Moose

Every Golden Scale, empress of the solar system, stands at the edge of the tallest of the Ninety-One Peaks of her Ametrine Palace, surveying the planet she has claimed as capitol from a vantage point fifteen miles above sea level. she looks down at the glittering flanks of the Grand Pyramid to where they disappear into the western ocean, then south to the Lesser Pyramid, only half the height and capped with her House of Emerald Delights, the vast pleasure-arcology of intergrown gardens, arcades, bars and theatres. between the Grand and Lesser Pyramids, and clustered around their bases like students at the feet of sages, the other Eighty-One Peaks, housing the civil and military administrative offices of her vast bureaucracy, libraries, galleries, temples to her glories and conquests, ports for spaceships and aircars, gardens, vaults of gold and silver..... to the east, as the sun sets, the Ametrine Palace casts its own immense rain shadow into darkness, endless suburban sprawl crusted over the hardpan and itself half-swallowed by sand and incensebrush. like great serpents or the roots of the world-tree, mile-wide clusters of pipe bring water from the far edge of the planet to water the Palace and the vineyards and groves of olive and almond and date palm that cover its lower slopes and immediate surroundings