“Asmodel was a Uranian mass with an hydrosphere of picotechnological murk black as ink, black as the pupil of an all-seeing eye, with an atmosphere as filled with fleets and storms and swarms of nanite diamond, auxiliary machines, and operatives, as Venus is with cloud. The whole mass was the shape of a vast convex, forming a sail absorbing the trailing light from Ain. When the mass passed the orbit of Pluto, it collapsed into a globe of storms, ringed with bands of darkness; and it fell toward Sol, assuming a highly elliptical orbit. Its albedo was so low that we lost track of it.
“Then, in A.D. 10920, the core of Asmodel ignited like a small, failed star, and the clouds emerging from the explosion formed streamers reaching toward the planets of the inner system, and the larger asteroids.
“It was searching for evidence of our interplanetary colonies, and found … nothing.
“The core of Asmodel went dark again, and major part of the uranian mass solidified once more, and shrank as it approached aphelion, becoming a body only twice Earth’s diameter, an egg of smooth crystal, and its atmosphere was a banner behind it long as a cometary tail. From the energy traffic, we deduce this tail was its periscope, the source of its observation across the interplanetary distances of our doings. But it also acted as a launch accelerator, for it shot silver tool-swarms into orbit.
“As it swung past Sol in sub-mercurial orbit, these swarms constructed ring-shaped devices, which it dropped into the sun, partly made of matter, partly of energy, partly of something more dense than neutronium we cannot see nor analyze.
“The uranian mass sent murk like shadows to swarm over our machines and battle-asteroids, and although our nanotechnology could control material at a molecular level, we could neither detect nor deflect attacks which disintegrated atomic bonds. Our weapons fell to dust.
“We flung the moons of Phobos and Deimos, using a magnetic monopolar linear accelerator, at ninety-nine percent of the speed of light at the incoming mass. Nothing known to our science could have halted them: even disintegrating them to their constituent elements would not check the mass-energy of their velocity. Something not known to our science, a frame-dragging effect caused by the core of the dark gas giant rotating at the speed of light pulled the moons into a parabolic orbit, and as if in mockery, the living planet Asmodel restored them to their exact orbits and epochs around Mars.
“We expended the utmost of what we could in nuclear and thermonuclear and antimatter bombardments, kinetic, energetic, informational, chemical, molecular, nanotechnological packages—it all fell into an atmosphere as deep as that of a gas giant, creating flares of lights and refracted rainbows.
“Do you think ships of the greater races would have hulls? No. Atmospheres destroy incoming rubbish, matter or antimatter, more effectively.
“And yet we fought on! Magnificent and futile, yet we fought!
“What point was there to empty all Earthly arsenals into clouds that generate tornadoes into whose each eye five Earths could fall, or that spin out thunderbolts whose blasts more than exceeded our mightiest warheads? And if there were any headquarters, brain, or master node within the gas giant, or in his core or cloud or inky oceans, we missed it.
“Asmodel moved next its mass between Earth and the sun, and resumed its vast, thin, concave shape. It had raised its sail. That was all it did or needed to do. It put up a parasol, and let the world freeze.
“The sun was dark, and there was moonlight no more, and the murk came from space like black rain. All the waters of the atmosphere fell as snow and hail to solid seas, and soon all the gases of Earth’s atmosphere began to condense.
“In the same way a medieval castle would gather all the suburbs behind its gates and walls to withstand the siege, when Earth was besieged by darkness, we gathered all the surface civilization, and as much of the oceanic civilization as we could, and drew them underground.
“Had we not practiced? Had we not prepared? Everything was calculated to a nicety. We had supplies, greenhouses, geothermal heat, an artificial biosphere, systems for placing massive numbers into biosuspension. Assuming normal population growth rates, we should have been able to preserve the underground warrens and kept essential personnel alive for eighty years. Three generations of siege!
“And the besiegers waited eighty-one years.
“Perhaps we could have retooled, altered our psychologies, designed new forms of life better suited to the task, but not without spending resources allotted to feed the starving. Not without changing our individualistic and egotistic neuropsychology. Not without sacrificing the poor.
“So the psychological pressure of life in a warren for such independently minded men, with every bite of food, every breath of air rationed, in the end, was too much. The population fell. We did not have enough in numbers to maintain our midlevels.
“Our minds were broken by factions. The people rebelled. Systems broke down.
“Then the Virtue Asmodel directed a beam of energy from the sun through the core of the planet and out the other side. It slowed the core rotation, altered the magnetic properties of the planet, and, more significantly, cooled the interior of the globe. At one blow, our geothermal heat that powered our civilization was insufficient to maintain thought-activity in the Noösphere. The foe collapsed the source of power we thought was independent of the sun.
“We tried to flee, to escape the long shadow of Asmodel, by bending that same energy beam and propelling the world into another orbit far from its blockade—I need not tell you how absurdly, how impossibly delicate that matter was. You gentlemen are both duelists. Throw a raw egg into the air, and shoot it with a bullet, just grazing the egg so gently that you can deflect its fall without breaking the shell. To move this globe was the single greatest mathematical and engineering feat the human mind has ever conceived, and it was done perfectly.
“Why was it so perfect? Because we Swans, we exemplars of independence and wild, mad thinking, full of gaiety and boldness, we had already been expelled from the planetary mind core by our own exile. The damaged mind of Tellus was usurped by one mind, endlessly reiterated, found in the archives, and all the lesser minds in the mental ecology, the ghosts of Sylphs and Locusts and Melusine and all the lordly dead of the First Humanity gathered to this new Tellus and exalted him.
“When Earth fell into her new orbit, Asmodel, following, again took up position between us and the sun, but now the great concave became transparent, a focusing lens, and Asmodel heated the atmosphere from solid to gas.
“We discovered only then that some of the substance had crossed the void between Asmodel and Earth in the form of liquid picotechnology we call murk. It fell as meteors through the atmosphere, and then as cloud vapor, then as deluge, drowning certain villages and patches of valley even before we had been able to evacuate underground. Tens and hundreds of thousands of people were perfectly safe, perfectly frozen, as well as plants, spores, seeds, grubs, worms, and all the minutia needed to restart and restore the ecology.
“It was done with effortless, godlike elegance. The calculation times we estimate they took just to block out the chaos math needed to foretell the revitalization of the ecology are staggering: it would be like a juggler assembling a ticking pocket watch in midair, all the parts and gears and springs and levers moving, all the motions coming together at just the right time to be self-sustaining.
“Asmodel breathed the Earth back to life. The Slumberers in the murk woke in fury to greet a population already exhausted with war and eager to surrender.