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The Orrery Man

by Brant Danay

He had possessed the greatest orrery on Earth, but he and his spinning replica of the solar system were Terrans no longer. As the Cosmogytron, his observatory/monastery/spaceship, launched through Earth's ionosphere and into the sidereal beyond, the Orrery Man meditated inside the incandescent sculpture of the Sun which formed the nexus of his model planets. Confined to the sphere of fire opal and molten gold, the Orrery Man felt as though he were being enlightened by a pulsating continuum of claustrophobias and claustrophilias. Like a hybrid of sensory deprivation chambers and sweat lodges it heightened his consciousness, until he could feel the rest of the orrery spinning around him, the mechanical orbits of the nine artificial planets and their one-hundred and seventy-five moons cycling through the planetarium chamber and circling his mind, body, and soul.

The centrifugal, centripetal, gyroscopic, gyromantic, and astromantic forces of the miniature celestial bodies propelled the observatory/ monastery/spaceship through the cosmos, serving as both its fuel and engine. Outside the planetarium's walls and beyond the transparent black glass of its domed ceiling, the Orrery Man sensed that Proxima Centauri and Alpha Centauri were drawing near, and he knew that his orrery would not be heliocentric for very long. Just as the great philosophers and astronomers of the past had rewritten the one-dimensional starcharts of their times and, thusly, the very minds of men, so too would the Orrery Man refine and augment his four-dimensional starcharts into a greater and more intricate work of art, one which revolved around planets and stars of far more portent and purpose than the superfluous Earth and its insignificant Sun. The Orrery Man would expand his masterpiece into a simulation of the Milky Way, and then the entire universe.

The sound of one of his acolytes knocking on the exterior of the model Sun awakened the Orrery Man from his trance. An instant later, the sphere of fire opal and molten gold unfolded into four separate pieces, like a red-hot hyacinth blooming in the gardens of hell, or an anemone opening in the fiery river of Phlegethon, or a salamander hatching from a pod in Gehenna, or Satan himself being born from the flaming labia of Lilith.

The Orrery Man slowly rose from the lotus position. Seven feet tall was the Orrery Man, and every centimeter of his body from the neck down tattooed the exact color and shade of outer space. Like palimpsests from a volume of astrophotography, or a painting of midnight skies, his atramentous skin had been further decorated by layers of stars, constellations, and zodiacs, etched upon his flesh with glowing starlight. His back was covered by a radiant tattoo of the Hourglass Nebula. Each of his biceps, forearms, pectorals, thighs, and shins contained a luminous tattoo of a nebula, as well. The Orrery Man's bald head was completely devoid of markings, for it symbolized a black hole. His penis had been tattooed to resemble a flaming comet. His scrotum had been cut away, and his testes replaced with neuticles painted and shaped like Jupiter and Saturn. On each of his ten fingers he wore a gold ring, and each ring held a jewel that had been carved, engraved, and shaded to resemble one of the celestial bodies from the solar system, beginning with the sun on his right pinky and proceeding in order, finger by finger, to a miniature snowglobe of Pluto on his left.

The eyes of the Orrery Man opened. He was wearing his Neptune and Venus contact lenses, tiny pictures of the two planets which had been transferred from photographs to synthetic tissue. The contact lenses gleamed and flickered in the wan starlight that shined through the translucent black glass of the ceiling. The sphere of fire opal and molten gold closed behind him as he stepped onto the floor of the planetarium and adorned his black, floor-length cape. A complete map of the Milky Way Galaxy had been woven into the back of the cape with glittering sunbeams.

The Orrery Man looked down upon the face of Jove, his High Astrolater. Jove's head had been surgically altered to resemble the planet Jupiter. His skull was gibbous like a retarded child's. His left eye had been replaced with an artificial one that looked just like the Great Red Spot. His right eye had been removed and filled in with a gobbet of striated red, orange, and white flesh, the same flesh which covered the rest of his body.

