But that turned out not to be the case.
“Oh, something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Volyova said, breezily. “Does the phrase Sun Stealer mean anything to you yet?”
“No,” Khouri said. “Should it?”
“Oh; there’s no reason it should—just a question, that’s all. Too tedious to explain why, of course—don’t worry about it, will you?”
She was about as convincing as a Mulch fortune-teller.
“No,” Khouri said. “I won’t worry, no…” And then added: “Why did you say ‘yet’?”
Volyova cursed inwardly: had she blown it? Perhaps not; she had delivered the question as blithely as she dared, and there was nothing in Khouri’s demeanour to suggest that she had taken it as anything other than a casual enquiry… and yet… now was emphatically not the time to start making errors.
“Did I say that?” she said, hoping to inject the right degree of surprise-mingled-with-indifference into her voice. “Slip of the tongue, that’s all.” Volyova groped for a change of subject, quickly. “See that star, the faint red one?”
Now that their eyes had adjusted to the ambient light-levels of interstellar space, with even the blue radiance of the engine exhausts no longer seeming to blot out everything, a few stars were visible.
“That’s Yellowstone’s sun?”
“Epsilon Eridani, yes. We’re three weeks beyond the system. Pretty soon you wouldn’t have such an easy time finding it. We’re not moving relativistically now—only a few per cent of light—but we’re accelerating all the time. Soon the visible stars will move, the constellations warping, until all the stars in the sky are bunched ahead and behind us. It’ll be as if we’re poised midway down a tunnel, with light streaming in from either end. The stars will change colour as well. It isn’t simple, since the final colour depends on the spectral type of each star; how much energy it emits in different energies, including the infrared and ultraviolet. But the tendency will be for those stars ahead of us to shift to the blue; those behind us to the red.”
“I’m sure it’ll be very pretty,” Khouri said, somewhat spoiling the moment. “But I’m not quite sure where the ghosts come into it.”
Volyova smiled. “I’d almost forgotten about them. That would have been a shame.”
And then she spoke into her bracelet, vocalising softly so that Khouri would not hear what it was she had to ask the ship.
Voices of the damned filled the chamber.
“Ghosts,” Volyova said.
Sylveste hovered in midair above the buried city, bodyless.
The encaging walls rose around him, densely engraved with the equivalent of ten thousand printed volumes of Amarantin writing. Although the graphicforms of the writing were mere millimetres high and he floated hundreds of metres from the wall, he only had to focus on any one part of it for the words to slam into clarity. As he did so, parallel translating algorithms processed the text into something approaching Canasian, while Sylveste’s own quick semi-intuitive thought processes did likewise. More often than not he came to broad agreement with the programs, but occasionally they missed what might have been a crucial, context-dependent subtlety.
Meanwhile in his quarters in Cuvier, he made rapid, cursive notes, filling page after page of writing pad. These days, he favoured pen and paper over modern recording devices where possible. Digital media were too susceptible to later manipulation by his enemies. At least if his notes were pulped they would be lost for ever, rather than returning to haunt him in a guise warped to suit somebody else’s ideology.
He finished translating a particular section, coming to one of the folded-wing glyphs which signified the end of a sequence. He pulled back from the dizzying textual precipice of the wall.
He slipped a blotter into the pad and closed it. By touch he slipped the pad back into a rack and removed the next pad along. He opened it at the page marked by its own blotter, then ran his fingers down the page until he felt the roughness of the ink vanish. Positioning the book exactly parallel with the desk, he stationed the pen at the start of the first new blank line.
“You’re working too hard,” Pascale said.
She had entered the room unheard; now he had to visualise her standing at his side—or sitting, whichever was the case.
“I think I’m getting somewhere,” Sylveste said.
“Still banging your head against those old inscriptions?”
“One of us is beginning to crack.” He turned his bodyless point of view away from the wall, towards the centre of the enclosed city. “Still, I didn’t think it would take this long.”
“Me neither.”
He knew what she meant. Eighteen months since Nils Girardieau had shown him the buried city; a year since their wedding had been mooted and then put on hold until he had made significant progress on the translating work. Now he was doing exactly that—and it scared him. No more excuses, and she knew it as well as he did.
Why was that such a big problem? Was it only a problem because he chose to classify it as such?
“You’re frowning again,” Pascale said. “Are you having problems with the inscriptions?”
“No,” Sylveste said. “They aren’t the problem any more.” And it was the truth; it was now second nature for him to merge the bimodal streams of Amarantin writing into their implied whole, like a cartographer studying a stereographic image.
“Let me look.”
He heard her move across the room and address the escritoire, instructing it to open a parallel channel for her sensorium. The console—and, indeed, Sylveste’s whole access to the data-model of the city—had come not long after that first visit. For once the idea had not been Girardieau’s, but something Pascale had initiated. The success of Descent into Darkness, the recently published biography, and the upcoming wedding had increased her leverage over her father, and Sylveste had known better than to argue when she had offered him—literally—the keys to the city.
The wedding was the talk of the colony now. Most of the gossip which reached its way back to Sylveste assumed that the motives were purely political; that Sylveste had courted Pascale as a way of marrying his way back into something close to power; that—seen cynically—the wedding was only a means to an end, and that the end was a colonial expedition to Cerberus/Hades. Perhaps, for the briefest of instants, Sylveste had wondered that himself; wondered if his subconscious had not engineered his love for Pascale with this deeper ambition in mind. Perhaps there was the tiniest grain of truth in that, as well. But from his current standpoint, it was mercifully impossible to tell. He certainly felt as if he loved her—which, as far as he could tell, was the same thing as loving her—but he was not blind to the advantages that the marriage would bring. Now he was publishing again; modest articles based on tiny portions of translated Amarantin text; co-authorship with Pascale; Girardieau himself acknowledged as having assisted in the work. The Sylveste of fifteen years ago would have been appalled, but now he found it hard to stir up much self-disgust. What mattered was that the city was a step towards understanding the Event.