Raj chuckled. Why not? That's this five-thousand-year footrace's finish line, right?
Maybe, O'Reilly said. But even human-equivalent machines will need to consume some power.
Sue Loque was first to remove her glasses and wander out of the Cavern. To hell with it. Why should we worry about posterity? What has posterity done for us lately?
The others trickled off after her. Kaladjian walked away clenched, calling back to his antagonist, You realize this means nothing, don't you? Nothing at all.
Absolutely nothing, O'Reilly agreed.
Whatever lay in wait forty years down the pike, other clients waited in
line before it.
Who are they? Adie asked Stevie. The people we're supposed to be pitching to. Who would possibly be interested in buying such a thing?
Oh, the usual suspects. Academic researchers. The theme park people. The movie people. Whoever comes after theme parks and movies. You know: the ones who are always promising consciousness-altering, mind-meld video games in time for next Christmas.
But they'll be buying the box, right? The walls and the projector and the special accelerated graphics chips? Not… our rooms?
Bits sell iron. That's how it always goes. Nobody wants cables. They want what comes through them.
But still. They aren't… it's not like they.. this won't exactly be a volume business, will it?
Spiegel stuck out his lip. Never underestimate mankind's appetite for
the next big escape.
The next big escape came and sought them out. It landed on their outstretched palms, a bird returning to its golden bough. Karl Ebesen led them to Byzantium. He told them what they were after, even before Adie and Steve could lay their meager evidence at the foot of his
cubicle.
Byzantium? You mean the place where civilization wavered. The way
that the world almost went.
Spiegel and Klarpol traded helplessness. Sure, Karl. Whatever
you say.
The imperial capital. The one that kept Rome going for centuries after Rome died. The place where West almost traveled East. Or should that he the other way around?
Ebesen launched a search, knocking over his precarious stacks of sourcebooks and clipping files in the process. He located his discredited, yellowing anthology of world art, its pages halfway on the route back to ammonia.
Here's what you're after. He put his finger on a full-page black-and-white plate. For close to a thousand years, the greatest church in Christendom. And for another five hundred years after that, the greatest mosque in Islam.
Adie peered into the interior — hulking, mysterious, impossible to make out or take in. This? But this… this is in Istanbul.
Ebesen squinted at the picture. Byzantium. Constantinople. Istanbul. A place like that can never have too many names.
Or too many incarnations, apparently. Spiegel edged in for a better look. Just church and mosque? Didn't they want to cover any other bases?
Ebesen wagged his head at an elaboration more outrageous than the thing it explained. Based on a pagan shrine. Built to outdo Solomon's temple. After a millennium and a half, still the fourth-largest church in the world. The Hagia Sophia. The Holy Wisdom.
Adie stood staring, dazed by the space. I… was there. Inside. As a child. When my father… was stationed in the eastern Mediterranean.
And had sent a postcard to a girlhood friend of the inexplicable interior: "Make sure you see this once before you die."
They pumped Ebesen for all the details he had. They stole all his reference works. Then they went after every further source he could point them toward. Karl, for his part, had only been waiting for the call. The architectural building blocks that he and Vulgamott had for so long sculpted out of syntax and thin air now rose to the thing they were made for. The source from which those parts derived.
One thousand master craftsmen directing ten thousand conscripted laborers took half a dozen years to raise that model of paradise. The simulation team had between October and May.
Vulgamott took charge of the initial planning. The first thing we need to decide, of course, is magnification.
Adie stared at him, her face a blank.
Come on, he said. Scale? How large we want the thing to be?
I thought we'd just do it, you know: one to one?
Good Christ. Vulgamott struck himself on the forehead. She wants
it life-sized.
Spiegel rushed to defend her. At least we're not building in an earthquake zone. Getting the vault to stay up shouldn't be hard.
I don't know, Ebesen said. The model has gravity figured in. Thought, too, was an engineering problem. If you want a thing to stand, it has to be able to fall.
37
The room of holy wisdom spreads its tent beneath the dome of heaven.
Wood will not do, for its wooden parent burned. The building draws its stone from the farthest throws of empire. It cannibalizes for parts the world's great temples: columns from Ephesus and oracular Delphi, from Egyptian Heliopolis and Baalbek in the Levant.
It steals its palette of marble from the whole spectrum of imperial provinces: pink from Phrygia, Lydian gold, ivory Cappadocian, green from Thesselia, pure white quarries of sea-girt Proconnesus. Cut and dressed, the stone veins fan out to meet their mirror shapes at each facing's joint, picking up and echoing, like a stilled kaleidoscope, hints of heavenly device and earthly emblem, painted incantations, living creatures bolting through the symboled undergrowth.
The floor plan is a daring cross of conch and loggia. Basilica and hub — church architecture's two great streams — here flow together in a new confluence. And soaring above all, the dome rises to its awful altitude, climbing upward not to a point but cupped like the gentle firmament itself, a helmet resting on air, crowned in a crucifix, the world's
protector.
The dome bends over a gaping hole wider than its engineers should know how to span. Nor is the day's faith great enough to make up the shortfall. The emperor himself, at the building's christening, stumbles dazed into the vast vacuum of the eastern apse, dispenses with the prepared Deo Gratia, and blurts out, Solomon, I have outdone you!
Mosaic saints man the walls at strategic points. Deep-color tile squares of hammered gold leaf dusted over a layer of glass tesserae and finished with a layer of glass paste become the world's first bitmaps. Up close, their resolutions pixilate into discrete rectangles. But from down below, at the eye's prescribed distance, the folds of a gown hang full, and faces escape the waste of history into some stilled, further conviction.
Under the monstrous dome, empire draws itself tight into a hardened chrysalis. This room will fall first to Christian invaders, absorbing into its galleries the crypts of those crusaders who pillaged it. Later, from the conquering infidels, it will adopt calligraphic Arabic disks and minarets, and a subdued mihrab slipped into the east end, tilted slightly on the axis to Mecca. Another faith will command those mosaic saints to be destroyed, but fear and awe will leave them merely plastered over, protected for blasphemous mass viewing, centuries on, in the age of global tourism.