The Revelation Space Collection by Alastair Reynolds Read Free Book Online

‘If it really was something the Amarantin caused to happen . . . and if it really did coincide with them achieving spaceflight - then it might be of more than academic interest.’
    ‘I despise that phrase. Academic interest - as if any other kind were automatically more worthy. But you’re right. We have to know.’
    Pascale came closer. ‘Know what, exactly?’
    ‘What it was they did that made their sun kill them.’ Sylveste turned to face her, pinning her down with the oversized silvery facets of his artificial eyes. ‘So that we don’t end up making the same mistake.’
    ‘You mean it was an accident?’
    ‘I very much doubt that they did it deliberately, Pascale.’
    ‘I realise that.’ He had condescended to her, and she hated that, he knew. He also hated himself for doing it. ‘I also know that stone-age aliens just don’t have the means to influence the behaviour of their star, accidentally or otherwise.’
    ‘We know they were more advanced than that,’ Sylveste said. ‘We know they had the wheel and gunpowder; a rudimentary science of optics and an interest in astronomy for agrarian purposes. Humanity went from that level to spaceflight in no more than five centuries. It would be prejudiced to assume another species was not capable of the same, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘But where’s the evidence?’ Pascale stood to shake rivulets of settled dust from her greatcoat. ‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say - none of the high-tech artefacts survived, because they were intrinsically less durable than earlier ones. But even if there was evidence - how does that change things? Even the Conjoiners don’t go around tinkering with stars, and they’re a lot more advanced than the rest of humanity, us included.’
    ‘I know. That’s precisely what bothers me.’
    ‘Then what does the writing say?’
    Sylveste sighed and looked back at it again. He had hoped that the distraction would allow his subconscious to work at the piece, and that now the meaning of the inscription would snap into clarity, like the answer to one of the psychological problems they had been posed before the Shrouder mission. But the moment of revelation stubbornly refused to come; the graphicforms were still not yielding meaning. Or perhaps, he thought, it was his expectations that were at fault. He had been hoping for something momentous; something that would confirm his ideas, terrifying as they were.
    But instead, the writing seemed only to commemorate something that had happened here - something that might have been of great importance in Amarantin history, but which - set against his expectations - was bound to be parochial in the extreme. It would take a full computer analysis to be sure, and he had only been able to read the top metre or so of the text - but already he could feel the crush of disappointment. Whatever this obelisk represented, it was no longer of interest to him.
    ‘Something happened here,’ Sylveste said. ‘Maybe a battle, or the appearance of a god. That’s all it is - a marker stone. We’ll know more when we unearth it and date the context layer. We can run a TE measurement on the artefact itself, too.’
    ‘It’s not what you were looking for, is it?’
    ‘I thought it might be, for a while.’ Then Sylveste looked down, towards the lowest exposed part of the obelisk. The text ended a few inches above the highest layer of cladding, and something else began, extending downwards out of sight. It was a diagram, of some sort - he could see the topmost arcs of several concentric circles, and that was all. What was it?
    Sylveste could not - would not - begin to guess. The storm was growing stronger. No stars at all were visible now, only a single occluding sheet of dust, roaring overhead like a great bat’s wing. It would be a kind of hell when they left the pit.
    ‘Give me something to dig with,’ he said. And then started scraping away at the permafrost around the topmost layer of the sarcophagus,