1. Visions of Stars and Clouds
Compared to the distance separating Earth from Jupiter, the interval of airless void severing Earth from moon was small indeed. But the pinnace boat was not a great sailing vessel, and carried limited fuel. The voyage took weeks.
Aboard were Amphithöe, Del Azarchel, and Montrose, each in a hibernation coffin. Del Azarchel and Montrose, as before, slightly thawed their neural tissue, and remained mentally active, as if disembodied.
The boat’s telescopes studied an artifact found at L5, a stable orbital point directly between Earth and moon. The Swans had built, or perhaps grown, a cluster of space stations that looked like jellyfish or crystal wheels, and smaller vessels like origami foil or slivers of bright steel hung in a cloud around them, tethered or docked. The stations were dark, emitting neither heat nor energy, the remnant of some long-past space program or war effort.
After that, Montrose from his coffin noticed the telescopes drawing power, turning outward. Del Azarchel was surreptitiously studying the black skies again. Montrose used the same trick he had used before—he was confident Del Azarchel had not detected his little mole in the data feed—surreptitiously to see what Del Azarchel was looking at.
This time it was not exosolar planets.
Del Azarchel directed instruments and onboard analysis resources toward PSR B2224+65 in the direction of Cygnus the Swan. This was a pulsar, a pulsating neutron star, six miles in diameter and yet with a mass greater than the sun, plunging through the heavens like a blind fallen angel, X-ray jets radiating from the dark body like torn wings of invisible fire. What cosmic disaster had accelerated two octillion tons of matter from a standstill to over 620 miles per second, about one-half of one percent of the speed of light?
Slower, but more menacing, was Gliese 710 in the constellation Serpens Cauda, the Tail of the Serpent with whom Ophiuchus wrestled. This small K-type star was sixty-three lightyears from Sol and closing. It was destined to collide with the Solar System in one and a half million years.
Del Azarchel turned the telescopes again. The images were from black and blank interstellar space.
Except the space was not empty. The interstellar medium was much thicker than early, earthbound astronomy had predicted. Frozen gas giants like hulks of hydrogen by the hundreds, smaller solid worlds by the thousands, icebergs and mountains by the myriads, all thronged the alleged emptiness of space but, issuing no light, had been undetectable by the ancients.
Montrose felt a pang of fear for his wife. How could any ship survive such hidden reefs and rocks? Rocks? No. At the relative speeds these bodies moved, call it a shooting gallery, a no-man’s-land of shells and bombs, or some roaring Norse pit of chaos older and deeper than Hell.
Gas and dust were everywhere, in streamers and clouds, held away from each star by its tiny bubble of solar wind.
The Local Interstellar Cloud was thirty lightyears wide and included the dim and nearby spark of Promixa, Altair spinning like a mad ballerina, blazing Vega, cyclopean Arcturus, and bright Fomalhaut ringed with its countless planetoids. The cloud was flowing ever outward from a star-forming region called the Scorpius-Centaurus Association, which in turn was merely an arm of a larger and older complex of star-forming molecular clouds, like a massed flotilla of thunderheads.
Montrose could not shake from his imagination the odd fancy that he was spying the red-lit smolder and fume of smokestacks from the furnaces of great, blind, slow and antique titans, creating stars on their forges like weapons of fire, and shining planets like jewels.
When its evolution across the eons was seen at once, the Local Interstellar Cloud waxed and waned like a campfire flickering, or like a vast, dark beast breathing. The Local Cloud eerily ate into the larger, finer neighboring G-cloud complex, which was centered around Alpha Centauri, almost as if struggling with blind and smoky limbs to consume it.
Suppose the Local Interstellar Cloud were indeed a living thing? Could it even notice the existence of Earth’s sun, any more than a man could notice a mitochondria? Or notice Earth any more than a man notices an atom of carbon floating in the fluid of his eye?
