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!”