“It’s not,” Rosemary insisted. “A chorus is just a collection of voices. A choir has a specifically religious meaning. Ever since we got here, you’ve been projecting religious overtones on everything we see. I think it’s unbalancing you.”
“It’s an alien world,” Rosemary said. “Different gravity, different physics, different lighting. Maybe you were just daunted by the strangeness of it.”
“Could be,” Lamont conceded. “But I can’t shake the feeling. I mean—what is this place, Rosemary? At some point, God knows how long ago, somebody picked the surface of that weird, lifeless moon as the foundation of a tower hundreds of miles tall. The tower was built for something, we don’t know what, but we know that it’s using the surface of the moon to block radio noise so that it can send those signals out into the void. The voices of the choir.”
“Chorus,” Rosemary corrected. “Ashton called it the chorus, but for some reason you keep calling it a choir.”
“Same thing,” Lamont replied dismissively.
“It’s not,” Rosemary insisted. “A chorus is just a collection of voices. A choir has a specifically religious meaning. Ever since we got here, you’ve been projecting religious overtones on everything we see. I think it’s unbalancing you.”
“You heard what the colonists were babbling after spending some time with that statue in the grove,” Lamont countered. “You’re going to tell me that’s not a religious experience?”
Rosemary shrugged slightly. “I’m not denying they had a religious experience. But what does that really mean, Monty? It means they had an experience that they interpreted religiously. If we really want to understand what this tower was built for, we’ve got to be neutral. We’ve got to resist the urge to impose our own biases on something that’s totally outside our domain. After all, that’s the one thing we know for certain about this place.”
“What’s that?” Lamont asked.
“It has nothing to do with us,” Rosemary explained, her tone suggesting that she was pointing out the painfully obvious. “None of it has. We’re out here looking for things we can use, places we can live. But it was all here before we were, and it wasn’t made for us. We’re just barging in. We’re the intruders.”
Rosemary doesn't know about the United Space coin or the United Space antenna does she?