He asked, “What is The Brightly Shining?” He made the words a curse in his mouth.
“Knowing will make you mad. You want to know?”
“Yes.” He made a curse out of that simple, sibilant syllable.
The lights were dimming. Or was it his eyes? The room was becoming dimmer, and at the same time receding. It was becoming a tiny cube of dim light, seen from afar and outside, from somewhere in the distant dark, ever receding, turning into a pinpoint of light, and within that point of light ever the hated. Thing, the man—or was it a man?—standing beside the desk.
Into darkness, into space, up and apart from the earth—a dim sphere in the night, a receding sphere outlined against the spangled blackness of eternal space, occulting the stars, a disk of black.
It stopped receding, and time stopped. It was as though the clock of the universe stood still. Beside him, out of the void, spoke the voice of the instrument of The Shining One.
“Behold,” it said. “The Being of Earth.”
He beheld. Not as though an outward change was occurring, but an inward one, as though his senses were being changed to enable him to perceive something hitherto unseeable.
The ball that was Earth began to glow. Brightly to shine.
“You see the intelligence that rules Earth,” said the voice. “The sum of the black and the white and the red, that are one, divided only as the lobes of a brain are divided, the trinity that is one.”