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.

5

Celestial Hospitality

1. The Unfinished Symphony

A.D. 11058

The opening statement of the Monument turned out to be the simplest of the grand themes played. Time passed as they listened to the simple progression of the Alpha Segment, through the sinuous Beta Segment, the marching chords of the Gamma, the dizzying intricacies of the Delta.

Nuances of meaning, lost from the merely literal interpretation of the visual symbol groups, were startlingly clear to both men when heard as chords. When the music wove its way through the Zeta section, the song sung an image of the Milky Way into the brains of both of them, and game theory analysis of the Eta segment, with its play and counterplay, made them both laugh.

And then a day came when the songs passed beyond what they had translated in their era. The learning of the new millennia surged into their consciousnesses, wave upon rising wave.…

The revelation of the symphonies dazed them, as the thousand voices cried in countless counterpoints the entire song of the cosmos, the percussion clockwork of orbital mechanics, the trumpet blasts and cymbal crashes of subatomic and atomic fissions, the intense rafts of strings of organic chemistry, the complex dance of life, waves and typhoons of primitive cognition, of awareness, of self-awareness, in some ocean of pure form where each drop was a silvery and perfect note.

They heard the secrets of the mind-body relationship, the basic invariant systems for all possible psychological architectures, including human, of any mind either natural or artificial; the secrets of planetary formation; the mathematical description of galactic nebulae, spiral and irregular (but once their hidden designs were laid bare, surprisingly not irregular at all, but possessed of strange beauty) and elliptical galaxies; the patterns of history; the twenty-five possible non-Euclidean geometries; the nine stable higher intellectual topologies which can emerge from lower natural intelligence; the four possible institutional developments whereby a civilization can emerge from barbarism; the two possible systems of self-awareness that can emerge from lower forms of life, and the one possible mode called life, in its dizzying complexity, which can emerge from the deceptively simple mechanics of nonlife.…