Montrose drove the nightmarish sensations crawling through his brain away with an effort of will. A simpler question was at hand. He wondered what Del Azarchel sought among these strange astronomical splendors.
A few weeks later, nearing the moon, the pinnace passed not far from a rotovator. This was a shining length of ultra-tensile cable, miles long, used to add kinetic energy to vessels seeking higher orbit, or to subtract from those descending. It was old, unlit, unrotating, empty of ships.
Their flight path required them to orbit the moon and shed speed. As they made the final approach, the antique rotovator sank in the distance in the east, fell behind the bright limb of the moon’s rim, and was gone.
2. Tycho Crater
His still-active nervous system connected to instruments in the hull, Montrose studied the orb below.
Gone was the tide-locked moon of his youth, black and silver as a lapwing. Now it was black and yellow as a goldfinch, and the seas were peacock-hued like stained glass, and each hour new hills and maria came over the horizon into view. Eventually their destination passed beneath.
Tycho had once been the youngest large crater on the moon, less than one hundred eight million years old, with walls tall and sharp. To each side smaller craters gaped, created by ejecta from the Tycho impact: Sasserides and Pictet, Street and Longomontanus. Shadowy impressions remained of those once-vast craters now that a new crater, almost a sea, had been formed directly on the same spot as Tycho, and the new layer of lava and ejecta had bathed them. Tycho was therefore once again the youngest crater on the moon.
Once there had been, radiating out in each direction, an immense system of rays partly reaching around the great curve of the moon formed by streams of tektites, countless pebbles bright as snow, each with its distinctive shape, tear-drop or sinuous or globular, depending on how far from the crater it fell.
Most of those rays long ago had vanished, not just because so many tektites had been carried back to Earth during the Second Age of Space as fortune-telling charms, but because Del Azarchel had blacked out vast swathes of the surface to draw his hand there; and, ages later, the seas and dark areas of surface had been coated with self-replicating logic diamond tawny as the skin of a lioness; and, later still, the lunar face of living gold was first shattered and then inscribed by the weapons of the Asmodel of Hyades with notations: circles with ovals, triangles within triangles, endless nested sinewaves like the patterns left by a receding sea in the sand. The vast inscription covered about an eighth of the hemisphere.
In all this rocky tumult, most but not all of those startling rays issuing from Tycho were gone forever. Someone had taken the time to reconstruct four rays of shining white gravel, glacier-bright, reaching miles across the moonscape. They were precisely perpendicular, and one arm was twice the length of the other three. The resulting figure embraced nigh half the globe. These new rays were younger than the Monument inscription, for the tektite streams lay atop them.
Midmost in the circular sea of Tycho was a central peak, formed by the splash of the momentarily molten rock during the impact, rising a mile above the black plain.
That central peak had been burrowed, cut, and carved by machines smaller than grasshoppers into a cathedral based on the eccentricities of Gothic design.
The boat was directed to splash down in a crater that had been filled with a fine dust, whose particles had been milled to frictionless smoothness. Under the moon’s low gravity, this substance cushioned their landing like water, and long arms of particles rose up at the impact, forming no clouds, but falling straight down again, albeit with elfin slowness. A tinkling like rainfall was audible, despite the airlessness, as particles of dust rebounded from the hull.
“Home again, to my world of exile,” Del Azarchel sent from his coffin to Montrose’s. “A dead globe with a black sky! How I despise this place.”
Montrose sent back, “This is my first time—that I remember—I’ve landed on an extraterrestrial body. For me, this is a damn historic moment!” He checked a monitor to see how his coffin was oriented in relation to the surface, now that the boat was no longer in zero gee, whether he was prone or supine. He was facedown. “I landed face-first! That is one small face-flop for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Del Azarchel (who, over the eons, had heard every single servant of his, posthuman or subhuman, make some variation of that joke upon moonlanding) impatiently began the process of thawing his body, eyes first, so that he could roll them in disdain.
