Status Updates From Count to Infinity (Count to...

The final duel having ended in tragedy, Pastor Reyes prepares to bury the remains, and is told that it is not necessary, that time and death are no more. Appendices dealing with history after the timeline given in The Judge of Ages. The Petty Sweep, the founding of the Tables of Stability.

The duel, so long postponed, ends in a way that echoes the Cold War strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction. You fight, and Everybody Loses. Now Pastor Reyes is left brokenhearted to somehow pick up the pieces.

Once again Mr. Wright's taste for the operatic manifests itself, this time in the various superclusters' intelligences appearing as allegorical figures of extraordinary elaborateness.

The trial concludes. The Maiden decides to give Montrose, Ximen, and Rania the ultimate "I'm gonna kick you all the way to next Tuesday" -- they're sent forward to the end of time. Montrose awakens in what appears to be his old lair in the Crystal Palace of Cheyenne Mountain -- but the date readout on his coldsleep coffin reads "Eschaton." IOW, the End of All Things.

Montrose and Raina pilgrimage to Virgo for an audience with its Cherub, the Maiden. Passage through a region torn by war, the adoption of orphan motile planets that come to beg. And now they are at last in Virgo, and Montrose has been punished for telling off the Maiden in defense of his beloved Raina. Permanent erasure of the memory of his harsh words. They are on trial for lese majeste and insurrection.

Horrific vision of the destruction of the Local Group. Blackie used the Eschaton Engine as a weapon, determined to destroy any copy of Montrose that might be there. Montrose wants to kill him, both as justice for mass murder beyond imagination, and to protect the rest of the universe from this man's obsessive hatred. Rania believes she can reform him.

Sorting out Le Gentil, and tracing the transmission paths of the egocasts of Del Azarchel and Rania. Realizes that Blackie's been had. Montrose locates Rania's hiding place and creates a nuptial bower for their long-delayed wedding night. Shades of Adam and Eve in her re-bodying. Will it be the long-awaited moment -- there's still a lot of book left here.

The arrangements have been made for the marriage of Milky Way and Andromeda as equal spouses. Montrose is egocast to Le Gentil, a satellite galaxy of the new bi-galactic system, where he surprises the local security systems by taking over and fixing everything he can get to. In return, he just wants help finding Rania.

Andromeda reveals her reasons for the war -- and her reasons for capitulation. She's hoping to alter Milky Way's fundamental political and informational structure into a more centralized system, simply through what is necessary to assimilate the spoils. And she believes that it is necessary to operate an ancient devising that will save a portion of the universe by destroying the rest.

A sequence that reminds me of the part of EE Doc Smith's Spacehounds of IPC after they crash on Ganymede. Montrose single-handedly rebuilds technology from stone knives right up. Only in this case it was a test, to see if it was worthwhile for the Andromeda Mind to speak with him. Now to find out why Andromeda lost the War in Heaven.

The defeat of Andromeda, and the effort to reconstruct its Throne enough to understand how victory had been achieved by a loose Collaboration over a unified, centrally controlled Mindfulness. And the resurrection of Montrose and transmitting him there as an emissary.

Montrose takes over as Authority, with the responsibility of getting the Orion Arm ready for the terrible war with the centralized Throne of the Andromeda Galaxy. The next section is a historical overview of the battles, with whole star clusters and black holes used as weapons.

We learn the False Rania was a terrible mistake on the part of M3. They thought they'd detected an error and removed it, but in fact it was something they didn't recognize or understand, which was essential to her being. And that much of what we thought to be natural in distant clusters was in fact technology -- echoes of Lovecraft's words about the placid island of ignorance.

The history of cliometry, and then the nature of truth at its deepest levels, loving good and hating evil. Pragmatism vs idealism. A Final Calculation, a working greater than any extant mind can comprehend, that requires turning whole galaxies into computronium.

Montrose finally fights his way up to a position at which the Absolute Extension, the governing Authority of M3, actually takes notice of him. Vast cultural gap based upon biology, particularly ambush vs. persistence hunting. Meaning of basic terms such as courtesy being different.

The civilizations Montrose created to repair his spaceship justify their actions, explaining how his mind was taken over by the Lithotrope (a living-rock entity, to judge by the name). He heads off to M3 -- and then things don't go as expected. He's disembodied and treated as a captive, a slave -- but he's a stubborn cuss and fights his way upward to recover his memories and gain agency.

Finishing the history lesson, with another riff on Brin's Uplift Universe, and then Montrose awakens, once again embodied and without the alien mind emmeshed with his own. Now to find out what the Sam Hill is going on here.

Montrose is getting some kind of direct-to-mind info feed, back to the earliest beginning of the universe. The Ice Giants -- is the author drawing on Norse mythology? It really feels like a "this is the actual history behind the myths the Norse told." OTOH, his chronologies at the beginning of the book clearly treat the Christ as a historical person and the Gospels as historical accounts.

If the end of the last volume echoed Good Friday, the beginning of this one does evoke Easter. The explosion of a mega-giant star -- but in a 'verse of sapient celestial bodies, is it happenstance or deliberate self-sacrifice, to empower Montrose to complete his journey? Echoes of CS Lewis and of Madeleine L'Engle.