What Order to Read Revelation Space Series

Synopsis

Dr. Dan Sylveste, an archaeologist who has for years been fascinated with the long-dead conflicting race the Amarantin, is about to find something that could modify the form of mankind. But earlier he tin can act on anything his wife is killed and he is captured when a coup sweeps across the planet Resurgam. Meanwhile, an astonishing send bearing a coiffure of militaristic cyborgs and a kidnapped Gunnery Officer is begetting downward on Resurgam, crossing light years of space to enlist Sylveste's help to save their metamorphosing Captain. Merely Sylveste, or, more than accurately, the software programme containing his father's knowledge that he carries in his heed, can save the Helm. None of them tin anticipate the calamity that will upshot when they see, a cataclysm that volition sweep through infinite and could decide the ultimate fate of humanity.

Extract

One

Mantell Sector, North Nekhebet, Resurgam, Delta Pavonis system, 2551

In that location was a razorstorm coming in.

Sylveste sood on the edge of the digging and wondered if any of his labours would survive the dark. The archeological dig was an array of deep foursquare shafts separated by baulks of sheer-sided soil: the classical Wheeler box-grid. The shafts went downwards tens of metres, walled by transparent cofferdams spun from hyperdiamond. A million years of stratified geological history pressed against the sheets. Just information technology would have only 1 skillful dustfall i proficient razorstorm to make full the shafts about to the surface.

"Confirmation, sir," said one of his team, emerging from the crouched class of the first crawler. The man'southward voice was deadened behind his breather mask. "Cuvier'south just issued a severe weather advisory for the whole North Nekhebet landmass. They're advising all surface teams to return to the nearest base of operations."

"Y'all're proverb we should pack up and drive back to Mantell?"

"It's going to exist a difficult 1, sir." The man fidgeted, drawing the collar of his jacket tighter around his neck. "Shall I effect the general evacuation order?"

Sylveste looked down at the excavation grid, the sides of each shaft brightly lit past the banks of floodlights arrayed around the area. Pavonis never got high enough at these latitudes to provide much useful illumination; now, sinking towards the horizon and clotted by great cauls of dust, it was niggling more than than a rusty-red smear, difficult for his eyes to focus on. Shortly dust devils would come, scurrying across the Ptero Steppes like and then many overwound toy gyroscopes. Then the chief thrust of the storm, rising like a blackness anvil.

"No," he said. "There's no need for us to go out. We're well sheltered here there's hardly any erosion pattering on those boulders, in case you hadn't noticed. If the storm becomes as well harsh, we'll shelter in the crawlers."

The man looked at the rocks, shaking his caput as if doubting the bear witness of his ears. "Sir, Cuvier just issue an advisory of this severity in one case every year or 2 information technology's an guild of magnitude above anything nosotros've experienced before."

"Speak for yourself," Sylveste said, noticing the way the homo'south gaze snapped involuntarily to his optics and then off once again, embarrassed. "Listen to me. We cannot afford to abandon this dig. Do you understand?"

The man looked back at the filigree. "Nosotros tin can protect what nosotros've uncovered with sheeting, sir. Then bury transponders. Even if the dust covers every shaft, we'll be able to find the site once more and go back to where we are now." Behind his dust goggles, the man's optics were wild, beseeching. "When nosotros return, we tin can put a dome over the whole filigree. Wouldn't that exist the best, sir, rather than chance people and equipment out hither?"

Sylveste took at step closer to the man, forcing him to footstep dorsum towards the grid's closest shaft. "You're to do the following. Inform all dig teams that they carry on working until I say otherwise, and that there is to be no talk of retreating to Mantell. Meanwhile, I want only the near sensitive instruments taken aboard the crawlers. Is that understood?"

"Only what about people, sir?"

"People are to do what they came out here to do. Dig."

Sylveste stared reproachfully at the man, almost inviting him to question the order, but after a long moment of hesitation the man turned on his heels and scurried beyond the grid, navigating the tops of the baulks with practiced ease. Spaced around the grid like downward-pointed cannon, the delicate imaging gravitometers swayed slightly as the wind began to increment.

Sylveste waited, then followed a similar path, deviating when he was a few boxes into the grid. Near the centre of the excavation, iv boxes had been enlarged into one single slab-sided pit, thirty metres from side to side and nearly as deep. Sylveste stepped onto the ladder which led into the pit and moved speedily down the side. He had fabricated the journey up and down this ladder so many times in the terminal few weeks that the lack of vertigo was almost more than agonizing than the thing itself. Moving down the cofferdam's side, he descended through layers of geological time. Ix hundred chiliad years had passed since the Event. Almost of that stratification was permafrost typical in Resurgam'due south subpolar latitudes; permanent frost-soil which never thawed. Deeper down close to the Event itself was a layer of regolith laid down in the impacts which had followed. The Event itself was a unmarried, hair-fine black demarcation the ash of called-for forests.

