"Two centuries of far-ranging civil war had obliged the free and nominally western nations to enter a period of contraction and pause in which to consider their contradictions. Traditions and virtues were redefined and eventually freed of meaning. Priorities were mishandled and lost. Of special significance, the grave duties involved with watching the skies were entrusted to home hobbyists, and the aspirations of science and discovery that led the eye away from the world were set aside, to be taken up by those for whom these aspirations were principally political.

"Two calamities, the first the smaller and more tragic. Suddenly China declared a race to Mars, and in a year it was won. A flag to mark the Martian soil and a world-historical achievement to last the season. Then homesteading, for a more binding claim. A campus of tubes and domes housed ten sinonauts plus two from the commonwealth for added effect. The daily and mission-critical dispatches chronicled with compelling visuals the adventuring, the amassing of priceless basalts and feldspars, the calisthenics and patriotic songs, the occasional and incongruous evidence of celebratory beverages. Perhaps to make the whole thing plausible. A conception and Martian baby were on the docket, plus a greenhouse, observatory, bungalows for the inevitable fare-payers. A 26-month tour, not such a burden for those becoming legends. Chang-Juli, Long Reach, an expression of the human spirit.

"Like so many expressions of the human spirit it was false or at the very least fleeting: politics, born cruel, had been made a home on Mars, out of lowball polyplasticine and the science of expedience, which is the opposite of science. There's an old joke that says that we wake up every day in order to step closer to the grave. On Mars, it was the day itself that moved them along: the same light that powered their life-support poured 25 daily millirads of high linear energy transfer radiation through the walls into their lives. The eventual dispatches that evaded the filters showed them pleading, naked, glowing red and suppurating. Compelling visuals. No contingency plans for this twist of fate, which can happen when a product is rushed to market. Too late they were advised to bury the installation in the local sands. Or to suit up, too weak to walk, and go outside and hide under the arrays, exhaling vomitus as needed. Rescue was rushed out, but the transit was six months. Eventually for the last of the aspirants a moment of relief: a plastic ring buckled under the assault, refrigerant passed into quarters, providing suffocation during sleep.

"So that place was no more welcoming than any other place. The mourning was general and sincere. Many or most admonished that nothing had been accomplished. Twelve dead in the heavens, the rest dying more efficiently at home. And then there were those who were astonished that nothing had been accomplished, which was something.

"Within the year the eyes of the omphaloskeptics were forced skyward again. Two Slavic home explorers, names Eudo and LaZouche, turned one evening to their lenses and espied an arriving planetoid, a bolus the size of an island kingdom, prescribed by nature. Contingency plans were dug out of yellowing drives and with great public displays of earnestness a series of fiascoes was sent aloft to save man.

"Under normal conditions a new experience (though this was in fact a routine correction) will generate reactions within a considerable range. Not so here. Eudo-LaZouche revealed itself to the naked eye and all apathies warmed to apoplexies. The fears hardened to a fever, and man became feeble from mania. There were no pleasures because distraction was impossible. Industry and invention ground to an end because plans require a future. Diminishing days were given to prayers and reasoned appeals and the half-mad hopes of the undeserving, although anyone who could've listened to them would have heard this with interest: ten billion engines humming the same joyless tune.

"It came in sharp and cut a tendon from the air over Central Asia. Lit up the sky; orbiting platforms dropped like diamonds; eventually it fell away; soon a dead man would clarify.

"One popular post-modern model runs roughly like this: man's mind is impressed with but cannot understand itself. Thus the contrivance of a superimposing element (also impressive). For example, there is the conceit that only man can feel awe, the state of wonder that leaves a creature feeling privileged and slightly benumbed. That which will awe the weary and unimpressible mind of man cannot be of man, of course, so man builds the Imponderable and accredits it; in time it becomes an element, like ether, without which the macrophenomena of nature and the epiphanies of man cannot be understood.

"So key amongst the definitions of the human mind are self-regard and self-diminution; ambition and satisfaction; the need to know and the need to already know; the will to freedom, perhaps the freedom to trust. And hagiographers would one day wonder by what combination of these or other qualities - by what careful blend, and at what heat and in what medium - had the unlikely likes of Marc Samuel Bouchet been empowered or allowed to create an epochal creed, an Imponderable understood by all.