When their ears thawed, among the hums and ringing of their ear hairs coming back to life, they heard a voice like many thunders, transmitted by conduction through the bedrock and surface-dust and hull, uttering words in Latin. There was no noise of breath behind the voice, but instead a silvery and pure sound, beautiful but cold as mountain snow.
The moon was speaking to them.
3. Tycho Basilica
The voice told them to leave their boat where it lay, and to leave Amphithöe in hibernation, but to approach on foot. There was no way to reply, since the message was sent by conduction through the rocky surface of the moon through the hull.
Soon Montrose and Del Azarchel, dressed in their traditional black-and-silver space garb of the Hermetic Order, were bouncing with silent, elfin footfalls across the cracked black lava plain of Tycho. A cloud of dust rose up at each step. Because it formed no plumes, to their earthly eyes the substance as it fell looked not like dust, but like water of unearthly cinereal hue. Each dust mote fell in a geometrically straight line or nicely parabolic curve, if slowly, to the surface, not spreading and not floating.
The lines of the Monument writing crisscrossed their path, swirl upon spiral, and, like the mysterious lines once inscribed by ancient peoples on the high arid plateau in Nazca, indecipherable at eye level.
Both men had much leisure to examine, first at a distance, and then close at hand, the features of a basilica larger than a city, its flying buttresses and rose windows, its bronze panels carved in relief with pageants of prophets, pagans, pharaohs, and lawgivers, and the tier upon tier of saints and apostles both sculpted across the mountain face and atop narrow columns high above. These faces stared across the dead landscape of the moon with empty eyes of stone. Many lamps burned with unwinking strength inside the twelve-thousand-foot-high edifice. Rays from the many widows paved the crater floor in triangular swathes of light, colored shadows of lilies and crosses painted cerise, argent, sable, fulvous, and purple.
The airlock at the base of the mountain, which opened for them, was adorned with figures from some Bible story Montrose did not recognize: a mother floating in the clouds, a crowned child in her arms, handing a brown garment to a kneeling monk.
Once inside, pressure returned, and with it, sound and, once they doffed their hoods and masks, scent and the tiny sensations of ventilation on the skin. Montrose rubbed his face with both hands, especially his nose, as he found his skin itching whenever he left vacuum. Del Azarchel no doubt felt the same skin discomfort as all astronauts repressurizing, but refused to wince or scratch. Instead he solemnly drew the Iron Crown of Lombardy from some padded case hidden under his half cape, and fitted it to his brows.
Next to the inner airlock was a lump of ice in a metal cup affixed to the wall. A loud pop of laser energy melted the ice. Del Azarchel touched the water with his finger, and touched his brow, navel, left shoulder and right, and raised an eyebrow toward Montrose, who did not copy, or even understand, the gesture. Montrose bent over the tiny cup of water and sniffed it carefully, but did not detect any medicinal smell. He could not imagine what it was for. Del Azarchel sighed in contempt, and was the first man through the inner airlock.
Within was a red carpet flanked by a double row of black pillars, each with a capital of gold. In niches between each pillar was a statue larger than life of some figure from myth, legend, or history. Their garments and gear were painted realistically: a friar in brown robes with rope belt, or a prophet in camel-hair coat, a soldier in a coat of mail, or a king in a crown of gold. Apostles carried, each one in his hands, the fashion of his death: a saltire, a fuller’s rod, an axe, a cross reversed, a halberd, a saw. Montrose stared at one Apostle carrying a flaying knife and folds of human skin, complete with boneless face skin drooping like a doffed mask, and wondered who it was.
The ceilings were of lunar proportion, very high, with tall arches lost in upper shadows, and the men did not bark their heads as they skipped on long parabolic arcs along the red carpet.
Montrose said, “Okay, Blackie, what can the moon ask of us she could not have deduced for herself, or ask by the radio? The posthuman Swan aboard the Hysterical Blindness, he had an intelligence measuring around a thousand. The superposthuman hydrosphere of Earth, back when it contained your Exarchel, was two thousand, and this postsuperposthuman is ten thousand.… And pus-runny scabs! Am I sick of using that terminology!”