The floor of the pit was not level, but followed narrowing steps downward to a final depth of forty metres below the surface. Extra floods had been brought down to smooth light into the gloom. The cramped surface area was a fantastical hive of activity, and within the shelter of the pit at that place was no trace of the air current. The dig team was working in near-silence, kneeling on the ground on mats, working abroad at something with tools so precise they might have served for surgery in another era. Three were young students from Cuvier born on Resurgam. A servitor skulked beside them awaiting orders. Though machines had their uses during a dig's early on phases, the final work could never be entirely trusted to them. Side by side to the party a adult female sat with a compad balanced on her lap, displaying a cladistic map of Amarantin skulls. She saw Sylveste for the commencement time he had climbed quietly and stood up with a start, snapping shut the compad. She wore a greatcoat, her black hair cut in a geometric fringe across her brow.

"Well, you were right," she said. "Any it is, it's big. And information technology looks amazingly well-preserved, too."

"Any theories, Pascale?"

"That'due south where you come in, isn't it? I'k just here to offer commentary." Pascale Dubois was a young journalist from Cuvier. She had been covering the dig since its inception, often dirtying her fingers with the real archeaologists, learning their cant. "The bodies are gruesome, though, aren't they? Fifty-fifty though they're conflicting, it'south near as if you can feel their pain."

To one side of the pit, just before the floor stepped down, they had unearthed two stone-lined burial chambers. Despite being buried for ix hundred chiliad years at the very to the lowest degree the chambers were almost intact, with the bones inside still assuming a crude anatomical relationship to ane another. They were typical Amarantin skeletons. At first glance to anyone who happened not to exist a trained anthropologist they could accept passed equally human remains, for the creatures had been iv-limbed bipeds of roughly human being size, with a superficially similar bone-structure. Skull book was comparable, and the organs of sense, breathing and communication were situated in coordinating positions. But the skulls of both Amarantin were elongated and birdlike, with a prominent cranial ridge which extended forwards between the voluminous eye-sockets, downwards to the tip of the beaklike upper jaw. The bones were covered here and in that location past a skein of tanned, desiccated tissue which had served to contort the bodies, drawing them or so it seemed into agonised postures. They were not fossils in the usual sense: no mineralisation had taken identify, and the burial chambers had remained empty except for the bones and the scattering of technomic artefacts with which they had been buried.

"Perhaps," Sylveste said, reaching downwards and touching one of the skulls, "we were meant to call back that."

"No," Pascale said. "As the tissue stale, 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 crepe spanning the belvedered ceiling; the air vivid with sicky entoptics in the current vogue: seraphim, cherubim, hummingbirds, faeries. He remembered guests: nigh of them associates of the family; people he either barely recognized or detested, for his friends had been few in number. His father had been tardily as usual; the political party already winding downward past the fourth dimension Calvin deigned to show upwards. This was normal then; the time of Calvin's last and greatest project, and the realisation of information technology was in itself a slow death; no less and so than the suicide he would bring upon himself at the projection's culmination.

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

"Open information technology," Calvin had said.

He remembered taking it; feeling its lightness. He had snatched height off to reveal bird's nest of gristly packing cloth. Inside was a speckled brown dome the same colour as the box. It was the upper role of a skull, obviously human, with the jaw missing.

He remembered a silence falling across the room.

"Is that all?" Sylveste had said, simply loud enough so that everyone in the room heard information technology. "An erstwhile bone? Well, thanks, Dad. I'm humbled."

"Besides you should be," Calvin said.

And the trouble was, as Sylveste had realised nearly immediately, Calvin was right. The skull was incredibly valuable; two hundred thousand years onetime a adult female from Atapuerca, Spain, he presently learned. Her time of decease had been obvious enough from the context in which she was buried, but the scientists who had unearthed her had refined the gauge using the best techniques of their mean solar day: potassium-argon dating of the rocks in the cave where she'd been cached, uranium-series dating of travertine deposits on the walls, fission-runway dating of volcanic glasses, thermoluminescence dating of burnt flint fragments. They were techniques which with improvements in calibration and application remained in employ among the dig teams on Resurgam. Physics allowed only so many methods to date objects. Sylveste should take seen all that in an instant and recognised the skull for what information technology was: the oldest human object on Yellowstone, carried to the Epsilon Eridani organisation centuries before, so lost during the colony's upheavals. Calvin'southward unearthing of it was a small miracle in itself.

All the same the flush of shame he felt stemmed less from ingratitude than from the mode 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 on, the skull had travelled with him to Resurgam, to remind him ever of that vow.

He could not neglect now.

"If what yous're implying is the case," Pascale said, "so they must have been buried like that for a reason."

"Maybe equally a alert," Sylveste said, and stepped downwardly towards the 3 students.

