“Agnieshka . . .”
“It’s called Penrose tiling. It is not actually a repeating pattern, like a crystalline form, but a system of two different parallelograms that can be laid out to tile a plane.”
“Ah. Pentrose. Five-pointed roses.”
“No, actually, it was named after the inventor, a mathematician named Penrose.”
“It’s fascinating. I’ll have to make people take their shoes off before they can walk on it.”
“No you won’t. The wood will be covered with a clear, preserving polymer, and then a sheet of diamond will be laid on top of that. It will never scratch, and besides being the hardest substance possible, diamond is also one of the strongest.”
“How do you go about cutting sheets of diamond this big?”
“After we found The Diamond, we were six months figuring that out. The usual method of cutting diamond is to use another diamond, a very slow grinding process. But all flawless crystals have planes in them that can be fractured, if you do it right. We determined those planes, and placed shaped charges that cracked off one side of The Diamond. Then, by heating the stone to a known depth with the proper laser frequency for a few microseconds to thermally stress it, and setting off a small, but continuous shaped charge around its edges, we are able to pop off large sheets of the desired thickness.”
Thinking what would happen to the man who shattered such an absolutely priceless and irreplaceable resource, I said, “I wouldn’t have wanted to be the engineer who set off that first charge!”
“It was a tank who did it. The humans had given up weeks before, and had huge wire saws on order.”
“All hail the tanks of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces. Now, show me the rest of the place.”
My apartment was magnificent, yet in a warm, homey way. Whereas the cathedral generated feelings of awe and glory, my new dwelling felt like home, and despite its grandeur it was a place where I wanted to live.
The views from the many balconies were as magnificent as Kasia had hoped. With the trees and the grass shown growing, it reminded me of the view from Signal Mountain, near Chattanooga, in America, back on Earth.
Most of the place was carpeted, in natural wool grown in New Sudan and woven in New Kashubia. Thinking what Agnieshka’s magnetic tank treads would do to the rugs, I assured her, “You are still going to be welcome, even if I do have to replace the rugs now and then.”
“I won’t hurt the carpeting, boss. All of the floors in all of the buildings are underlaid with a layer of a ferromagnetic alloy. I can magnetize it as I go along, float a few centimeters above the carpet, and degauss it as I pass. It also lets us move heavy things around, if we want to.”
In some of the hallways, there were stands of ancient sixteenth-century parade armour, the stuff you could see in museums on Earth. As best as I could tell, these were full-sized armor, made to fit big men, as most of the real medieval and renaissance knights were.
Many people have the impression that all of the people of these eras were small, as indeed many underfed commoners were, because of the small size of the armor on display.
This is because they were looking at armor made for children.
It was vitally important for a medieval prince to have his son accepted by all of his people as their next ruler. If the kid wasn’t, it could plunge the country into a civil war that might be the downfall of the prince’s entire family. It was therefore common to have very decorative armor made for the boy, and to parade him as often as possible before one’s subjects, to increase his popularity.
Since boys grow, this armor was often worn for only a few times over a year or two, and then retired, still in beautiful shape. It was carefully preserved in case a grandchild might come along who could fit the expensive stuff.
Sometimes it was preserved for hundreds of years, and ended up in museums. Real armor was all too often destroyed in combat, frequently filled with bullet holes.
“An interesting choice of decorations,” I said.
“We thought you’d like it. But those are actually decorated versions of the humanoid drones you just bought. They will be your housekeepers, your servants, and your guards, if need be. There are several dozen irreparable tanks available with intact computers in them. The plan is to station them around the valley to control the drones.”
“Nice. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with human servants, anyway. You have again done a fabulous job. I know that Kasia will love this place. Build it.”
“Don’t you want to see it from the outside?”
“Yes, of course. How clumsy of me.”
The screen flew us out through a window and did a one eighty from a hundred meters out. My reaction was one of “Wow!” My new home was warm and comfortable from the inside, but out here, it was as awesome as the cathedral. Yes, this was what Gaudi would have built, if somebody had given him a kilometer-high cliff face to carve, and a few hundred tons of gold and platinum to plate it with.
Then our view climbed up higher than the canyon wall.
“This is your roof garden, boss. Your kitchen gardens are out behind it.”
“Lovely. Build it. Build anything that you want to build. You ladies are masters!”
“I hope you really mean that, sir. You see, there is this other thing that we want to do.”
The view spun again, and we were looking at a valley totally transformed. The entire canyon wall, a kilometer high and forty curving kilometers long, was carved into what I can only call the most beautiful city I had ever seen. It all looked like it was done by my favorite architect, but some portions looked as if they had been done by a Gaudi who had been born in China, or India, and others if his ancestry had been from Middle Earth.
“There are thirty thousand apartments here, sir, with an average floor space of a thousand square meters each. Every one of them is individually designed, no two of them are alike, and they all have a fine view. There are restaurants, concert halls, offices, schools, shopping centers, sports stadiums, churches, hotels, and everything else that a city of a hundred thousand people needs to provide a full life. Let us build this for you, sir.”
“My God. My wonderful God. It will take me years to study and appreciate all this. Forget about my ranch. Build this instead.”
“We can do both. We have the land. We have the money. We have the materials. We have the labor force. We have the plans. We can get it all done for you in three months, and have the grass lush and green before your leave is over.”
“Build it!”
I didn’t know who would live in this city. Maybe the other Kashubian veterans would want an apartment in town as well as an estate in the country, the way the Russians all do. But even if it ended up empty, something so beautiful deserved to be built!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Uncle Wlodzimierz
In the morning, I could have had breakfast sent up, but I hadn’t done any cooking since I left Earth, and I wanted to see, in private, if I was still any good at it.
I had the scrambled eggs, sausage, and fried potatoes looking edible enough, and coffee, orange juice, toast, and a vase with a single rose in it on the table when Kasia walked in.
She had slept sixteen hours nonstop, and looked a lot better for it. She smiled, nodded, and sat down to eat my breakfast. I started to cook some more.
“You can cook, too?”
“I am indeed a man of vastly underestimated talents. And you are a woman who looks a few thousand times better than she did yesterday.”
“Thank you, I think. Say, you weren’t serious about stopping me from getting on with my job, were you?”
“I certainly was. You don’t have a job right now. You are on vacation from your job, which is observing for a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank. Anything else that you might be doing is merely a hobby, no matter how profitable it might be. Your hobby has now been delegated to your trusted subordinates, and you will now go off with your new and loving husband for a dream honeymoon to some secret and very private recreation spot. There, you and I will recreate ourselves in lavish style, and maybe even screw a little.”
“Mickolai, I’ve got to stay in touch!”
“Nope. Permission denied. Eva, are you there?”
The kitchen didn’t have a wall screen, so Eva’s voice came out of midair.