“Rania’s terminology of the comparison scales she read from the Monument is more apt,” said Del Azarchel with a note of melancholy in his voice. “Organization on a picotechnological level of gas-giant-sized masses, such as Asmodel, Rania called Virtues. The Jupiter Brain, which is organized only to the atomic level, she called a Power. The Earth core is a Potentate. Luna is an Archangel. When I was Exarchel and covered all the surface of the globe, I was as brilliant as an Angel. I was as bright as the Son of the Morning.” He sighed.
Montrose realized that Del Azarchel was not sighing over his lost high intelligence, but over the mere mention of Rania’s name. A stab of hatred lanced him.
“Calling a computer an angel?” His voice was hoarse. “My ma would have denounced such talk as blasphemery.”
“No doubt,” said Del Azarchel with a lazy purr in his voice. “Yet the true blasphemy is the appalling magnitudes of difference involved. All words ever spoken by mortal men could be recorded in five exabytes. The mind at this globe’s core below our feet contains twenty times that amount. A single well-formulated and nontrivial thought of hers is ten terabytes of data: the equal to the print collection of the World Concordat Library at Zaragoza, where I had my throne and capital before your partisans burned it and drove me to Prussia in A.D. 2409.”
Montrose said, “You ain’t still peeved about that, is you? I can’t even remember which world war that was. Maybe I was a-slumbering at the time. Gird up your saggy loins and snap the hell out of it.”
“Since you had your Giants burn the entire world, no, the burning of one irreplaceable library of hard-won human knowledge palls by comparison.”
“Well, as I figure it, you wiped out seven worldwide civilizations to my one, so you’re ahead by six, counting as who should be stuck deeper into the boiling black ooze beneath the floor of hell. That’s what we is measuring, ain’t it? Which of us gets stuck further down the sewer pipe beneath the Devil’s red-hot poop hole?”
Del Azarchel said, “We are discussing our present hostess, whose motives, I confess, I have not yet divined. Yet there is no mystery to why this magnificence rears here a mountain adorned within and without with breathtaking beauty. Does it not serve the glory of her order as well as of God?”
“You don’t believe in that snake oil? A preacher man lives off gullible widows ’cause he don’t like honest work.”
“Was your mother gullible, my dear Montrose? You spoke of her often when you were insane.”
“Leave my mother the hell out of this, Blackie.”
“Very well. I shall speak of my sainted mother, long-suffering, of whom it delights me to speak. Had my accursed father attended to the duties imposed by the Holy Church, he could not have divorced and abandoned my mother to die in a ditch,” said Del Azarchel gravely. “So I will never call the Church a merely mortal institution. Her laws are wiser than what men design.”
Montrose and he were at that moment at the end of a long arc. Each man touched the carpet with a boot toe, and pushed himself into the air. Since their heads were at the same level (which is rare when men walk together on the moon) Montrose could stare him in the eye. “You talk like a Bible-thumbing sobber, but you don’t really believe a word of it, do you?”
Del Azarchel said, “The matter is moot, since I plan never to die nor to let the universe die, and therefore, God willing, I will never come to the Judgment Seat of God.” Del Azarchel took up some small metal medal he had on a necklace, and, despite that it must surely still be subzero temperature from exposure to the lunar surface environment, he kissed it. “You yourself talk nothing like the faithful and yet your faith is as deep. Is it not?”
“Not hardly.” Montrose snorted. “All the church-talk is pie in the garden yesterday and pie beyond the pearly gates come tomorrow, and never pie today when the children is hungry.” He pointed at the ornaments and gilded statues lining the corridor down which they half flew. “You think if Jesus made the emission nebula complex in Sagittarius and wove the strands of DNA on every critter and crawly and bug and bird in the world as neatly as a symphony of molecules, His Almighty Pop would be impressed by our paint and glitter and glass windows, to say nothing of the lies and murdering done in His name?”
