“. . . of the illness, seems unchanged since last entry. No more than a few millimetres of encroachment. Cryogenic functions are still green, miraculously. But I think we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the unit’s failure at some point in the future . . . ” Thinking to herself, that when it did fail, if they were not speedy in transferring the Captain to a new reefer (exactly how was an unanswered question), then he would certainly be one less problem for them to worry about. His own problems would be over as well—she sincerely hoped.
She told the bracelet: “Close log file.” And then added, wishing devoutly that she had spared herself one smoke for this moment: “Warm Captain’s brain core by fifty millikelvins.”
Experience had told her that this was the minimum necessary temperature increase. Short of it, his brain would remain locked in glacial stasis. Above, the plague would begin to transform him too rapidly for her tastes.
“Captain?” she said. “Can you hear me? It’s Ilia.”
Sylveste stepped down from the crawler and walked back towards the grid. During his meeting with Calvin the wind had increased appreciably; he could feel it stinging his cheeks, the scouring dust a witch’s caress.
“I hope that little conversation was beneficial,” Pascale said, snatching away her mask to bellow into the wind. She knew all about Calvin, even though she had never spoken to him directly. “Have you agreed to see sense now?”
“Get Sluka for me.”
Ordinarily she might have rejected an order like that; now she just accepted his mood and returned to the other crawler, emerging shortly afterwards with Sluka and a handful of other workers.
“You’re ready to listen to us, I take it?” Sluka stood before him, the wind whipping a loose strand of hair across her goggles. She took periodic inhalations from her mask, cupped in one hand, while the other hand rested on her hip. “If so, I think you’ll find we can be reasonable. We all have your reputation in mind. None of us will speak of this matter once we return to Mantell. We’ll say you gave the order to withdraw once the advisory came in. The credit will be yours.”
“And you think any of that matters in the long term?”
Sluka snarled: “What’s so damned important about one obelisk? For that matter, what’s so damned important about the Amarantin?”
“You never really saw the big picture, did you?”
Discreetly—but not so discreetly that he missed her doing it—Pascale had begun taping the exchange, standing to one side with her compad’s detachable camera in one hand. “Some people might say there never was one to see,” Sluka said. “That you inflated the significance of the Amarantin just to keep the archaeologists in business.”
“You’d say that, wouldn’t you, Sluka? But then again, you were never exactly one of us to begin with.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if Girardieau had wanted to plant a dissenter in our midst, you’d have made an excellent candidate.”
Sluka turned back to what Sylveste was increasingly thinking of as her mob. “Listen to the poor bastard—sinking into conspiracy theories already. Now we’re getting a taste of what the rest of the colony has seen for years.” Then her attention snapped back to him. “There’s no point talking to you. We’re leaving as soon as we have the equipment packed—sooner, if the storm intensifies. You can come with us.” She caught her breath from the mask, colour returning to her cheeks. “Or you can take your chances out here. The choice is entirely yours.”
He looked beyond her, to the mob. “Go on, then. Leave. Don’t allow anything as trivial as loyalty to get in your way. Unless one of you has the guts to stay here and finish the job they came to do.” He looked from face to face, meeting only awkwardly averted gazes. He barely knew any of their names. He recognised them, but only from recent experience; certainly none of them had come on the ship from Yellowstone; certainly none had known anything other than Resurgam, with its handful of human settlements strewn like a few rubies across otherwise total desolation. To them he must have seemed monstrously atavistic.
“Sir,” one of them said—possibly the one who had first alerted him to the storm. “Sir; it’s not that we don’t respect you. But we have to think of ourselves as well. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s buried here, it isn’t worth this risk.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Sylveste said. “It’s worth more risk than you can possibly imagine. Don’t you understand? The Event didn’t happen to the Amarantin. They caused it. They made it happen.”
Sluka shook her head slowly. “They made their sun flare up? Is that what you actually believe?”
“In a word, yes.”