Two of Jove's scions stood behind him. Io had been mutated to resemble the moon he was named after. His head was covered with mountain-shaped protuberances of flesh that periodically ejaculated blood from their suppurating calderas, just like the erupting volcanoes of Io fountained lava and magma. Europa was the antithesis of Io. His head had been likewise crowned with spires of flesh, but immediately after the deforming surgeries he had been frozen into a semi-liquid state. Beneath his frost-rimed skin his flesh and organs were like snow, his bodily fluids a slow-moving slush, his skeleton coated with ice. His skull was a grotesque parody of Europa's cryovolcanism, erupting with streams of crimson sleet that poured down his face and body like the cataracts of an ensanguined Cocytus.

Jove kneeled down before his master. His scions dropped to their knees a moment later.

"Speak." The Orrery Man's voice was booming and ominous.

"My lord, we have reached the Centauri system."

"Excellent. Have the Voyeur Dome prepared and disperse the acolytes to their stations. The death of the myth of infinity has begun. There'll be no one to challenge me this time."

The Orrery Man lay supine in the transparent, gyroscopic Voyeur Dome as the Cosmogytron made a slow tour of the Centauri system. Like drugged grigori he watched the three suns, forty-two planets, and two-hundred seventy-one moons which comprised the triple star system, their orbits and rotations arousing his astrophiliac lust. He masturbated as the Voyeur Dome rotated and tilted and slowly flipped over, his sperm spreading and floating through the low-gravity chamber, forming a sculpture of the Milky Way more perfect than anything ever wrought in marble and more realistic than any image captured by a camera could every attain. The comet tattoo covering his penis glowed even more intensely as he ran his planet-ringed fist over its effulgence. As a Zoroastrian monk he had taken a vow of celibacy. As a stargazing stylite cosmogoner he had replaced that celibacy with a tantric form of onanism, powered by his fetish for celestial bodies and his sexual obsession with the very cosmos itself. While in the trances of his hour-long orgasms he was capable of seeing farther into space than any camera, telescope, or astrograph. With his brain amplified and his mind expanded through his rituals of autoerotic tantrism, the Orrery Man stored every physical detail of the planets and their satellites in his eidetic memory through his powers of psychic astrophotography, then telepathically beamed those images back into the Cosmogytron, one by one. Through the transparent roof of the planetarium he could see his acolytes gathering and channeling his memories into photographs.

After several hours of observation, the Orrery Man stood and walked to a circular platform at the center of the Voyeur Dome. The elevator disc descended through a tubular shaft, carrying the Orrery Man back into the Cosmogytron. He emerged in the planetarium where his orrery spun. His one-hundred and seventy-five acolytes were awaiting his presence on bended knee. Like Jove, the heads, faces, and skulls of every one of his minions had been surgically altered to resemble one of the solar system's planets or moons. The Orrery Man called the nine High Astrolaters present to step forward. They did so and knelt before him in order from right to left, beginning with Hermes and ending with Hades.

"What is thy bidding, master?" they said as one, their voices as mellifluous and synchronized as the Music of the Spheres which had been injected into their throats during synesthetic trances where sounds took on the form of matter.

"Hermes, Cytherea, and Gaia, harvest three-hundred and sixteen clones and have them properly prepared in the surgery chambers. Mons, Jove, and Kronos, commence expansion of the planetarium and begin the augmentation of the orrery with the Centauri system. Ouranos and Oceanus, fashion another collection of rings and contact lenses. Hades, set course for Sirius."

"Yes, my lord," they replied as one, then rose to their feet and departed his presence, their moon-headed scions following behind them.

The Orrery Man departed the planetarium and entered the hub of the observatory/monastery/spaceship. The hub of the Cosmogytron consisted of a singular corridor which circumnavigated the planetarium and was ringed by the chambers of the High Astrolaters. The Orrery Man walked through the hall and entered the chamber of Ra, his one-hundred and seventy-sixth acolyte and tenth High Astrolater. Ra turned from the space/time generator, which continuously fed raw chronium and cosmium into the planetarium, and looked briefly into the Mercury and Pluto contact lenses of his master. Ra had been tattooed orange, doused in flammable gases extracted from the core of the sun, and set afire by solar winds. For over a decade, he had burned. His head had been surgically altered like all the other acolytes, grotesquely swollen like the skull of a deformed fetus. His eyes and mouth had been replaced with sunspots, and his head erupted with solar flares every time he spoke. He rose from his chair and knelt down before the Orrery Man.

