“It seems unlikely that we would travel hundreds of light years from Earth and encounter something so recognizable.”
Clifford shook his head. “I got a picture of immensity, of ultimate importance,” he admitted. “But nothing clearer than that. What did you see?”
“I saw Mary,” Lamont replied, feeling slightly self-conscious. “A stained glass image of Mary in an old cathedral.”
“The Virgin Mother?” The engineer responded, his dusty eyebrows lifting. “Interesting.”
“Why?” Asked the newspaperman.
“Well, like I said before, I think the tower uses images and ideas that are already in our minds to help us understand things that would be otherwise too far outside our experience to take in. We both saw religious imagery. The fact that your Catholic background gives you a pre-existing conception of a Divine Feminine might have made you receptive to a different part of the message than I was.”
“Brilliant,” Lamont answered dryly, “Except that I ain’t Catholic. Never have been.”
Clifford made a face as if he were being introduced to a new piece of evidence that uncomfortably conflicted with a pet theory. “Really?” He asked. “Are you certain?”
“Shouldn’t I be?” Lamont countered.
“Well,” Clifford mumbled, “It seems unlikely that we would travel hundreds of light years from Earth and encounter something so recognizable. After all, what we’ve seen of the tower has been evidently alien in the extreme. It’s just that certain experiences within it have carried a feeling of…”
“Familiarity,” Lamont finished his sentence.
“Exactly,” Clifford nodded, becoming animated again. “In fact, once you set aside the external strangeness, the general function of the tower seems compellingly similar to…” He hesitated.
“To what?” Lamont urged.
Clifford licked his lips and picked up the cup again. “I don’t know if I should talk about it.”
"the general function of the tower seems compellingly similar to…" .... a chapel at the end of the universe.