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.

A digression on the long, distinguished, and largely inconclusive history of theological criticism across the galaxy—because before Oolon Colluphid set out to reinvent the wheel, it helps to understand how many wheels have already been reinvented, and in how many cases they were on fire at the time.

Colluphid is assigned a research assistant—sullen, spectacularly uninterested in theology, and possessed of exactly the lateral thinking that makes him either the worst research assistant in the galaxy or the most necessary one.

Oolon Colluphid, newly tenured and aggressively certain, attends a Conditions Ceremony on Brontitall—and discovers that three hundred beings sincerely mourning a god they know is gone are considerably harder to argue with than he expected.