“The Supreme Being might be impressed not with the worst of men, but with the best!”
“Meaning you, I take it?”
“I intend not to be unworthy of nature, but to command her, and to reshape this whole cosmos to reflect my glory. Will not God Himself be awestruck? I intend no lesser thing than to pluck His scepter from His hand! I do not worship the craven God, unwilling to wrestle man, or one who seeks knee-tribute of cowardly and obedient serfs, or such a God as wrinkled and gray old women revere.”
“Well, lower your voice,” said Menelaus crossly. “Because one of those old women happens to be this wrinkled and gray old moon we are standing on. But I’ll concede to you this one contest this one time. I think your jabbering about overthrowing God wins you the bigger prize and the lower place in Hell.”
Before them the corridor ended in panels colored in jeweled enamel showing images from some parable: On the right were two youths with similar features, presumably brothers, one in black and the other in red, facing a bearded patriarch whose hand was raised in the old astronaut’s hand sign showing that he was giving them a command. The brother in black held his fist in the sign for affirmative whereas the brother in red had his first two fingers touching his thumb in the sign for negative.
On the left, the panel showed the brother in red, hoe in hand, head bent beneath a sun of many rays, thorns about his feet and grapevines overhead. The brother in black, a cup in one hand and a dice box in the other, lolled on the lap of a redhaired woman who poured him wine.
A motto picked out in gold letters said in Latin: SAY THE BLACK, DO THE RED.
Above these panels was a relief image of a woman in a crown of twelve stars, one bare and slender foot on the crescent moon.
Montrose studied the face closely. She looked like Rania.
Beneath her, the panels displaying the brother in black and red were suddenly divided by a vertical line, a line which silently and slowly widened. The two panels were the two leaves of a door tall enough for a man making moonleaps to pass through without barking his head. The double door swung open to reveal a dark void.
4. A Chamber of Darkness
Beyond was a vast circular floor, wide as a ballroom floor or wider. In the far distance, at the other side of the chamber, as if across a sea of night, burned two flickering candles in tubes of red glass.
Toward those lights the two men walked the drifting and elfin walk of the moon, boots lightly brushing the floor only once a fathom or so, and the echoes of their infrequent footfalls were both vanguard and rearguard.
The candles were set on shoulder-high candlesticks of gold. The flames were rounder and more bluish along the bottom than flames burned on Earth, due to the lesser gravity not pulling the cool air down around the hot smoke swiftly enough to make a teardrop-shaped flame.
Between the golden candlesticks was a waist-high eight-sided post of brown and speckled marble. In its concave surface rested a golden bowl, partly filled with water. Montrose touched the rim of the bowl, which hummed like a shy bell for a moment, and in the candlelight, ripples slower and taller than earthly ripples walked in concentric circles toward and away from the center of the bowl.
As if that were a signal, the candles grew brighter, and the shadows drew back. To one side of the basin, in a niche in the wall, robes and goatee carven in black marble with hands and face of alabaster white, was a crowned figure garbed as an Hermeticist holding a naked sword in his right hand and an orb topped with a cross in his left. In a niche in the wall to the other side, carven in red but also with alabaster face, wearing the long wig of a judge, a figure was holding in one pale hand a golden balance scale. Atop the wig was the square black cap traditionally worn when passing a sentence of death. In his other hand the red-robed figure held a long-barreled pistol of white ceramic.
The black figure was handsome as the Devil; the red figure was hook-nosed and lantern-jawed, gangly and ugly as a gargoyle.
“Beginning to think the universe was made to make fun of me,” sighed Montrose.
“It’s a flattering likeness,” said Del Azarchel sardonically. “In reality, you are quite a bit less appealing. The stone cannot display the oddness of how infrequently you blink, or the way you crick your neck to make your Adam’s apple protrude.”
