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.”