‘I recognise this area. It’s where we found the obelisk.’
‘Yes,’ Pascale said.
The landscape was craggy and mostly unvegetated, the horizon ruined by uprearing broken arches and improbable rock pillars, all of which looked on the point of imminent collapse. There was little flat ground, just deep fissures, like a calcified unmade bed. They came in over a solidified lava stream then landed on a flat hexagonal pad surrounded by armoured surface buildings. It was only midday, yet the dust in the air attenuated the sunlight so severely that it was necessary to bathe the pad in floodlights. Militia dashed across the ground to meet the flight, hiding their eyes against the light from the aircraft’s underside.
Sylveste grabbed his mask, regarded it disdainfully, then left it on the seat. He needed no help making it the short distance to the building, and if he did, no one was going to know about it.
The militia escorted them into the shack. It was years since Sylveste had been this close to Girardieau. He was shocked at how small his adversary now seemed. Girardieau was built like some piece of squat mining machinery. He looked capable of scrabbling his way through solid basalt. His red hair was short and wirelike, sprinkled with white. His eyes were wide and quizzical, like a startled Pekinese pup.
‘Strange allegiances,’ he said, as one of the guards sealed the door behind them. ‘Who’d have thought you and I would ever find ourselves with so much in common, Dan?’
‘Less than you imagine,’ Sylveste said.
Girardieau led the team forward through a ribbed corridor lined with discarded machines, grimed beyond recognition. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what all this is about.’
‘I have my suspicions.’
Girardieau’s laughter boomed off the derelict equipment around them. ‘Remember that obelisk they dug up hereabouts? Of course — it was you who pointed out the phenomenological difficulty with the TE dating method used on the rock.’
‘Yes,’ Sylveste said tartly.
The implications of the TE dating had been enormous. No natural crystalline structure was ever completely perfect in its lattice geometry. There would always be gaps in the lattice where atoms were missing, and in those holes, electrons would gradually build up over time, knocked out of the rest of the lattice by cosmic-ray bombardments and natural radioactivity. Since the holes tended to fill up with electrons at a steady rate, the number of trapped electrons provided a dating method which could be used on inorganic artefacts. There was a catch, of course: the TE method was only useful if the traps had been emptied at some point in the past. Luckily, firing or exposure to light was enough to bleach — empty — the outermost traps in the crystal. TE analysis of the obelisk had shown that all the surface-layer traps had been bleached at the same time, which happened to be nine hundred and ninety thousand years earlier, within the errors of the measurement. Only something like the Event could have bleached an object as large as the obelisk.
There was nothing new in this; thousands of Amarantin artefacts had been dated back to the Event using the same technique. But none of them had been buried deliberately. The obelisk, on the other hand, had been emplaced deliberately in a stone sarcophagus after it had been bleached.
After the Event.
Even in the new regime, this realisation had been enough to draw attention to the obelisk. It had stimulated renewed interest in the inscriptions over the last year. On his own, Sylveste’s interpretation had been sketchy at best, but now what remained of the archaeological community came to his aid. There was a new freedom in Cuvier; Girardieau’s regime had relaxed some of its proscriptions on Amarantin research, even as the True Path opposition grew more fanatical.
Strange allegiances, as Girardieau had said.
‘Once we had an idea of what the obelisk was telling us,’ Girardieau said, ‘we sectioned the whole area and excavated down sixty or seventy metres. We found dozens more of them — all bleached prior to burial, all carrying basically the same inscriptions. It isn’t a record of something that happened in this area at all. It’s a record of something buried here.’
‘Something big,’ Sylveste said. ‘Something they must have planned before the Event — perhaps even buried before it, and then placed the markers afterwards. The last cultural act of a society poised on annihilation. Just how big, Girardieau?’
‘Very.’ And then Girardieau told him how they had surveyed the area first using an array of thumpers: devices for generating ground-penetrating Rayleigh waves, sensitive to the density of buried objects. They’d had to use the largest thumpers, Girardieau said, which meant that the depth of the object had to be at the extreme range of the technique; hundreds of metres down. Later they had brought in the colony’s most sensitive imaging gravitometers, and only then had they gained any idea of what it was they were seeking.
It was nothing small.
‘Is this dig connected with the Inundationist program?’
‘Completely independent. Pure science, in other words. Does that surprise you? I always promised we’d never abandon the Amarantin studies. Maybe if you’d believed me all those years ago we’d be working together now, opposing the True Pathers — the real enemy.’
Sylveste said, ‘You showed no interest in the Amarantin until the obelisk was discovered. But that scared you, didn’t it? Because for once it was incontrovertible evidence; nothing I could have faked or manipulated. For once you had to allow the possibility that I might have been right all along.’
They stepped into a capacious elevator, outfitted with plush seats, Inundationist aquatints on the walls. A thick metal door hummed shut. One of Girardieau’s aides flipped open a panel and palmed a button. The floor fell away sickeningly, their bodies only sluggishly catching up.
‘How far down are we going?’
‘Not far,’ Girardieau said. ‘Only a couple of kilometres.’
When Khouri awakened they had already left orbit around Yellowstone. She could see the planet through a porthole in her quarters, much smaller than it had looked before. The region around Chasm City was a freckle on the surface. The Rust Belt was only a tawny smoke ring, too far away for any of its component structures to be visible. There would be no stopping the ship now: it would accelerate steadily at one gee until it had left the Epsilon Eridani system completely, and it would not stop accelerating until it was moving barely a whisker below the speed of light. It was no accident that they called these vessels lighthuggers.
She had been tricked.
‘It’s a complication,’ the Mademoiselle said, after long minutes of silence. ‘But no more than that.’
Khouri rubbed at the painful lump on her skull where the Komuso — Sajaki was his name, she now knew — had knocked her out with his shakuhachi.
‘What do you mean, a complication?’ she shouted. ‘They’ve kidnapped me, you stupid bitch!’
‘Keep your voice down, dear girl. They don’t know about me now and there’s no reason they have to in the future.’ The entoptic image smiled jaggedly. ‘In fact, I’m probably your best friend right now. You should do your best to safeguard our mutual secret.’ She examined her fingernails. ‘Now, let’s approach this rationally. What was our objective?’
‘You know damn well.’
‘Yes. You were to infiltrate this crew and travel with them to Resurgam. What is now your status?’
‘The Volyova bitch keeps calling me her recruit.’
‘In other words, your infiltration has been spectacularly successful. ’ She was strolling nonchalantly around the room now, one hand on her hip, the other tapping an index finger against her lower lip. ‘And where exactly are we now headed?’