"Bouchet was an abstract portraitist or actually a postman in urban Aix-en-Provence. Like many an artist, little is known about him except the lies. He had not in fact won awards, killed for a cause. Early life and education were unmarked by any significant ease. He was intelligent but came across otherwise, so he began to feign strong opinions, which suffices in some circles, naturally toward which he gravitated. His art was borrowed ideas but he had a new theory for it, and that bought him entry. Quickly developing all the skills of a charismatic man without, perhaps, the vague menace.

"He loved the idea of books, and carried a battered cardboard box of hardbacks with him; his journals reveal a skilled writer, but it's not clear that he could read. He was known to dress himself in optimistic carnival colors that drew and misled the eye. Not an inebriate in any way that mattered; and his skills with women only got him so far, so he was loyal to his family.

"Remarkably, his neuroses seemed to have been formed in a foundation of common sense and civility. For example, when he spoke it was to fable and brag, but a number of accounts had him prefacing these bouts with apologies. In his journals we find a man who, regarding the misery of his accomplishments, was confident enough to blame himself; he found himself fascinating, certainly, but mainly in the way of a roadside accident; every day his battles raged, and every day he made gentleman's draws.

"Marc Bouchet was kind, conniving, ambitious when it availed him, serene despite it all, utterly meaningless.

"This last was most important. He might have been the least religious man of sound mind ever to walk the earth. He lacked the devotion asked of theists and atheists, and couldn't be agnostic because he didn't wonder about it. In early writings he described himself as an apathist - who had not found enough in the question to hold his attention - but he shed that because it was, after all, an ism. Politics - religion plus hate and minus beauty - left him easily nonpolitical. Science cults seemed the most far-fetched. Bouchet had somehow managed to make his way into a seventh decade without forming a belief about anything more consequential than himself.

"He lost his artist's hands to tremor, and couldn't sell his new style as a style. He considered his options and chose published polemics. A more exacting discipline than prose or poetry, which no one read anyway, it had the timeless benefit of low materials costs; and of course he lived in an era when only loons and dilettantes did not publish polemics, and these days he was thinking of his legacy.

"He dedicated himself to it; he had nothing to say. Surprising, and a matter for reflection over several weeks. This was not a salon, where words were ephemera, light wine. The printed word was merciless. Give a fool a pen and he is exposed, forever; an equivocator, defined; a liar is hoist on his canard. The printed word is art and science, drawer of distinction and thus a measure of the user, a mirror on him and a lens, and a grim challenge to a man indebted to having no meaning.

"But liars depend on the truth and keep it close, and Bouchet found a start there, tenuously, calling up an inarguable, a dull verity, to use as the premise of his polemic. A truth has corollaries, of course, and he strung them together as they came. Over several days - and without epiphany, which he would not have trusted, or sense of creation - he filled out the design until it became, surprising to him, a credo, formed of nothing but consequent statements of the obvious.

"He pushed the button that expressed it into publication. And there it floated, exposed to the eyes and the interests and predilections of the world for what surely was a picosecond, a joke overcasting it, last year's joke-of-the-day, then a sudden surge of recipes, possibly all the same, then the joke again, or a variant that was an irony, then a cloud of polemical diary entries, roughly the same, floating over like squid ink, then staged memories captured in grainy tones, followed by book-length crimes of cannabic solipsism, or polemical accounts of repasts, contretemps and the latest in imponderables, and naturally some advice and wise words that surely were a cruel joke, all of this, over the course of the moment, pressed into the general blend, millions upon millions of failed attempts to warrant whatever attentions received.

"An epochal creed for some other time, then. Marc Bouchet died not alone, to be sure, but forgotten and unknown, which wouldn't have surprised him.