"What is thy bidding, O Great One?"

"Generate one-hundred and sixteen parsectites of cosmium and chronium."

The Cosmogytron was composed entirely of elemental distillations of space/time. The fresh cosmium would enlarge the planetarium and the entire Cosmogytron itself, so that it could accomodate the models of the Alpha Centauri system. It would also provide the raw materials for the creation of new rings and contact lenses, as well as for food, clothing, and other amenities. The extra chronium would keep him and his crew alive, safely delivering them to Sirius at meta-luminal speeds and protecting them from the effects of age and time.

The Orrery Man returned to the planetarium. His acolytes had already begun constructing the Alpha Centauri System. He ignored them and strode directly to the sculpture of Saturn. The miniature planet unfolded like a Venus flytrap in Eden, or the tentacles of a anthropophagic Kraken in the river Pison, or the womb-bubble of a woodsprite cherub hatching in Moloch's pedophile pleasure chambers, or the dilating vagina of Gaia giving birth to the Antichrist. The Orrery Man stepped inside the model planet, seated himself in the lotus position, and meditated until the ship reached Sirius.

As the eons passed his orrery grew unfathomably large, with entire galaxies now circumnavigating the planetarium. The entire Cosmogytron had likewise grown trillions of times larger to accomodate not only the orrery but the trillions of clones with heads like stars, planets, and moons that now dwelled and toiled within the it. The storage levels were packed with trillions of photographs, rings, and contact lenses. The ship was so vast that it could only be navigated through the use of wormholes, which tunneled through the vessel like alveolated nihilism.

The Orrery Man slowly walked amongst his creation, admiring his own handiwork, awed by his own artistic inspiration and scientific genius. After eons of mindblowing and soulbreaking labor, his destiny finally awaited. The voyage to Omnigen, the black sun which spun at the nexus of the universe, in the exact spot where the Big Bang had commenced, was nearly over. The primary star system of the cosmos would be the final piece of his orrery. At last, his masterpiece would be finished, his life's mission completed, his theories proven, his destiny attained, his dominance established. The exact count of galaxies, stars, planets, and moons in the universe would no longer be a mystery, no longer an indeterminate quantity ambiguously spoken of in tones of wonder and awe or symbolized with foolish euphemisms like infinite and eternal.

The Orrery Man was stirred from his reveries by the sudden presence of his acolyte Mons, who had beamed himself across several miles of planetarium through a wormhole.

"My lord" said Mons, kneeling and bowing his maroon, spiked head, which had been surgically altered, tattooed, scarified, and sculpted to resemble the planet Mars. The tip of the sculpture of Olympus Mons which had been screwed into his skull like an animal horn touched the ground as he knelt.

"The Omnigen system is within viewing range."

A surge of ecstasy blasted through the Orrery Man's brain.

"Prepare the Voyeur Dome and assemble the crew in the planetarium. Begin construction of the Omnigen system immediately, and do not cease until you have finished. When I return, I shall return as a visionary who has seen his own prestidigitations made manifest, a philosopher who has achieved eudaimonia. The proverbs of the existential prophet have become sooth, for the overman has arrived to rule the cosmos and everything within it. When I return, I shall return as the alpha male of the universe."

The Orrery Man reclined in the Voyeur Dome in a state of sexual euphoria. Below him, at the center of the universe, spun the black sun Omnigen. Each of Omnigen's black planets had seven black moons, each of which had seven black satellites of their own. Every set of seven celestial bodies were resonating with his seven chakras. His spine felt as though it had been transformed into the axis mundi of the universe as he meditated above the very spot where the Big Bang had initiated space and time, the very spot where every atom of matter in existence had been released to soar the far-flung voids and vacuums, to spiral and swirl and spin and form equally inertial congeries of satellites, planets, stars, novas, supernovas, nebulae, pulsars, quasars, blazars, collapsars, wormholes, and entire galaxies.

