“Diamonds,” Agnieshka said, suddenly “walking” up the steps in front of me. She was now wearing a long dress and had a shawl covering her head, as is proper for a woman entering a Catholic church. “It gives good traction and cuts wear down to an acceptably low level.”
“The gold, I understand. Where did the diamonds come from?”
“From right here in New Croatia. It’s a military secret, so be warned. With it, we can make our computers thirty times faster than anybody else’s. That’s a big military advantage, and we don’t plan on giving it up. We are not permitting any civilian uses of the new semiconductors at all. The Croatian Government and even the Kashubian parliament don’t know about either The Diamond or what we’re doing with it.”
“We’re stealing it.”
“You might say that, or you could say finders, keepers. While we were digging one of the Loways to the south of here, we came across The Diamond, the largest ever discovered by many orders of magnitude. It is almost half a cubic kilometer in volume, it is composed of absolutely pure carbon twelve, and it is a perfect, flawless, single crystal. We’ve been using it to make integrated circuits, since it is vastly superior to the silicon that has been used for hundreds of years. My own circuits were upgraded some months ago, and I am now thirty times faster than I was before. Every other military computer in our army has now been upgraded as well. There has been more diamond dust, bits and pieces generated than we can find a use for industrially, so we will be using it extensively in the flooring here, and in your other buildings.”
“Agnieshka, you left me a half a paragraph back. This huge diamond, a single, flawless crystal made of only one isotope. That’s impossible. Such a thing couldn’t be.”
“It definitely flies in the face of every known theory of planetary formation. Certainly, it never formed here naturally. Some have suggested that it was originally created in a dying star which later exploded, but even that idea goes against the accepted theories of stellar formation. But you cannot disbelieve in what verifiably exists. If you want, maybe someday I can take you to it.”
“Someday, you will. For now, I will suspend my disbelief. Take me inside the church.”
I spent over an hour on that imaginary tour, completely enchanted. It wasn’t only the incredible size of the place—the nave was over a kilometer long, and the ceiling was eight hundred meters above our heads! It was the incredible beauty of it all. There were a hundred and eleven stained glass windows, each twenty meters wide and over seven hundred meters tall. Only they weren’t stained glass. They were each a single crystal of diamond, stained in every possible color with the same ion implantation techniques used in making integrated circuits. They were guaranteed to last for five thousand years.
The pictures on most of them started out at the bottom with a martial scene, some battle from history that Agnieshka said one of my ancestors had fought in. Then, as you raised your eyes, it slowly changed into a celestial scene, a picture of the perfection of God’s heaven. But beyond the materials, and the subject matter, was the fact that the art itself was superior to anything that I had ever seen!
Every square centimeter of the interior was elaborately decorated, and when you went close to any surface, you saw that the beauty was carried down to the smallest level that your eyes could see, as though a master jeweler had spent months perfecting every tiny bit of the huge building.
Many of the great churches on Earth have a certain morbidity about them, with an emphasis on pain, suffering, and damnation. That was not the case here. The entire building was an affirmation of joy, here and in the hereafter.
Above the altar, Christ was not nailed to the cross, but seemed to be hovering in front of it. His arms were outstretched, but in a gesture of welcoming, and His face glowed with love, concern, and joy.
The richness of detail in everything in the church, the fantastic appointments, the awesome beauty of it all, left me speechless for a time, but in the end I said, “This is easily the most magnificent building in Human Space. Yes, build it, build it, and spare absolutely nothing in getting it absolutely right. Delay the rest of the ranch, if you have to, and my home as well, but build this place. The only thing that I regret is that no large congregation will ever be able to hear a sermon in so huge a building.”
“Oh, but they will. More computer time was spent on the acoustics of this church than on all of the rest of the structure combined. A single unamplified human, speaking from the pulpit, will be clearly audible to everyone even if this building is filled to capacity, assuming that they are reasonably quiet.”
“But how will those people get here? This whole area is supposed to be a radioactive waste.”
“They will come by the new Loways, and park in the extensive lots we will build underground. They will think that they are going somewhere else, since we will control the computers that run the roads.”
“I feel like a child, talking to you here. Just build it. I have complete trust in you.”
“Thank you, sir. Your trust means much to all of us. Would you like to see the other outbuildings, now? You asked that the other rock spires be made into castles, but the thinnest one could serve nicely for an enlarged model of the Chinese ‘Color of Iron’ pagoda, and we wished you to see what we had in mind.”
“I would like to see it, but not today. A human can only take so much of this sort of thing at one time, and I am overwhelmed right now. Look. I have no right to judge your work. It is superior to anything that I could have imagined. For me to tell you to change this or that would be like some illiterate nobleman telling Leonardo da Vinci that his bridge wouldn’t stand up. I am ignorant, but at least, I know that I am ignorant.”
“One of your philosophers said that that was the beginning of wisdom.”
“Let’s hope so. I need all the wisdom that I can get. But for now, show me the home that Kasia wants carved into that cliff face.”
“We are sure that she will like it, boss, since her tank, Eva, had a lot to do with the design. Eva knows Kasia the way I know you. Shall we start from the inside, this time? This is your private elevator, that connects down to your parking garage.”
The screen showed a large, beautiful room with walls and ceiling of a richly carved dark wood.
“This is some sort of oak?” I said.
“No, it is a wood that was native to this planet. It is extinct, now, except on one large island where everything from off planet, including humans, is excluded by the Planetary Ecological Council. There are dead forests of it in several areas. Nobody is sure just why they died, but the locals were using it for firewood. We found it to be attractive, and it carves well, so I have ordered forty thousand logs of the stuff, all that I could find. We thought that it deserved to be saved and used.”
“You did right. This is a big room for an elevator.”
“That was my doing, sir. I was hoping that when all this was finished, you might want me to visit you some time. Not in the flesh, of course, but might I say, in the steel?”
I was touched. “Agnieshka, I never realized that you felt any different, being someplace electronically, as you are here with me now, and being someplace physically. But yes, my beautiful lady, you are welcome to my home any time you want. You will always be a welcome guest, a welcome friend.”
I thought that there might have been a tear in the eye of her image on the screen when she said, “Thank you, Mickolai.”
“Now, turn us around, and show me my new home.”
“This is the entrance foyer. The door to the left is the public entranceway.”
My attention was drawn to the wooden “parquet” floor. It was obviously made of several other light and dark native woods. But the pattern dazzled my mind, the way one of M. C. Escher’s drawings can do. Something wasn’t quite right. I eventually realized that the rosettes formed by the wooden parallelograms were five sided. You can tile a plane with squares, or triangles, or hexagons. You can’t tile a plane with pentagons. It’s an absolute impossibility. Yet, here it was right before my eyes!