"Twenty years later Rachel Charneau, 41, a writer for the stage whose ungoverned drug use and dissociative schizophrenia have made her luminous in that world, and whose handiworks have earned expectancy there and a rich and practiced awe, puts together a tone cluster in three acts, "L'arbre Bleu," in which a facsimile of Marc Bouchet makes a brief appearance, proselytizing; she'd found his credo in a cellar box during an addled rummage. The play was successful; absurdist of course; it was about family madness; it was autobiographical; she was Bouchet's granddaughter; his lines were played for crackpottery. The heavy-footed "La comete repond a toutes les questions" received especial smiles, the upside-down smile mixed with one arched eyebrow, the contemplative touch of a finger to the corner of the pout.

"An academic at the College of Bordeaux had made it his life's avocation to parse and otherwise justify the artistic product of Mme. Charneau. Unlike, say, the allegorical poetry of Parmenides, or Euclid's Book of Fallacies, every undertaking of the modern mind was and had been safeguarded with care, perpetuated onto glassy memory circles kept cool in sand bunkers, and it took the researcher just a few seconds of dirty spadework to pull up Bouchet and his opus; he gave it a generous passage in his thesis, which found its way to a journal of note.

"The Blue Tree and its explication were contemporaries of Eudo-LaZouche. And a simple stating of the obvious - suddenly granted a time and a place in which, finally, stating the obvious was no longer deemed inappropriate - began to do its work.

"Cometism is its appellation now not by Bouchet but because of the broad purchase of that name, improvised over time, long after him, who thought such a thing as a name for his quiet descriptions unwarranted. These descriptions began with two understandings. He understood, because he had discovered it, that an absence of belief meant nothing, because like any empty place it would be filled, by something not necessarily salutary. As well, the hideous transpiration of the recent centuries -- and the emotional infirmities to which he and everyone he'd ever known were subject -- led Bouchet to understand that, although its beliefs require self-exaltation, the human mind was very much a project in its infancy, unworthy of acclaim.

"He struck self-exaltation to its minimum with this unprovable but inarguable normative statement of belief: the human race has value and must be protected. The beauty of the line being that it hadn't the temerity to say why, which would've been to encourage discussion.

"Cleverer still was the imperative there, from which flowed the consequences active even today. Bouchet addressed creed-holders of every caliber and kind and put to them a metaphor in the form of a comet, a real and fixed menace not discovered until tomorrow, whose path would put an end to them and the philosophical opinions they made and held dear. Proposed: any of these - religions, causes, polities - not founded on preventing that from happening were little more than suicide cults. The security of the makers of thought must be made the thought of first order, he surmised; as to secondary thoughts, there were none. Third-place thoughts he described, charitably, as entertainment at best.

"Much of Bouchet's treatise was a tutorial on clearing the head. He reminded us that one's philosophical opinion - one's emotional attachment to a general premise - is merely a by-product of one's immalleable nature: one's type, or temperature. He then deduced that beliefs are in fact essentially parasitic. For example, even something as threadbare as a book, dutifully giving off its ideas like spores, easily wins an adherent when one of these agents makes chance lodgment in just the right disposition, taking over. Amongst his advised remedies, he suggested cataloguing the flaws not in the opinion itself but in the head that had made a perfect home for it. And if you can't find any, well, that's one for starters.

"Strange creed. But a boulder sent to abrade Earth of its hubris was not strange. It was not even insane. It was what had made definitions and the other conceits of man as empty as the head of an imbecile, or a wounded animal, which cannot even form a proper question, can do little more than process pain and know that it's not supposed to be this way.

"The macrophenomena of the natural realm are the foundation of the religious query, and Eudo-LaZouche carried a message in that regard, Bouchet decoding. Cometism was a fancy amongst scholars at first: it did not require emotional attachment, and this lack of demands drew affection there. Soon it grew to something more like a fad: Cometism appealed to those who debated in good faith and with curiosity; those who argued because they enjoyed the greasy feel of it in their mouths were increasingly and cruelly ignored. Trend, current, movement: Bouchet had promised that nearly no causist nor keeper of a faith need be deprived because, sparse as it was, Cometism had the room to allow nearly any other belief to complement it and live within its folds, along the lines of this homily: even if your belief is not the truth, it is worth protecting nonetheless. Collectors cautiously hunted down his gouaches and heavy-fingered line drawings.

