So, then: the Cathedral. It's enormous, magnificent. You exit the biosphere lock, and you see it before you, above you, a ragged shadow against the stars. Light is needed for you to take in the architecture, but there is no light, for Lévie is distant now and Madeleine not yet close enough. Through the long period of the cosmic interhelium, the Cathedral is above all other things a Mystery. From the lock to the main portal a crooked track runs down the crater slope along a path cut into the cold stone. You descend with the required safety line clipped to your belt by the robot that mans the outer gate. Typically the descending visitor, curious, will switch on the powerful lamp of his suit. But the lamp's white finger can touch only separate spots of the edifice, moving from one to the other--here, there--like a feeble probe across an outer skin. It is difficult to keep the beam on the same point as one approaches, so the visitor stops, gawks, gropes with his pencil of light over the creation in rock. Covering the distance from the biosphere (two hundred meters) in this way can take an hour. It took me an hour. Father Mirton was waiting at the tomb, not surprised, as he told me later: some sit down on the slope and fall into a kind of trance, wakened only by their suit alarm. I can believe it. The Cathedral is not a building, it's a sculpture. Not a sculpture either. Ugerzo, ordering this version of crysthorn, knew that what was planted here would be planted for no common purpose, that the Cathedral's function would be insignificant alongside what it evoked. One function only was specified: the tomb of Izmir and the altar. They are inside, enclosed in their own minibiosphere--for them a place must be kept intact, and access maintained for the faithful. The rest was left to the imagination of the designers and to the growth's ergodic algorithms. The sowing filled the circle around the tomb, some four hundred square meters. In the near weightlessness of the asteroid, the crysthorn has shot to a height of almost a quarter of a kilometer. From the lock of the crater biosphere one sees a hyperboloid corpus with crooked wings outspread, curved ribs in the middle. On the flanks are asymmetric towers topped with stone that sprouts jagged leaves, as if frozen in place by blackest vacuum at the moment of its explosion into carbon shrapnel. The form speaks of the flight of the soul, which to reach the starry void must tear itself, in agonizing pain, from the chains of matter. When the light begins to trace a profile here, an edge, a break, a rib of a cupola--sharp detail emerges from the gloom, a cluster of hard shadows, and the eye is pulled into a spiral, no end to the detail, the fractal nature of the crysthorn making self-similar shards of every shape, and the viewer is lost. Around the towers, stairways out of Escher soar to stop-motion frames of death, at a certain angle it looks almost like a path a human being could take, but when the light takes in a larger piece of the Cathedral, you see that it would have to be a spider, not a man, and that even a spider could not reach there. Because of the asymmetry of the towers, all this openwork of the crysthorn appears to tilt toward the crater, toward the observer, and to the right. Meanwhile the deceptive, recursive algorithms responsible for the outer surfaces of the main nave make you think that you are watching the last, dying stage of the building--as if some tumor of stone were rankling within--and that very soon, in a day, maybe two, it will sink and fall into itself, rotten through: the tapering ribs will collapse beneath the weight of tortured rock; the spine, topped with a cross, will plunge into the dimness of the internal organs; and from between the jaws of the jutting portal will flow a slow avalanche of the Cathedral's brittle blood. The form speaks of the torment of dying alone, of the frailty of matter, whose doubts poison the unseen soul. And if you turn off your lamp and sit there for a moment on the slope, or maybe hesitate a while, with a step forward, back, by the safety line--the eye's hungry pupil might catch a ray or two of light coming from the high mass of shadow. Starlight pierces the Cathedral. It has no walls or roof, after all, they are not necessary to it as a building--indeed, this is not a building--and the transparent dome that covers the tomb of Izmir and the altar performs the functions of walls and roof itself. We are not dealing here with an ergonomic thing. The interior is not empty, filled with, though no human being will see it, the same mystery of crysthorn metamorphosis that has carved the parts visible to us. So at certain times certain stars send their light through the Cathedral. The observer descending the slope registers flashes of light in that gigantic stain of darkness, very like signals of decay in a vacuum chamber: tiny firings, now and then, from nothingness. Then you enter the shade of the portal, frozen waves close around you like curtains, like a thicket of iron bushes, you wade through the waters of a lake of pain. A turn, a light--and you are standing before the tomb.

(...)

