Alastair Reynolds: The Revelation Space Collection

‘Perhaps,’ Sylveste said, reaching down and touching one of the skulls, ‘we were meant to think that.’

‘No,’ Pascale said. ‘As the tissue dried, it distorted them.’

‘Unless they were buried like this.’

Feeling the skull through his gloves — they transmitted tactile data to his fingertips — he was reminded of a yellow room high in Chasm City, with aquatints of methane icescapes on the walls. There had been liveried servitors moving through the guests with sweetmeats and liqueurs; drapes of coloured crêpe spanning the belvedered ceiling; the air bright with sickly entoptics in the current vogue: seraphim, cherubim, hummingbirds, fairies. He remembered guests: most of them associates of the family; people he either barely recognised or detested, for his friends had been few in number. His father had been late as usual; the party already winding down by the time Calvin deigned to show up. This was normal then; the time of Calvin’s last and greatest project, and the realisation of it was in itself a slow death; no less so than the suicide he would bring upon himself at the project’s culmination.

He remembered his father producing a box, its sides bearing a marquetry of entwined ribonucleic strands.

‘Open it,’ Calvin had said.

He remembered taking it; feeling its lightness. He had snatched the top off to reveal a bird’s nest of fibrous packing material. Within was a speckled brown dome the same colour as the box. It was the upper part of a skull, obviously human, with the jaw missing.

He remembered a silence falling across the room.

‘Is that all?’ Sylveste had said, just loud enough so that everyone in the room heard it. ‘An old bone? Well, thanks, Dad. I’m humbled.’

‘As well you should be,’ Calvin said.

And the trouble was, as Sylveste had realised almost immediately, Calvin was right. The skull was incredibly valuable; two hundred thousand years old — a woman from Atapuerca, Spain, he soon learned. Her time of death had been obvious enough from the context in which she was buried, but the scientists who had unearthed her had refined the estimate using the best techniques of their day: potassium-argon dating of the rocks in the cave where she’d been buried, uranium-series dating of travertine deposits on the walls, fission-track dating of volcanic glasses, thermoluminescence dating of burnt flint fragments. They were techniques which — with improvements in calibration and application — remained in use among the dig teams on Resurgam. Physics allowed only so many methods to date objects. Sylveste should have seen all that in an instant and recognised the skull for what it was: the oldest human object on Yellowstone, carried to the Epsilon Eridani system centuries earlier, and then lost during the colony’s upheavals. Calvin’s unearthing of it was a small miracle in itself.

Yet the flush of shame he felt stemmed less from ingratitude than from the way he had allowed his ignorance to unmask itself, when it could have been so easily concealed. It was a weakness he would never allow himself again. Years later, the skull had travelled with him to Resurgam, to remind him always of that vow.

He could not fail now.

‘If what you’re implying is the case,’ Pascale said, ‘then they must have been buried like that for a reason.’

‘Maybe as a warning,’ Sylveste said, and stepped down towards the three students.

‘I was afraid you might say something like that,’ Pascale said, following him. ‘And what exactly might this terrible warning have concerned?’

Her question was largely rhetorical, as Sylveste well knew. She understood exactly what he believed about the Amarantin. She also seemed to enjoy needling him about those beliefs; as if by forcing him to state them repeatedly, she might eventually cause him to expose some logical error in his own theories; one that even he would have to admit undermined the whole argument.

‘The Event,’ Sylveste said, fingering the fine black line behind the nearest cofferdam as he spoke.

‘The Event happened to the Amarantin,’ Pascale said. ‘It wasn’t anything they had any say in. And it happened quickly, too. They didn’t have time to go about burying bodies in dire warning, even if they’d had any idea about what was happening to them.’

‘They angered the gods,’ Sylveste said.

‘Yes,’ Pascale said. ‘I think we all agree that they would have interpreted the Event as evidence of theistic displeasure, within the constraints of their belief system — but there wouldn’t have been time to express that belief in any permanent form before they all died, much less bury bodies for the benefit of future archaeologists from a different species.’ She lifted her hood over her head and tightened the drawstring — fine plumes of dust were starting to settle down into the pit, and the air was no longer as still as it had been a few minutes earlier. ‘But you don’t think so, do you?’ Without waiting for an answer, she fixed a large pair of bulky goggles over her eyes, momentarily disturbing the edge of her fringe, and looked down at the object which was slowly being uncovered.

Pascale’s goggles accessed data from the imaging gravitometers stationed around the Wheeler grid, overlaying the stereoscopic picture of buried masses on the normal view. Sylveste had only to instruct his eyes to do likewise. The ground on which they were standing turned glassy, insubstantial — a smoky matrix in which something huge lay entombed. It was an obelisk — a single huge block of shaped rock, itself encased in a series of stone sarcophagi. The obelisk was twenty metres tall. The dig had exposed only a few centimetres of the top. There was evidence of writing down one side, in one of the standard late-phase Amarantin graphicforms. But the imaging gravitometers lacked the spatial resolution to reveal the text. The obelisk would have to be dug out before they could learn anything.

Sylveste told his eyes to return to normal vision. ‘Work faster,’ he told his students. ‘I don’t care if you incur minor abrasions to the surface. I want at least a metre of it visible by the end of tonight.’

One of the students turned to him, still kneeling. ‘Sir, we heard the dig would have to be abandoned.’

‘Why on earth would I abandon a dig?’

‘The storm, sir.’

‘Damn the storm.’ He was turning away when Pascale took his arm, a little too roughly.

‘They’re right to be worried, Dan.’ She spoke quietly, for his benefit alone. ‘I heard about that advisory, too. We should be heading back toward Mantell.’

‘And lose this?’

‘We’ll come back again.’

‘We might never find it, even if we bury a transponder.’ He knew he was right: the position of the dig was uncertain and maps of this area were not particularly detailed; compiled quickly when the Lorean had made orbit from Yellowstone forty years earlier. Ever since the comsat girdle had been destroyed in the mutiny, twenty years later — when half the colonists elected to steal the ship and return home — there had been no accurate way of determining position on Resurgam. And many a transponder had simply failed in a razorstorm.

‘It’s still not worth risking human lives for,’ Pascale said.

‘It might be worth much more than that.’ He snapped a finger at the students. ‘Faster. Use the servitor if you must. I want to see the top of that obelisk by dawn.’

Sluka, his senior research student, muttered a word under her breath.

‘Something to contribute?’ Sylveste asked.

Sluka stood for what must have been the first time in hours. He could see the tension in her eyes. The little spatula she had been using dropped on the ground, beside the mukluks she wore on her feet. She snatched the mask away from her face, breathing Resurgam air for a few seconds while she spoke. ‘We need to talk.’