In the Chinese heaven the stars are "ranged into constellations" and governed like an empire: an emperor at the North Pole, five monarchs in the stars of Leo, tribunals and empresses and heirs, so that "the constellations receive the names of men, animals, and other terrestrial objects". "The Great Bear, or Dipper" is the "residence of the Fates", where the length of each life is measured and meted out. The names come down from the sky, and the record keeps one story of how a particular pair of star-figures came to be.

That story is "the fable of Aquila and Vega", "known in Chinese mythology as the Herdsman and the Weaver-girl". The Weaver, daughter of the Sun-god, sat so close to her loom that her father married her off to a herdsman who kept his cattle on "the Silver Stream of Heaven (the Milky Way)"; but as a wife she forsook loom and needle for idleness, and the angry Sun-king set the two on opposite banks of the river of stars, to "meet only once a year", "on the seventh night of the seventh month". To carry the wife across, myriads of magpies flock together into "the magpie bridge" over the flood of heaven.

Only the Chinese page is wired to served text; the address also gathers Indian, Ojibwa and Amazonian witnesses to the making of the constellations, but none of those can yet be read beside this one. When a people writes its whole bureaucracy across the night sky, is it explaining the stars, or using them to explain itself?