Madeleine was in view. Even inside the Cathedral, inside its biostasis, the rays of rich purple penetrated. I had been waiting for Gazma half an hour now. I took off my suit and set it in the first pew, beside the helmet. I prayed awhile. Still no sign of Gazma. I lifted my head without thinking and began to study the intersecting innards of the Cathedral. The feeling was not as strong as Mirton said, but I too had the conviction, every so often, that someone, Gazma, was watching me from that high labyrinth of shadows. I went to the edge of the biobubble to take a closer look at the crysthorn stone. The sculpting was highly complex, one pattern shifted into another, and the geometry of congruent figures kept drawing the eye away from the light. It was not sculpture, of course, since no one had hewn and worked this stone of the Horn. The form, commencing from the first seeds, had eaten into the asteroid's cold ground and heaved in a wave of nanotransformations until, particle by particle, there rose here the memorial of Ugerzo's gratitude. But how much can be contained in a seed's starting algorithms, in an architectonic code of crysthorn? The face--it was definitely a face--and the silhouette, and the meniscus of stone, and the overhang of eyeless skulls, and the upper intestinal cortege on the string of darkness stretched taut across the loins of the Cathedral, a cortege of gaunt figures, a processional dance of alien skeletons--surely all this could not have been provided by the code of an initiating seed. I don't know the specs, but it seems unlikely that the planners had written into the seeds the future position of every piece of Izmir mineral, ergodic autoprogramming doesn't work that way, one must leave room for chaos. So if it wasn't the hand of the planners, whose hand was it? Whose was the talent behind this carving? Who gave grace to the fragile angels, put blood lust in the brows of the stalagmite demons, framed the illusion of refractive flow through the Cathedral's epithelium? Who was the author of this masterpiece? I decided I should read more on nanogenerative technologies.

From a pew I climbed up on a bony ledge of one of the Cathedral's curved ribs. Here, in the middle of the main nave, from the surface of the stone--as through a thick membrane deforming their features--heads of normal size emerge, peer out. Shadows gently cross their foreheads, their cheeks. I put out a hand, touched with the pads of my fingers. It was cold, extremely cold, making the skin crack. I pulled my hand away, fearing frostbite--that would cause trouble, fuss--but pulled too violently! Gravitation on the Izmirids is minimal, a light kick can send you up several meters. I went flying in a wide arc, hit my back against the barrier of the biobubble, which stabilized me a little as I then was thrown toward the tomb. I managed to grab one of the pews, somersaulted, hit the floor with my left shoulder, and my head smacked into stone--it sounds like little now, but at the time I was certain it would be a concussion at least. I didn't lose vision, but pain filled me, shutting out all else. Blinking, I touched my head: sticky. I saw the red on my fingers. My hair was matted with blood. I staggered to my suit, put it on, the helmet too, sat and ran a diagnostic. The microprobes entered me: no fracture, but a long laceration. No important vessel had been hit, there was not much loss of blood. I waited for the dizziness to pass. Still no Gazma. To hell with him. The man was a lunatic, wasn't he, how could I have thought that he would come on time, that he would come at all? It burned when the suit sealed my wound. The sedative began to work. I returned to the Honzel Hotel.

(...)

Mirton left his quarters in the same mess as he had lived in them. When I entered, something fell to the floor. But there were changes: naked walls. Apparently he had taken with him the photographs of the Cathedral. I turned on the projector, but its memory had been erased. I started going through Mirton's things--a good way to kill time, to divert my thoughts: putting this place into any order would easily fill more than two days.

On a dresser I found a box with several dozen rolls of foil: etched enlargements of black-and-white shots of the Cathedral. I looked at them all in turn. Mirton had scribbled on them, made comments in large letters, arrows pointing to lopsided circles enclosing fragments of images, all this in red marker. I taped a few to the wall to examine them more carefully. What was this about? Mirton had underscored certain architectonic details: the cornice of one of the towers, the pseudogargoyles at the portal. Near them he had written: 2 mos. excr.? Perilevium. And: mass transport? And: 3 mm/h.

He had also left books, not bound copies of personal notes but textbooks on nanogeneration: Crysthorn: Structure and Functions; Chaos Chained, or the Pathways of Life; The Programming of Open Negentropic Systems: An Introduction; The Self-Actualizing Language of Nanomachines: A Manual; and the like. I remembered the holo of his that I had almost stumbled into on the first day. So he had been studying the Cathedral from the fundamentals up: the architecture, building strategies, materials.

About crysthorn itself I know enough to be able to go through these books without feeling that I am banging my head against the wall of esoteric high tech. True, I never fully understood the theory of its programming, the mind rebels somehow, refusing the notion of planning what is unforeseeable, of calculating what is incalculable. But the applications I knew, I once even did some sowing myself. It was only a small gazebo by a lake at my parents' place in Hoolstalon. I sowed strictly by the book, following instructions: marked off a rough square, measured by pacing, opened the hermetically sealed crysthorn (the Gazebo Venice version, as I recall), poured the appropriate amount of seed into my hand, and strewed it along the marked lines. A little was left over, so I added that at the corners. I threw on top two buckets of mud prepared earlier. In one night the gazebo had grown nicely. How old was I then, thirteen? Even at thirteen I was impressed by the allowable imprecision of the process: it didn't matter if I sowed exactly along a line or not, if I strewed the seed in a wide band or not; it didn't matter where they fell; it even didn't matter if I planted them all or not--a quarter of them would have served: the instructions said that a dozen seeds would work; the whole bag, twenty decos, was to bring as close to one as possible the probability of obtaining the ideal form of the purchased item. Clearly there is a tremendous difference between a commercial, closed crysthorn like the one that produced the gazebo of my parents and the one-of-a-kind, open crysthorn of the Cathedral. The difference lies in the preprogramming of the code. The crysthorn of the Cathedral belongs to the "incomplete" types: not all the data about the end form are provided. The gazebo, for example, would grow the same, down to the microscopic level, whether you planted its seeds on a volcano, at the bottom of the Lizon Sea, or on a rock of the Horn. The Cathedral, on the other hand, would grow very differently with a change in such minute parameters as the precise moment of sowing.

