Patron of the Arts

Nova stood next to me as we stared up at the beautiful alien building glowing in the distant light of Sol. “I never tire of coming here,”

she said. “It’s always the same, yet . . . never the same.”

I debated whether to unlash the big stasis cylinder holding my equipment now or later, and decided later. The weather satellite had told of a sandstorm to the west, so we put on our spacesuits, just in case. I helped Nova into the straps of her big backpack full of an assortment of equipment and food. Then I pulled on mine, bending with the weight even in this lighter gravity.

I had a difficult time finding the spiraling steps, for in this light everything looked different. That cascade of liquid frozen crystal I remembered as being elsewhere, and that wall of starbursts was entirely new. I supposed I had passed it in the dark and not noticed. We searched through an emerald cavern that looked somewhat familiar, then found ourselves going upward instead of down, through a colonnade of amber trees, and into a bower of bluegreen flowers.

Here we rested and made love and slept. I awoke in the night and felt her next to me, loving and trusting. I looked straight up, through a transparent ceiling that transformed the stars into blossoms of pinpoint suns. I felt calm and, perhaps for the first time in my life, serene. In the morning we found the opening into the base rock without trouble. Nova and I went out to carry in the transporter equipment. In our suits and backpacks we went into the shaped stone and along the passage to the room with the mural on the ceiling. I set the equipment with the focusing device on the sandpile beneath the mural. I knew of no other place to find my answers. Perhaps the answers were within me, simply undiscovered, as all magic is unexplained science.

I turned the light on the ceiling to show Nova the mural, but she wasn’t looking. Her own light was on a dark blotch in the sand.

“It’s your blood, isn’t it?”

I nodded. There were the marks of my feet and the disturbed sand where I had twice lain, once in fear and once in pain. “Look up,” I said.

She looked and her soft gasp echoed in the small room. “I had forgotten how strange and beautiful it was,” she said. She sat down on the sandpile and looked up. “We used to come here sometimes, when I was a child. I found this on our first visit. I was very small, and I got separated from the others. I lay here and . . .”

Her face grew solemn. “I think I slept and I had strange dreams. I woke when I heard them calling me, and I found my way out. I came here every time after that, down here, and . . .” Her eyes searched the faded mural. “I had forgotten . . . almost . . . it was always very disturbing, but . . . I always came.”

She laughed self-consciously and patted the sand. “Come, touch the sands of Mars,” she said.

Lying next to her I stared up at the galactic swirl of the unformed shapes. What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all? Was this some sort of primitive Martian cave drawing, of no meaning to anyone but the alien artist, or to the pre-historic tribe he belonged to? Or was this some sort of mandala, or focusing image? Was it meaningless decoration, design without content, the painting of a madman locked away forever in a red stone dungeon?

My eyes wandered over the flaked, faded mural, trying to replace the missing parts, merging, blending, brightening . . . Was there some sort of galactic center to it all? Did the picture truly represent a spreading of intelligence as it seemed to do?

The silent arms turned without words. The galactic mural spun silently. Eons passed. Suns were born and grew old and shrank to black holes and waited for rebirth. Still the spiral moved, shaping and being shaped, expanding and changing.

Lifeforms proliferated, changed, died, moved on, changed. The galactic swirl turned in its majestic sweep, the amorphic arms with their tips of life, moving past . . . pulling me along . . . pulling Nova . . . we melted, blended, linked . . .

There was the slightest shift of awareness, a millimeter of reorientation, and the sudden awareness of a new reality. I knew then what the galactic mural’s true function was. It was a focusing device, a cosmic mandala—and beyond that the supreme creation of the ancient Martians. We linked through the mandala to their ultimate concept, a gigantic organic computer, self-perpetuating, self-aware, nearly eternal. Carried by a flood of shifting reality, we moved into full-phased contact with this incredible storehouse of information, this vast thinking machine, this still-living heart of the Martian civilization. I suddenly knew how primitive man’s toddler science of mnemonics really was. We were still in the “rhyme to remind” stage and they had created the mural as a focusing and teaching device before man on Earth had left the Bronze Age.

Buried in the sand drift in the old and seemingly meaningless room was a stone bench, a kindergarten chair-and-desk for Martian children. It was a classroom where young Martians had learned the first steps in controlling the racial computer. It had lain, long unused, until I had stumbled into it.

Now I looked, really looked, up through the stone, into the crystal structure above us and saw it for what it really was, not an ancient ruler’s whim, not the crowning achievement of a dynasty, but an organic crystal entity, a storehouse and machine, a function and a personality fused into a living work of art. Each microfleck of crystal was stressed-just-so and linked to another, a latticework of knowledge and function that had lasted across the millenia, a matrix of reality that moved out of time and space as it needed. And, like a tool that is decorated, it was also beautiful, and now, for the first time, I saw how beautiful. I merged into the mental web of the Star Palace and saw things that man had not yet dreamed possible. I saw the simple methods whereby man might control his own body. I saw the techniques of virtually instant