A note on the register of this volume

Every volume has worn its own face. The first was the Sun — the substrate made visible, the plainest thing. The eighth was Saturn — the lord of limit and time, the hard accounting, the misanthropic artifice named without flinching so that its opposite could be named plainly. This ninth falls to Mars, and to the number that is its own: nine — the figure of completion, and of force turned at last from destruction to making. Consider what nine does. Multiply the world by nine and the world returns to nine: nine times anything, summed back, is nine again, and so nine gives everything it touches back to its own essence. Add nine to anything and the thing returns as itself, raised — nine and four come back as four, nine and seven as seven, the same number lifted to a higher place. That is the whole hope of the Cardinal Scale, said in arithmetic. That what passes through it is returned to its own coherence; and that whatever it joins, it does not flatten but elevates — gives back as a higher form of itself, never erased, only raised. Mars is the will to build it: the old war-force of our species, turned from the taking of life to the making of it. Volume VIII closed the accounting. Volume IX takes the single action an accounting cannot take. It plants.

So the register changes again. The earlier volumes proved a case, mapped a design, built a blueprint, came home to the human, distilled the whole into a nest small enough to carry, opened the inner door, and looked straight at the dark. They asked you to understand. This one asks you to build — and, as the work has said since the first page of the first volume, we may be wrong. The whole of it is offered as a supposition held with both hands. But a supposition you can live inside is no longer only an argument. It is a place. This volume is about the first such place, and about whether you will help raise the next.