Over these books I forgot about the passing time (people can indeed contrive to control their thoughts), and only the signal of contact established with the planet returned me to reality. It was after their council.

"There is little I can tell you in this dark hour," said the bishop. "Two alternatives are left, and they are equally tragic. We here have no right to advocate either one. Possibly you will be returned to life on Lizon, should you decide to leave in the face of everything. But, truthfully, there is no basis in logic for depending on that possibility. Staying on the Izmirids, you preserve your life, as they have assured me, for several more years. But then you must die a solitary death, in that most desolate place." He tightened his lips. "People feel that in suffering they are always alone, but that is not true, it is never true. Remember this, there, in the dark. God will not abandon you, my son." He blessed me. "Forgive me, that I sent you there."

Yes, in moments of extremity we return to the basic words, speaking as one speaks to children. At the beginning and at the end, that same honesty, certainty, simplicity.

(...)

A last look at the Cathedral. I took with me a few of Mirton's photographs on foil. What exactly was he after? I suspect that in this way he was tracking changes in the Cathedral's architecture, that he found some error in the crysthorn code, some gap in the subroutines of self-termination. The photographs confirm this. I have walked around the Cathedral several times, probing with my lamp at some of the pieces of the structure that he recorded, comparing them: they are different, they have altered, assuming shapes more or less related. The pieces that I didn't find, I didn't find no doubt because they and their settings have changed too much for me to recognize them from these photographs. How quickly does this take place? Mirton evidently tried to measure the pace. It is surely much slower than the rate of first growth, the Cathedral after all has been standing here for many years, people would have noticed something. But I think that even Mirton wasn't completely sure. Or could he have been on the track of something else?

Gazma flicked past in my cone of light: I saw a quick movement in the upper section of the Cathedral's left tower. He must have hidden himself deeper inside, because afterward I saw only motionless shadow. What is he doing there? And how did he get there? The Cathedral--I don't need to remind myself of this, it's so plain--is not a building subject to ergonomics, its architecture is not in the service of human use, it has no stairways, no ducts or shafts, Gazma must have accomplished no little feat of climbing. The gravitation is weak, true, but if you fall from up there, bones will break, mass is mass, momentum momentum.

I went in. I am standing at the tomb of Izmir. What did that madman say? That there was an attraction? That you couldn't free yourself? Like iron filings. Maybe he. I have felt nothing like that. I take off my helmet and gloves. The stone marker is cold and smooth. The angular face of Izmir Predú fills my hand. I turned on the journal and once again listened to the recording of my conversation with Telesfer at the CFG laboratories. Let's say that the Black Wool is an artifact of the aliens. That it's a Hoan machine, though we have not been able to discover the medium of its action. The traces of a gamma burst suggest a cosmic catastrophe on a grand scale. The Izmirids have been crossing the interstellar void for hundreds of thousands of years. Is it possible that they were intentionally aimed into space before the explosion? For what purpose? Where are they headed? If not for the accidental encounter with Madeleine, they would have ended their voyage in orbit around Lévie. It's one or the other: there is a purpose or there isn't. But no. Take the crysthorn. There are midway solutions. Except the time--such time--the vast stretch of millions of years--is surely outside the reckoning of any civilization! And even if all this is true, what then is the Wool? It keeps the asteroids in a group. To what end? For if that was its only function . . . The sense, the sense! The marker at my hand is so smooth, it's practically wet. Deo optimo maximo. That carving is lovely: fortunate, that at least it was not left to chance. It's really not hard to understand Gazma's fascination, esthetics is the first language of religion. A hundred ninety-five minutes. The reds, yellows, and blues of Madeleine shine like dawn through the ribs of the Cathedral, everything here is either in shadow or painted with viscous colors. I'll sit, I'll quiet my heart. I thought that it would be mainly fear, an animal terror, but I feel only regret now, a great, motionless, heavy regret, the squeezing weight of dark water. No thoughts, no instructions for the body, even my eyes are dry. There is only a little tightening in my chest. But why speak, silence is better.

Jacek Dukaj

Translated by Michael Kandel