“I am assuming the moon can hear us, and has sent machines smaller than dust motes up our nose by now, which are taking photos of our lower intestines, poking through what we had for lunch. So why ain’t she talking?”
“She waits for us to speak first.”
“Got it.” He cleared his throat and cupped his hands around his mouth as a trumpet. “YOOHOO! MISSUS MOON! HOWDEE-DO! GUNNA TALK, AINTCHA? START JAWING!”
Del Azarchel favored him with a cold stare.
“What?” said Montrose, shrugging and spreading his arms.
“You simply try to be a boorish clod, don’t you?” drawled Del Azarchel.
“Twenty-mule-team-loads of fun.”
“Do you recall when you were insane—more insane—during the Expedition, and I was cleaning up your zero-gee excretion clouds? How much of that was the real you? You wear the same moronic grin.”
“I figure it’s all me, brain damage or brain augmentation,” said Montrose. “And, hot horny-toad in deep-fried damnation, but I surely like being me! Like it a lot! O’ course, I’ve never been a swaggering scared tyrant with the blood of innocent millions on my hands and a firepoker up my rectum. So I ain’t got much basis of comparison.”
Del Azarchel turned from him, raised his head, and spread his arms as if addressing a large assembly (which, of course, he had done many times in his life). His voice rang out like a trumpet of gold, pitched precisely to fill the chamber, syllables timed so that echoes would not obscure his words:
“Most great and noble, elevated and esteemed Mother Selene of the Order of the Discalced Friars of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, by your kind leave, the Judge of Ages, the highly evolved Menelaus Montrose, and our royal self, Nobilissimus and Senior Officer of the Hermetic Order of the Irenic Ecumenical Conclave of Man give you greetings and salutations and express our humble thanks for having been invited into your gracious hospitality. If you would see fit to address us, our gratitude would be magnanimous!”
Only silence answered.
“Wow,” said Montrose in a flat and nasal voice. “That were so much better than my saying yoo-hoo. Ninety words to my nine, so that’s one order of magnitude less efficient, but yet somehow-r-’nother you got the same result, most exactly.”
“Nine? You surely are not counting ain’t you as one word?”
“Aintit?”
Del Azarchel lowered his arms. “She knows we are here. I do not detect any other doors, or any way to go further into the mountain, even though there is an extensive community living here. Have you any ideas more penetrating, mayhap? You boast you are so much smarter than I. Elicit speech from her.”
Montrose shrugged. “I could yodel yoo-hoo again.”
“Perhaps there is something she wishes us to do.”
“We could take off our shoes.”
“What? Why?”
Montrose shrugged again. “It was good enough for Moses talking to a smoldering shrubbery. Anyhow, you would think superintelligent beings would not stand on ceremony.”
“I am not sure about that,” said Del Azarchel slowly, thoughtfully. “Maybe it is the opposite. Maybe the higher a being is, the less he speaks literally.”
“Why? Something wrong with plain talk?”
“It is inefficient. Consider: language in its first stages of evolution is entirely metaphorical. Music is the most ambiguous but also the most moving form of communication. Even precise and scientific language is merely a less ambiguous, more colorless and less moving metaphoric speech than a layman’s. To a higher mind, even the ambiguity might be something used properly to communicate, not merely to the reason, but to the whole person. The reason why we see no obvious signs of the Hyades governing Earth is because of that very efficiency. Their ambiguity is deliberate, and to the enlightened mind, speaks volumes. They need no open signs of power.”
“Or their notion of efficiency means they retreated after we put up a fight.”
“You are an insane man. The Earth was prostrate! So said the Swan.”
“And there might be Fourth Comprehension above what he is cleared to know. He said someone is occupying the old memory space that Pellucid used to fill. Something so smart as to make even Sister Lunatic here look like an idiot.…” And in a slightly louder voice, Montrose called, “Ah! No offense meant there, Sister.…” and then to Del Azarchel he continued, “… And that revived version of the Tellus Mind might know what was done to repel the aliens. And Mother Selene might know. If we can get her to talk. Maybe there is a microphone switch we are supposed to twitch?”