“Then you’re a lot further gone than I feared.” Sluka turned her back to him to address her mob. “Power up the crawlers. We’re leaving now.”
“What about the equipment?” Sylveste said.
“It can stay here and rust for all I care.” The mob began to disperse towards the two hulking machines.
“Wait!” Sylveste shouted. “Listen to me! You only need to take one crawler—there’s enough room for all of you in one, if you leave the equipment behind.”
Sluka faced him again. “And you?”
“I’ll stay here—finish the work myself, along with anyone else who wants to stay.”
She shook her head, snatching off her mask to spit on the ground in disgust. But when she left, she caught up with the rest of her brigade and directed them towards the nearest crawler, leaving the other—the one containing his stateroom—for him alone. Sluka’s mob entered the machine, some of them carrying small items of equipment or boxed artefacts and bones recovered from the dig: scholarly instincts prevailing even in rebellion. He watched the crawler’s ramps and hatches fold shut, then the machine rose on its legs, shuffled around and moved away from the dig. In less than a minute it had passed out of view completely, and the noise of its engines was no longer audible above the roar of the wind.
He looked around to see who was still with him.
There was Pascale—but that was almost inevitable; he suspected she would dog him to his grave if there was a good story in it. A handful of students who had resisted Sluka; ashamedly he could not place their names. Perhaps half a dozen more still down in the Wheeler grid, if he was lucky.
Composing himself, he snapped his fingers towards two of those who had stayed. “Start dismantling the imaging gravitometers; we won’t need them again.” He addressed another pair. “Begin at the back of the grid and start collecting all the tools left behind by Sluka’s deserters, together with field notes and any boxed artefacts. When you’re done, you can meet me at the base of the large pit.”
“What are you planning now?” Pascale said, turning off her camera and allowing it to whisk back into her compad.
“I would have thought it was obvious,” Sylveste said. “I’m going to see what it says on that obelisk.”
Chasm City, Yellowstone, Epsilon Eridani system, 2524
The suite console chimed as Ana Khouri was brushing her teeth. She came out of the bathroom, foam on her lips.
“Morning, Case.”
The hermetic glided into the apartment, his travelling palanquin decorated in ornate scrollwork, with a tiny, dark window in the front side. When the light was right she could just make out K. C. Ng’s deathly pale face bobbing behind an inch of green glass.
“Hey, you look great,” he said, voice rasping through the box’s speaker grille. “Where can I get hold of whatever perks you up?”
“It’s coffee, Case. Too much of the damned stuff.”
“I was joking,” Ng said. “You look like shit warmed over.”
She drew her palm across her mouth, removing the foam. “I’ve only just woken up, you bastard.”
“Excuses.” Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.
The voice rasped again, “Pardon me, but we do have a kill scheduled for this morning, if I’m not very much mistaken. You remember this fellow Taraschi we’ve been trying to take out for the last two months? Ring any bells in there? It’s rather crucial that you do, because you happen to be the individual assigned to put him out of misery.”
“Off my back, Case.”
“Anatomically problematic even if I desired to locate myself thus, dear Khouri. But seriously, we have a probable kill location pegged, and an estimated time of demise. Are you sharpness personified?”
Khouri poured herself a final few sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
“I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then let us discuss matters of a terminal nature, at least where Taraschi is concerned.”
Ng began to hit her with the final details for the kill. Most of it was already in the plan, or stuff that she had guessed for herself, based on her experience of previous kills. Taraschi was to be her fifth consecutive assassination, so she was beginning to grasp the wider scope of the game. Though they were not always obvious, the game had its own rules, subtly reiterated in the grand movements of each kill. The media attention was even picking up, her name being bandied around Shadowplay circles with increasing frequency, and Case was apparently setting up some juicy, high-profile targets for her next few hunts. She was, she felt, on the way to becoming one of the top hundred or so assassins on the planet; elite company 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 floods and held it by hand over the side of the obelisk. From somewhere above lightning strobed: electricity coursing between dust planes in the storm.