Blasphemy (part 10)
The Grand Temple of Joos-tow had been obvious from the air, a series of concentric circles of towering pillars surrounding a massive dome. A crowd of pilgrims waited patiently in the inner arcs between the towers, a sea of red, scarlet, and carmine robes alive, and breathing, the life blood of the Laasko in the vessels about its very heart.
From ground level, the complex loomed overhead in every direction. A small electric tram carried us for kilometers from the entrance through the rings to the main building itself. When we encountered the lines of pilgrims, they simply parted, silently, to let us through. There was no rush to see the High Priestess or calls for her to bless objects.
The vehicle stopped at the main doors to one wing of the building, two twenty-meter tall expanses of burnished silvery metal covered with large inscribed words. I recognized the flowing curved symbols for "Joos-tow"; they were becoming obvious and familiar. Vortex, through the handheld, translated the rest:
"For Joos-tow brought us the words, and we have known the wonders of peace, joy and wisdom. Let the truths of Joos-tow enter into you, as you enter into the truths of Joos-tow."
The doors opened easily, revealing a hallway that shrank into the distance, straight and uncluttered. The only support came from narrow vaulting arches disappearing into colorful, airy frescoes on a faraway ceiling. Giant murals stretched across some sections of the walls. They were all clearly images of Joos-tow performing some miracle or feat.
As the seven of us walked past these immense works of art, it was clear that each had been painted by different artists, each aesthetic and pleasing in their own way. There were also a number of empty places on the wall, waiting for their own interpretation of Joos-tow.
There was no one else in the vast passageway.
"I see that you appreciate the masterworks on our humble walls." The High Priestess pointed to one to our right, a vast night scene lit by an array of stars, a plain of grass dark yet glowing. A man lay in a small empty patch of ground, clearly ill, agonizing pain stretched along his leather-clad body. Something large, ominous and barely gray, a shadow in the shadows, seemed ready to devour the helpless man. Joos-tow was holding a hand in the air, somehow able to ward off the danger, even while crouching and comforting the ailing man. The paint, splashed in large, daring strokes across an area thirty meters square, should have been crude and clumsy. Yet, in this place, on the immense open wall, the effect was one of subtle simplicity, a panorama of detail more suggested than explicit.
"That is Rhi Ainn, and The Plains of Teem Drood, painted twelve hundred yearcycles ago. The style reminds me of the work in the galley of your ship." She was thinking of the Monet print on the forward bulkhead, from a work even older. Despite a galaxy filled with art of all sorts, it still appeals to me more than just about anything else I've seen. I have to admit that if there was something smaller but still as subtle by Rhi Ainn, I might be interested in putting it up somewhere inside of Vortex.
"And this one?" I asked, pointing to the opposite wall. "This seems a much different style, from a much different time." It was a court scene, with a crowd of thirty or forty nobles, dressed in lace and bright satins of green and blue. Joos-tow stood in the center, similarly dressed but in reds, preparing to drop a small black sphere from an opened palm. The style was realistic, with vivid colors carefully layered and applied. The strokes were nearly invisible, painstakingly blended.
"Social and Physical Gravity, by Lann Dyr. I believe it was completed two hundred and fifty yearcycles past."
The High Priestess described paintings and frescoes spanning nearly five thousand yearcycles before we reached the inner building. In all the cases, Joos-tow appeared nearly identical, a dark haired, green-eyed Laasko of indeterminate gender, generally serene, unimposing and otherwise unremarkable. There were exceptions, like in Against the Armies of Awpr Lii, where an unnaturally calm Joos-tow called down bolts of lightning against a force of men and women in chain mail armed with crude flintlocks. Where Sem Blek Once Stood had Joos-tow floating supernaturally above the center of a lake of lava, the remains of a castle slowly melting in the inferno. Even in the orange glow of that destruction, Joos-tow's image could have been taken from any of the other works. The clothing changed; Joos-tow was always dressed appropriately for the period of the painting, but that was it. Across these varying styles and periods, one would expect differences, as the image of their deity would tend to take on the aspects and interpretations of the time.