Del Azarchel shook his head. “Space is too vast to engage in trade or commerce between beings of such unequal power. Conquest is wiser.”
“And leaving us the hell alone is wiser yet. You know how much energy is needed to accelerate Uranus to even point zero one eight percent of the speed of light. The Hyades just did something our civilization could not afford. We’re too poor and mean on the cosmic scale of things. So what did they get out of this?”
“I know the benefit to us. Earth-like worlds we lacked the will and resources to claim as our own will be ours once the deracination ships arrive. For the first time, a single disaster against the Earth would not and could not exterminate the race.”
Montrose said, “You look mighty sour about it.”
Del Azarchel scowled and turned away. “This is not as I had imagined.”
“So what are these statues for? They’re ceremonial, too, I take it. Put up as a message to us? Was this whole room meant to be a message? A welcome message? According to you, Selene thought this was an easier way to convey a simpler message than to speak aloud in English. It must be some puke powerful memorandum to be worth all this time we could have already spent talking!”
“These statues of us—you and I are like dogs who, having seen a human baby weaker than us grow up to control the world in ways we cannot comprehend, are baffled to see that child now grown carrying pictures of us, her favorite hounds,” said Del Azarchel.
Montrose said, “Meaning you don’t know either. Is it a footrace, then? A wager? You and I going to see who figures out this puzzle first, and brag until the end of time? Or do you want to solve it together?”
Del Azarchel did not answer, but instead stepped to the statue of himself, touched it with his hand, stared at it for a moment, his eye taking on that momentary look of vital and magnetic energy that accompanied an increase of the firing rate to the optic nerve. He turned his head, and then his body, in a slow circle. “Nothing. A round room. Or perhaps slightly oval. Two images of us. Two votive candles. Whether this means we should be prayed to or should be praying, I cannot say.”
“What is the water for? To drink? Wash our hands?”
“Wash your sins, you idiot. It is a baptistery.”
“Well, idiot I may be, but an idiot savant. The room is slightly oval. It is the same size and shape as the opening statement of the Monument. Look at the ratio of eccentricity to the circumference. There is probably Monument writing underfoot, just not lit up.” He bent down and touched the floor surface. It was smooth and unyielding.
Then Montrose shrugged. “Aside from that I am stumped. If this is a race, you win. I cannot puzzle out the riddle. Selene jawed to us on Earth, and again when we splashed down in the moon dust. Now that we are here, she shuts up.”
Del Azarchel said, “Perhaps she passed beyond the phantasm boundary you established. Something we did now forces her to treat us as if invisible.”
Montrose remained kneeling, his fingers on the black and unmarked floor. “Something between now and when she spoke to us at splashdown? We were meant to stare at the outside of this cathedral for a good long time. I thought it was to get us to confirm that she had built it right. We are the only Old-Stock Elder-race men left.”
“Basilica, not cathedral,” said Del Azarchel absentmindedly.
“What’s the difference?”
“A cathedral is the seat of a bishop.”
Montrose turned his head. “I figured out how to get her to talk to us. What she’s waiting for. I win this round.”
Del Azarchel said, “Tell me.”
“Admit I win, and I will.”
5. A Chamber of Diapason
Del Azarchel actually laughed. “You hateful vermin! Were it not for you, all these worlds would have been mine now, pure logic crystal, gold like glass from pole to pole, and Rania by my side as my wife and my queen! My mind would have been expanded to the next order of magnitude by now! The Asmodel being would have been met with a glorious civilization, worthy of entering into their collaboration, even if at the most servile level! Instead of empires, I live a beggar! You—”
But he saw Montrose was not listening.
