I could imagine them forging their way in TR through the blackness of the exterior galaxies—I saw them, frenzied and jubilant recreational predators without a care in the world. The streets and alleyways of the great City of the Universe led them directly to their objective, and they were so eager to get there that they never stopped to admire beautiful novas or iridescent clouds of atoms. This deficiency was not unique to them: the contemplative spirit was extinct. How different from my era, when we learned cosmology via origami, our small hands folding pieces of paper until we’d constructed an exhedron, which we then proudly showed our parents when we got home from school. And what a triumph for our bedroom decor! We gazed in wonder at its surfaces, all exterior, where we’d painted dancing mice and frog violinists in bright colors. Astral mysteries smiled upon us . . . mysteriously.

And before all that, a long time before, in a past so remote that it had become legendary, at the beginning of the conquest of exterior space-time, yes, even before the exhedron had been assembled, humanity, eager for mystery, went in search of the Great Rose at the bottom of the inverted cone of the dimensions. Those were the centuries of poetry . . . Ah, to think that the dew of the Great Rose is now used as brake fluid. Nobody’s interested in dawns anymore. Perhaps I’m wrong to lament the prosaic tenor of my children’s tonic. After all, they are a product of poetry, so to then demand poetry from them could lead to overload.

Years ago, when the game was first invented, only millionaires played it, not only because of the sophisticated equipment required, but also because of the fees for “hunting licenses.” But things evolved very quickly. For one, the devices could be produced so cheaply that the cost became insignificant; for another, before they’d even levied the fees, it had become clear that the number of inhabited and civilized worlds was so enormous that opening them up to the hedonic “exploitation” of the general public wouldn’t even make a dent in the supply.