"As Cometism began to mainstream, fractiousness along the traditional lines eased and even acquired the whiff of insipidity: Bouchet had plied the tiring reminder that we are not the enemy, but then had elaborated, beautifully, with this critical improvement: everything else is the enemy. A phrasing that discomfited neo-animists and partisans for the natural world, to whom Cometism rejoined: man loves nature but nature requites nothing and in fact abjures sentiment of any kind. Excepting, if you like, Eudo-LaZouche.

"Cometism was not quite a miracle. Fighting continued like everything else, though mainly as management concerns: the wars of grand schemes generated little excitement. The people still had their parties, of course -- hate-filled, grim -- but mainly for use now in seeing to the needs of tradition, or for the easing of the burden of the ballot-caster. That old survivor Idiocy seemed unimpressed. At some point Cometism became popular enough to warrant heckling from the young.

"And then there was this: Cometism could be as cruel as the truth. A body of old verities became outgrown, and the rights of animals, the mentally ill, capital criminals, the rights of man were subjected to a pitiless re-understanding. This unpleasantness derived from another suggestion buried in Bouchet's writings that had surfaced and grabbed on: the Project. The Project was simply the human race and the daily specifics of its furtherance and protection. The Project became something of a choosing tool and a touchstone for deciders and makers of public opinion: when a matter of expense or legislative adventure was propounded, there were many who obliged it to pass intact through a challenge, a question which in time evolved from its prosaic roots to a template advising many an individual dilemma: how does this choice advance the Project?

"Cometism might've been the first creed to be embraced despite asking sacrifices and in return promising nothing more than more of the same.

"These sacrifices and that promise were soon given full expression in the Panoptes Program, an outer-space pursuit of unprecedented scope and participation. Far-ranging vessels would be sent to rendezvous with twelve asteroids in the great band of them past the Martian circumference, twelve like the figures on a clock face, and stud them with astrographic telescopes arranged in crossfire. Ninety-six eyes, in constant communication, powered by the sun, each eye with a brain behind to make sense of what was seen. Cascading stereopsis, and no bolide nor ball of water ice would catch man unready: Earth would have decades in which to test and prepare a remedy. There was something sweetly satisfying about it, that these stones, objects of mortal dread, would be remade as protectors.

"The Mercia was first, and made its meeting with 4-Vesta. They'd barely mixed their boots into the dust when their AI called them inside to watch what was happening. No one from Earth bothered to contact them about this, excusably, or respond to their advisories and alert calls."

Cee: "I do have a name."

Brownlee: "I'm mainly done with this, and now I have a chance for you. Recall the intermezzo at this point. The long return. Sleep, eat. Look for distraction, hope for the best if that's how you do it, nothing happening in all its glory. Thought you might like to tell that story. Cee."

"Love to. The Ponderables, that's where I really shine. Do I have a go at your unimpressible style, or should I bend it more toward readability?"

"A puzzle for you."

Cee: "Another one: to me there's never nothing happening, and it's all interesting and part of the story. For example, regarding that period I carry with me discrete memories of every meal, incident of toilette and lavage."

"The historian's first challenge: what to leave out. And if you're hinting for advice I can offer you the old rule of thumb, which says not to include those last bits. Another thing. I noticed you being ironical there. I think you should avoid that. Here, now I say something I don't mean. Using that tone to signify. The air went dead there, hear it? Meaning is the only thing a word has, Cee. Take it away, and the word might turn on you."

Actually here Cee heard the air crackle with animation; he adored Brownlee for this sort of thing. Brownlee was the mutabilities of man laid out for him in daily lessons. A sarcast of resolve and shipwide renown; sometimes when he spoke he used the trick of leaving words out to draw the ear in; and when he jibed he might keep the tone neutral enough that the jest of it lay in question. And now a little lecture on the virtues of clarity.

At any rate, Cee was unaware of any ironicality on his own part, and would reread this with interest. For now, the safety of soft laughter. "A puzzle for me."

"I've left notes on my planner, it's open and you can root around. I'm off." He wheeled onto the causeway.

