Joan and Anne transfer their consciousness into alien Noudah bodies to visit their world and mediate between the rivaling factions of Tira and Ghahar as well as research their history. Their world is closest to the sun in a system with five planets, while Joan and Anne spy the conversation from Baneth, the moon of the gas giant in the system. Using a signal from a node in the communication network of the Amalgam, an advance alien race, sent from twenty light-years away, Joan and Anne can prove to the Noudah to be alien visitors. Together they engage in archaeological excavation to search for pottery shards of the extinct fraction of Niah and find a mathematical theorem in the form of a commutative diagram drawn as a seven-dimensional hypercube, which is then transmitted into space. Subsequently, the conflict between the Tira and Ghahar ends and they intend to work together to reach the black hole, which is visible from their world because of its accretion disk also known as glory.[3]
Reception
Reviews
Rich Horton writes on the SF Site, that the short story "opens with a spectacular hard SF coup", which is "all interesting enough, and well executed, but again it didn't quite ignite my imagination."[4]
Karen Burnham writes in Greg Egan (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) about "Riding the Crocodile", "Glory" and Incandescence, that "the real challenge is coping with the ennui of immortality" and that "his characters tend to do this by maintaining a spirit of scientific inquiry". In particular concerning "Glory", she calls it "perhaps even more emphatic" compared to Egan's novel Distress.
Burnham, Karen (2014). Greg Egan (Modern Masters of Science Fiction). Modern Masters of Science Fiction. University of Illinois Press (published 2014-04-03). ISBN978-0252038419.