"I was afraid you might say something like that," Pascale said, following him. "And what exactly might this terrible alarm 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; equally if by forcing him to country them repeatedly, she might somewhen cause him to expose some logical error in his own theories; one that even he would have to acknowledge 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, also. They didn't have time to go about burial bodies in dire warning, even if they'd had whatsoever idea about what was happening to them.""They angered the gods," Sylveste said.

"Yeah," Pascale said. "I think we all concord that they would have interpreted the Issue as evidence of theistic displeasure, within the contraints of their conventionalities organization but there wouldn't take been fourth dimension to express that belief in whatever permanent form before they all died, much less bury bodies for the benefit of time to come archeologists from a different species." She lifted her hood over her head and tightened the drawstring fine plumes of grit were starting to settle down into the pit, and the air was no longer as notwithstanding as it had been a few minutes before. "But you don't think so, do yous?" Without waiting for an reply, she fixed a big pair of bulky goggles over her eyes, momentarily disturbing the edge of her fringe, and looked downwardly at the object which was slowly beingness uncovered.

Pascale'due south goggles accessed data from the imaging gravitometers stationed around the Wheeler filigree, overlaying the stereoscopic picture of buried masses on the normal view. Sylveste had only to instruct his eyes to exercise likewise. The gound on which they were standing turned glassly, 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 alpine. The dig had exposed merely a few centimetres of the top. There was evidence of writing downwardly one side, in one of the standard tardily-phase Amarantin graphicforms. Only the imaging gravitometres lacked the spatial resolution to reveal the text. The obelisk would have to be dug out before they could learn annihilation.

Sylveste told his eyes to return to normal vision. "Piece of work faster," he told his students. "I don't intendance if you incur minor abrasions to the surface. I want at to the lowest degree a metre of it visible by the end of tonight."

Ane of the students turned to him, notwithstanding kneeling. "Sir, we heard the dig would have to be abandoned."

"Why on world would I abandon a dig?"

"The tempest, sir."

"Damn the storm." He was turning away when Pascale took his arm, a little likewise roughly.

"They're right to be worried, Dan." She spoke quietly, for his benefit solitary. "I heard almost that advisory, also. We should be heading dorsum toward Mantell."

"And lose this?"

"We'll come back over again."

"We might never find it, fifty-fifty 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 twoscore years earlier. Ever since the comsat girdle had been destroyed in the mutiny, 20 years later when half the colonists elected to steal the transport and return home there had been no authentic style of determining position on Resurgam. And many a transponder had merely failed in a razorstorm.

"It'due south nevertheless not worth risking human lives for," Pascale said.

"Information technology might be worth much more than that." He snapped a finger at the students. "Faster. Utilise 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.

Sluke stood for what must have been the starting time time in hours. He could see the tension in her optics. The petty spatula she had been using dropped on the basis, beside the mukluks she wore on her feet. She snatched the mask away from her face up, breathing Resurgam air for a few seconds while she spoke. "We need to talk."

"About what, Sluka?"Sluka gulped down air from the mask earlier speaking again. "Y'all're pushing your luck, Dr. Sylveste."

"Yous've simply pushed yours over the precipice."

She seemed not to have heard him. "We care about your piece of work, you know. We share your beliefs. That's why we're hither, breaking our backs for you. But y'all shouldn't accept us for granted." Her eyes flashed white arcs, glancing towards Pascale. "Right now you demand all the allies y'all can notice, Dr. Sylveste."

"That'due south a threat, is it?"

"A argument of fact. If you paid more attention to what was going on elsewhere in the colony, you'd know that Girardieau's planning to move against you. The word is that move'due south a hell of a lot closer than you think."

The back of his neck prickled. "What are you talking almost?"

"What else? A coup." Sluka pushed by him to ascend the ladder up the side of the pit. When she had a foot on the first rung, she turned back and addressed the other two students, both minding their own business concern, heads down in concentration as they worked to reveal the obelisk. "Work for as long equally you want, but don't say no i warned yous. And if you've any doubts as to what beingness caught in a razorstorm is like, take a look at Sylveste."

Ane of the students looked up, timidly. "Where are you going, Sluka?"

"To speak to the other dig teams. Not everyone may know about that advisory. When they hear, I don't think many of them will be in any hurry to stay."

She started climbing, but Sylveste reached upward and grabbed the heal of her mukluk. Sluke looked downward at him. She was wearing the mask now, simply Sylveste could even so see the contempt in her expression. "You're finished, Sluka."

"No," she said, climbing. "I've just begun. It's you I'd worry most."

Sylveste examined his own country of mind and establish it was the terminal affair he had expected total calm. Only it was similar the calm that existed on the metallic hydrogen oceans of the gas giant planets further out from Pavonis only maintained by crushing pressures from above and below.

"Well?" Pascale said.

"In that location's someone I need to talk to," Sylveste said.

Copyright © 2000 by Alastair Reynolds

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What Order to Read Revelation Space Series

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