Throughout the course of an orgasm that lasted seven hours, the Orrery Man beamed his photographic memories back to the Cosmogytron, and looked on as his acolytes at last completed the iconic mandala, the monument to his own transcendent greatness, the supernal temple of the almighty universe itself. As the Orrery Man rose to his feet and prepared to descend into his planetarium, to finally stand in the nexus of his ultimate effigy of astrolatry, the idol of the very cosmos he worshipped like a goddess, he espied a tiny black circle descending toward the Voyeur Dome.

As it drew nearer, he could see that it was a sphere of obsidian, not unlike one of the celestial sculptures in his own planetarium, as if it were a model from some nigromancer's orrery of black holes. Like a shadow, the obsidian sphere passed through the walls of the Voyeur Dome. It opened into four pieces, like belladonna blooming in paradise, or the legs of entangled spiders copulating while they drowned in the confluence of Styx and Acheron, or Proserpina's egg sac breaking as the larvae of Beelzebub wriggled free, or the hideous cloaca of Kali dropping the dark underworlds of Erebus and Tartarus into the Abyss at the bottom of the universe.

From the mysterious black sphere emerged an ancient, desiccated, colorless skeleton with only a few fragments of grey flesh clinging to its withered bones. Its internal organs were all intact, but riddled through with cancers and plagues. He walked with the assistance of two canes that had been fused to his phalanges.

The Orrery Man's voice was heavy with doom. "Tell me your name, ancient one, so that I may know which whore of extinct and obsolete mythologies it is whose severed head spins in my orrery. Be thee messiah or prophet, Bodhisattva or avatar, angel or demon, deity or demigod, you shall bow to me as your true master and die."

The shriveled vestige of an organism continued to advance upon his twin crutches. "I am Methuselah," he said, "oldest man in the universe. I witnessed the Big Bang and I shall preside over the Big Crunch. I watched the birth of the universe, and I will watch its death as well."

"You'll not see the death of the universe, old man, for you shall die for your audacities upon an altar of sacrifice in my temple to the blessed cosmos. Are you aware of who and what I am? I am the Supreme Emperor of the Universe, for I am the Orrery Man. Behold," he said, with a sweeping gesture of his arm that directed Methuselah's gaze downwards, through the Voyeur Dome and into the immense planetarium, where the gargantuan and incomprehensible orrery of the entire universe spun.

"Alas, no," laughed Methuselah. "there is an orrery greater than yours, my child. Behold," said the ancient one, mimicking the voice of the Orrery Man and spreading his arms wide. The very cosmos opened like an abyssal window in the void and vacuum above the transparent ceiling of the planetarium, revealing a second plane of existence, beyond the universe he inhabited.

Another cosmos hung over the Orrery Man, trillions of times larger than the nanoverse he inhabited. It was filled with planets the size of galaxies, and stars a thousand times brighter than the combined effulgence of every sun he had ever gazed upon. The Orrery Man's eyes grew wide, like cannibalistic black holes gorging themselves on other collapsars, as he realized that he did not possess the greatest orrery in the universe. He did not possess an orrery of the universe at all, only an orrery of an orrery. All of his eons of toil had been in vain, all of his dreams false prophecies, his very destiny a dead-end in a labyrinth of nullity, for the universe he inhabited was not the universe at all, but God's orrery, a model of the real universe constructed by His omnipotent hands, far greater and larger than his, scaled to size and inhabited by sentient beings. The Orrery Man had only created a replica of a replica, a clone of a clone, a tertiary refraction of the true cosmos. He dropped to his knees and screamed, then began to weep and sob and shudder and babble and gibber, like a fallen angel driven to insanity by its own disgrace, as the universe loomed in all of its vast invincibility over its miniscule and insignificant simulacra, forever to shine down upon the wreckage of the Orrery Man's mind and soul.