Brownlee about a project. As ever: the busy hands, the making of something from nothing, the leaving of it behind. His time since the seventh day of August had been dedicated to the work of setting down the sum of his learning. There was quite a lot of that: Brownlee was a hoarder, and the object of his fetish was facts. The opus was history mainly, since there was more of it; history as embodied in its wars mainly, the loud parts, which he recounted backwards, the tales shrinking with age. Finally just a list. Battle of Flodden Field, Medieval. The history of the year just gone by was given detail and prominence, as was the story of Bouchet, Cometism coursing through the Mercia like a nutrient stream. He had put hard work into an anthology of plots and surprise endings from the Western canon, something of a time-saver; fragments of verse - the plenum is thought and thought preponderates, that sort of thing - and interesting words; he'd described the styles of the Old Masters, and drawn up a Rothko. He and Cee had assembled a series of science primers which only those who didn't need them could've used. An exposition on philosophy, with samples.

All set down because he had an idea that the sum of his learning might prove to be the sum of learning. He called it the Incunabula.

There was loose property in the walkway which he was forced to evade, and he might but wouldn't complain to Cee. Brownlee was looking for two things for the project at hand. First a jumper cable. Up the ramp on his left, a bank of lockers and he took it into his lap in a coil.

Now looking for a little courage. Just at the start of the long return to Earth, one of the slower loaders had been made consternated by the schedule change and left Brownlee crushed in his lower half. He might've died but no, part-paralyzed, even better. They'd shown him every kindness, contriving catheters and a brace, securing the dead parts and commending them to the care of surgeons homeside, and they built him a hand-powered wheelchair. And ramps and conveniences, and a stair hoist for him, which he had not worked up the tomfoolery to use, but he needed to get to Deck One so now he was calling it courage.

He put a pain pill under his tongue. The hoist was an arabesque of wires and pinions, all a bit invented. He rolled onto the shelf, locked his wheels, calculated the odds, depressed the lever that spun him up the spiral.

Well I won't be doing that again. He gave himself a moment. Deck One was as it had been. Beside him a monitor flickered like a child being ignored. Brownlee aimed toward the back bays. Someone coming: pale Mucel tumbled past like a scrap of paper. Poor boy. Now Cargo 1-B. The floor here was stamped with a traction pattern that made his treads bind, and he moved with a maddening flutter.

Signs of someone just there, a cup, an open ledger, and Brownlee would need the next minute to be alone time. He listened, and let out a cough a bit; better, the dimmer was just beside, and he played with the light a little. Nothing.

Quickly now to the end wall. He hissed at the loader there, indicating with his hands, and it came as directed. He positioned himself on its fork plate. Whisper: "Up." It raised him head-level with the top of the stacks. There was an electrical conduit just above, and he secured both ends of the cable. "Back." Cee screamed at it to stop, Brownlee rolling his chair forward, which fell away beneath him.

"The sight of it would have kindled one last and great religious day. Mitosis of the sun. Standing before it, science would stammer, and reason becomes preposterous. Adversaries of every shape and nature would share a sharp breath and form together in commons and city squares to watch the sky effloresce and to succumb to a sense of privilege, slightly benumbed. In mere minutes they begin to feel it, and awe is also fear, and the original enmity, survival, resurges. The hegira of man across the longitudes erupts on narrow roadways, hardens and grows turbid with violence; those who could would take to the air for a time and land in abandoned places. Suddenly the fliers lurch into the earth, to suffocate in root cellars, tube-stops, waste pipes and catacombs; drown in deeper and deeper waters; wait in lightless subterranes for the walls to liquefy around them. Better, some lucky of them rise at first light and contemplate the sunset. The spark of a new and enduring Homogenocene epoch. Wherein the colors are combined. And the creeds, and the causes, all the burdens made light as air. All the predilections and tastes meet and clarify to the taste of ash. Prescriptivists and descriptivists are wed at long last; Jerusalem is made whole; as are the golden-cheeked warbler with those who strove to save it, who never thought to save it from Nature; with whom the troubled bones of the Cynics finally find agreement; all lifted away and laced into a broad black altar-cloth, all of it, the broken-heartedness and suffering, the fear, the fear of the everyday and the fear of the end, lifted from us, toutes choses soulevees par le soleil, by solving flame, to the solace and surpassing peace of dreamless sleep."