Colluphid goes on the galaxy's most-watched talk show to defend his book and his motives, and meets a Neo-Presencist priest who is not interested in his arguments.

Colluphid returns from Still Here writing harder and faster than ever—and Divna, reading him clearly, asks the one question he has been working very hard not to answer.

A short chapter, told in a voice unlike anything else in this book, about making a room—and a window—and what happens to the light.

Colluphid travels to the oldest inhabited world in the known galaxy to interview the Remnant—beings who remember the previous universe—and discovers that the question he has been asking is the wrong one.

Colluphid delivers the galaxy's most anticipated lecture on the impossibility of a benevolent God—and then has dinner with Divna Allay, who has a word for what he's been doing.

On a world too beautiful to be accidental and too quiet to argue with, Hurkel meets a gardener who believes in God the way she believes in weather—not as a proposition to defend, but as a condition of existence.

Colluphid and Hurkel arrive on Oglaroon, a world that has organized its entire civilization around divine accountability—which should make them natural allies, and would, if the Oglaroonians weren't quite so committed.

A memo from the Theological Regulatory Authority arrives on Colluphid's desk, followed by forty-seven pages of forms requiring his immediate attention—and the discovery that previous theological critics have been "administratively reassigned."

In which Colluphid catalogs the universe's design failures with scholarly precision, Hurkel plays devil's advocate in the worst possible way, and someone—or something—writes two words in the margin of his research notes.

Colluphid travels to the Cathedral of the Conditions to meet his academic liaison—and discovers that "liaison" is the ecclesiastical word for someone assigned to make sure you understand exactly what you don't know.