It was odd. Art can tell a lot about the evolution of a culture. One could get a sense for their growth as a people, working their way through the inevitable cycles of stylistic (and historical) stagnation that are overturned by something radical, inventive, and liberating. Every phase of their artistic cycles was represented on these hallowed walls, from conservative orthodoxy to wild exuberance, from painstakingly concrete to shockingly abstracted. Joos-tow, however, remained constant, the same face, the same body, regardless of the rest of the work. It had to mean something, but I couldn't think of a tactful way to ask.
The wall of the inner building was clearly different, substantial, solid and far older, polished by the inevitable weathering effects of having been an outer wall long ago. It was simpler, blocks of barely curving granite fitted together in an impressive display of craftsmanship. Inside was a single circular room, a dome one hundred meters across and nearly as high. Shafts of golden sunlight poured into the room through impossible arches of glass set in the ceiling. Clever arrays of silvered mirrors sent fractions of those luminous beams everywhere, lighting every square meter of the wall. A row of obsidian stone panels ten meters square circled around the base of the dome. Above that, mathematical tessellations inlaid in gold, silver, magenta, and indigo crawled geometrically to the very apex of the structure. If they'd built this amazing temple six thousand yearcycles ago, then they should have been in hyperspace long ago.
I wanted to know what was holding it up, and how they'd built it. I knew more advanced cultures in the Coterie incapable of this kind of architecture, even with high tensile nanofiber meshes and antigravitic supports. There was nothing but stone here, and it shouldn't have been standing.
The High Priestess led me to one of the obsidian panels. It (and all the others) were inscribed in the neat curlicues of the Laasko language. These symbols were familiar somehow.
They were my lecture in mathematics. It was their Hawking, their wormholes, their Donross's Multidimensional Equivalence, everything up to their Carpenter, all etched in stone millennia old. The High Priestess was silent, letting me trace through the symbols, as Vortex translated them on the handheld display, overlaid by the terms I was familiar with.
The equations began the inevitable path towards Carpenter's Manifold Symmetry, with all of the inherent complexities in the derivation. It is the story of space and time, of the expansion of our Universe in all its surprising and unseen dimensions. It's damned hard math, filled with sets of infinite series of the calculus of chaos, where terms mingle and collide. There are singularities, where the Universe wants to divide by zero, quantum effects where only whole numbers are allowed, and virtual events that create infinities on both sides of an uncertain ledger.
There are also an infinity of potential Universes, depending on the definition of the initial conditions. Start from one set of possibilities and the Manifold Symmetry is impossible to escape. Start from a slightly different set of possibilities and the Manifold Symmetry is merely impossible. Both sets of possibilities are mathematically consistent, logical to a fault, and entirely reasonable.
Their derivation postulated a set of initial conditions that prevented the Manifold Symmetry from occurring. Their mathematics spelled out that 'none shall go faster than the speed of light' in big, bold letters.
"Do you see?" the High Priestess asked, pointing to the concluding equations. "You are in error. You cannot be. By the words of the Great Joos-tow, scribed by the god's hand, you are a blasphemy." She waved her hand around to point to the dome.
"This temple was raised by Joos-tow, to hold these words. It stands because Joos-tow says it shall stand, by the mathematics derived from these equations."
"It is one thing to have faith in a metaphorical divine being," I said quietly, knowing that I was treading on very dangerous ground. "It is another..."
The energy weapons of the two guards snapped eagerly into their hands, aimed directly at me. It was time for the heretic to be decintegrated.
"Stop," the High Priestess commanded. "You will not use weapons in this holy place." They didn't flinch, but the weapons eased down. She turned to me.
"Did you not understand?" she sighed, tired of the contradiction I posed. "Joos-tow is not a metaphor. Joos-tow is not an invisible, philosophical god." Her voice grew insistent and strident. "The paintings that you have seen were done from real events. On occasion, Joos-tow walks amongst us, bringing rewards and retributions. For thousands of yearcycles, Joos-tow has taught the Laasko, mostly in patience and never in error. You simply cannot be. You speak insanity, as those of Awpr Lii and Sem Blek. You have seen what Joos-tow did to them. Confess your heresy now."
"Distress Potential Protocol Nineteen," Vortex whispered in my ear. We hadn't been higher than Protocol Twelve in a long time.
"High Priestess, your mathematics are incorrect." The guns snapped back into position. I wasn't sure she'd be able to stop them.
"If my mathematics are so wrong," she shouted, irritated, "then why can't you demonstrate the error?"