Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online

indeed.
    “Right,” she said. “Under the Monument, plaza level eight, west annex, one hour. Couldn’t be easier.”
    “Aren’t you forgetting one thing?”
    “Right. Where’s the kill weapon, Case?”
    Ng’s form nodded behind her. “Where the tooth fairy left it, dear girl.”
    And then he turned his box and retreated from the room, leaving only a faint whiff of lubricant. Khouri, frowning, reached a hand slowly beneath the pillow on her bed. There was something, just as Case had said. There had been, nothing there when she went to sleep, but this sort of thing hardly bothered her these days. The company always had moved in mysterious ways.
    Soon, she was ready.
    She called a cable-car from the roof, the kill weapon snuggling under her coat. The car detected the weapon and the presence of implants in her head, and would have refused to carry her had she not shown it her Omega Point ident, grafted beneath the nail of her right index finger, making a tiny holographic target symbol seem to dance beneath the keratin. “Monument to the Eighty,” Khouri said.
     
     
    Sylveste stepped off the ladder and walked across the stepped base of the pit until he reached the pool of light around the obelisk’s exposed tip. Sluka and one of the other archaeologists had deserted him, but the one remaining worker—assisted by the servitor—had managed to uncover nearly a metre of the object, peeling away the nested layers of the stone sarcophagi to reach the massive block of obsidian, skilfully carved, on which Amarantin graphicforms had been engraved in precise lines. Most of it was textual: rows of ideopicts. The archaeologists understood the basics of Amarantin language, though there had been no Rosetta stone to aid them. The Amarantin were the eighth dead alien culture discovered by humanity within fifty light years of Earth, but there was no evidence that any of those eight species had come into contact with each other. Nor could the Pattern Jugglers or the Shrouders offer assistance: neither had revealed anything remotely resembling a written language. Sylveste, who had come into contact with both the Jugglers and the Shrouders—or at least the latter’s technology-appreciated that as well as anyone.
    Instead, computers had cracked the Amarantin language. It had taken thirty years—correlating millions of artefacts—but finally a consistent model had been evolved which could determine the broad meaning of most inscriptions. It helped that, at least towards the end of their reign, there had only been one Amarantin tongue, and that it had changed very slowly, so that the same model could interpret inscriptions which had been made tens of thousands of years apart. Of course, nuances of meaning were another thing entirely. That was where human intuition—and theory—came in.
    Amarantin writing was not, however, like anything in human experience. All Amarantin texts were stereoscopic—consisting of interlaced lines which had to be merged in the reader’s visual cortex. Their ancestors had once been something like birds—flying dinosaurs, but with the intelligence of lemurs. At some point in their past their eyes had been situated on opposite sides of their skulls, leading to a highly bicameral mind, each hemisphere synthesising its own mental model of the world. Later, they had became hunters and evolved binocular vision, but their mental wiring still owed something to that earlier phase of development. Most Amarantin artefacts mirrored their mental duality, with a pronounced symmetry about the vertical axis.
    The obelisk was no exception.
    Sylveste had no need for the special goggles his coworkers needed to read Amarantin graphicforms: the stereoscopic merging was easily accommodated within his own eyes, employing one of Calvin’s more useful algorithms. But the act of reading was still tortuous, requiring strenuous concentration.
    “Give me some light here,” he said, and the student unclipped one of the portable