited the ring as shepherding moons. Two of the satellites were volcanoscapes of rusty soil and ice the color of dried blood; two others were black like burned coals. But the final one was a jewel of beauty: a blue world of white clouds, with the lights of cities shining gemlike on the hemisphere facing away from the sun. The flocks of colored plates had been made thin here so that a beam from the central sun, like a spotlight, was striking that blue planet. From the x-ray emissions, it was clear that an invisible, perhaps microscopic, neutron star hung at the dead center of the turning ringworld, and the ring material itself shielded the five planets surrounding it, for they all orbited in the plane of the x-ray shadow.

In the near distance was the limb of a crescent planet, boiling with red, cerise, brown, and black storm clouds, with vortices and whirlpools or cerulean and indigo like staring eyes. There was also a beam where the plates had parted striking here. Despite the change in color, Montrose recognized this world as the Neptunian ice giant which had accompanied them and which, during the second half of the journey, had acted as a reflector for the deceleration beam Ain kept centered on the vast globe, and those reflected rays slowed the Solitudines Vastae Caelorum during the brief deceleration phases in the last half of her long voyage to the Praesepe Cluster. Its atmosphere of solid methane ice was now a boiling gas, and wisps of material, including tree-shaped dendrite housings from Ain, large enough to be seen at this distance, were progressing slowly or swiftly up the beam of sunlight, making it visible. At one time it had possessed a ring system as grand as Saturn’s, made entirely of dendrites. It evaporated, its components set about other tasks.

A score of other gas giants were visible like crescent moons, and if there were more than this in the star system, they were hidden beyond the immense curve of the Dyson sphere. Of worlds inside the outer course of the Dyson sphere, four were visible as circular shadows cast on the glowing curve of the colored panes.

The star before them, a yellow giant called Vanderlinden 133, coated with a semitransparent Dyson cloud of concentric layers, was neither the largest star nor the one sending and receiving the most signals.

The Praesepe Cluster contained over three hundred stars and fifty additional dark bodies as large as stars, which may have been opaque Dysons or other elements, nodes, or neural transmission stations in the vast brain of the Domination. The blue stragglers in the group—that is, stars hotter and bluer than other stars of the same luminosity—turned out to be, ironically, the undeveloped star systems, uninfluenced by stellar engineering. The others were coated by spheres and clouds of various thicknesses and consistencies. Certain stars had been artificially induced to ignite as novae: these were coated by nearly solid Dysons, but the excess heat permitted to leak out was sufficient for these stars to be seen from Earth and miscategorized as red giants. Montrose stared in wonder at an object less than a lightyear away, a Dyson oval much like an egg, at whose foci two stars rotated about each other.

Compared to these wonders, even the staggering immensities of the macroscale engineering at Ain were as nothing: a burdei pit-house next to a shining skyscraper.

The central core of the cluster was eleven lightyears in radius. There were two subclusters or lobes in the interstellar brain, one of which gave off stronger x-ray emissions than the other. This indicated that Praesepe was the remnant of two smaller clusters having collided some eight hundred million years ago, some two million years before Praesepe had ejected the stars which later were to form the Hyades Cluster. What convulsions, or wars, or divorces, or epileptic fits these great collisions and expulsions represented, no human knew.

The little fairy pointed at the ringworld. “There you are, Captain. That is you, there.”

Montrose looked at the ring of material. “Wait … this is impossible…” He said softly. “Cahetel…?”

3. The Jupiter Effect

Del Azarchel was also staring at the ringworld in wonder. “My discovery is somewhat less surprising than yours, as it turns out. I was going to tell you that there are human beings living here, on that blue world. I did not realize that one of them was you.”

“I think they are all me,” said Montrose with a strange little laugh. “Damnification and pestilence! He ate me, and I did not agree with his digestion. He was eating a virus. Is that what Ain meant? Is that what Hyades is expecting to happen all over the place, to every civilization men are sent?”

Del Azarchel said, “Did Ain beam a copy of you to the Praesepe Cluster? I was the one running the mental replication system all those years, and you slumbered! There was no copy of you made at any point on planet Torment. How can this be?” But then he said, “Ah! No! You did this long before, I think, while I tarried in Sagittarius. Very subtle!”

Montrose said, “I think my takeover of Cahetel was by accident, so don’t compliment me yet. But you see what happened?”

Del Azarchel pointed toward the ring encircling the blue planet. “Cahetel absorbed a complete copy of your brain information during the first hour of the Second Sweep, when all the Black Fleet was turned. And it could not leave well enough alone and so brought your memories out of storage a few times to help understand what the humans were doing, how to get them settled on the colonies, and so on. I assume Cahetel had other tasks to perform at other stars after leaving Sol?”