Then Del Azarchel realized what had happened. The symbolism, the silent communication, had been clear, blindingly clear. The mountain had been carved as a basilica, complete with all the ecclesiastic symbolism from their native era, so accurate that Del Azarchel had unconsciously performed the first ceremonial gesture a celebrant does when entering church, using the holy water, but not the second, which is to bow the knee. Montrose, stooping to examine the floor, had accidentally completed the gesticulation.
Del Azarchel realized with shame that Montrose had instinctively seen from his point of view something Del Azarchel’s own unstooping pride made invisible to him. This chamber was a mockery, not just of Montrose, but of the both of them. Instead of an altar with the host, this room contained icons of them, with candles burning for them as if they thought themselves saints, and the proportions of the chamber representing the missing designs of the Monument, as if that were the idol they served.
Del Azarchel dropped to one knee. There was an unseen membrane of interference created by a sound-dampening pressure curtain made of countless invisibly thin, macro-molecular, self-repairing and countervibrating strands covering the room at midriff level. As his head passed below it, unexpectedly to his ear came the soft music which had been issuing all this time from the blank floor.
It took Del Azarchel but a moment to quiet his internal life rhythms and to increase the number of nerve firings to his auditory nerve, an art he had done often to his eyes, but never before to his ears.
To him it seemed the music swelled and swelled, like a cavalry of elves emerging from beneath the sea. The shocking beauty of it washed over his soul, struck to his core. A normal man would have heard nothing but a shining roar as of ten thousand harps singing in hundreds of voices, a waterfall of noise in which the individual drops were lost, but Del Azarchel heard patterns within patterns, symmetries building greater symmetries.
Since turning posthuman, Del Azarchel had ceased to listen to music, at one time his only pleasure in life. Even Bach seemed too simple and predictable to him, nothing more than a nursery tune plinked on a toy piano. The most complex music the Old Stock humans had ever produced had been polyphony for eight voices.
But this! It was the music meant for a mind like his! There were eighty-one voices or harmonies, countless counterpoints of polyrhythmic oppositions woven into the soaring theme, puns and inversion as the voices first followed a nonimitative polyphony of multiple distinct rhythmic strata, then an alternation of the roles of the voices in a pattern of cycles and epicycles. He could follow it all, music no mortal man could possibly have understood.
He turned his face away from Montrose so that his enemy would not see his tears.
Del Azarchel forced the supernal majesty of the songs out from his mind, and concentrated on the meaning. He had not heard the opening strains of the interwoven symphonies, the glittering clash of the unearthly music, and so it was a moment longer than it should have been before he was able to form a multidimensional graph in his imagination, plot all the notes to it, map their durations and ratios, and realize that it was Monument notation, audible rather than written.
Because he could adjust his awareness both to the density of time, how many events per second he noticed, and the span of time, what interval his brain interpreted as “now,” Del Azarchel could expand his perception of time so that the patterns of harmonies and melodies formed by one symphony after another could be heard by him as if it all happened in the same long afternoon. No doubt to an outside observer, it would have seemed weeks.
The only limit was biological. He started feeling faint with hunger after the time span his attention said was an hour, but his stomach said was a fortnight. The first twitch of muscles, aside from blinking and breathing in time with the music, was to turn his head toward Montrose, who silently handed him a cup of gold. (Del Azarchel felt a tiny touch of superiority to know himself more sensitive to music than the Texan, who had moved first.)
“It ain’t no baptism sink,” said Montrose, during a moment of silence between two chords, using the highspeed, high-compression language of the Savants. “That was a joke, too. The water bowl is a cafeteria. Nanite liquid. Full of all the vitamins we need, proteins, and so on. You just gotta decide how much you trust her.”
Del Azarchel looked at the cup. In a ring circling the rim was an image of five loaves and two fish, and the cup itself was adorned with the scene of a bearded patriarch with a staff striking a rock from which many waters flowed.
He drank the contents without hesitation. Montrose held a cup of similar make, decorated with images of ravens bringing bread to a prophet, and he frowned at it sourly, but after a muttered curse or two, drank it also.