The War With Earth (13 page)

"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!

"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!