“I’m here,” Pascale said—louder now, but just as bodyless as Sylveste. “Are we sharing the same point of view?”
“What are you seeing?”
“The spire; the temple—whatever you call it.”
“That’s right.”
The temple was at the geometric centre of the quarter-scale city, shaped like the upper third of an egg. Its topmost point extended upwards, becoming a spiriform tower which ascended—narrowing as it did—towards the roof of the city chamber. The buildings around the temple had the fused look of weaver-bird nests; perhaps the expression of some submerged evolutionary imperative. They huddled like misshapen orisons before the vast central spire which curled from the temple.
“Something bothering you about this?”
He envied her. Pascale had visited the real city dozens of times. She had even climbed the spire on foot, following the gulletlike spiral passage which wound up its height.
“The figure on the spire? It doesn’t fit.”
It looked like a small, daintily carved figurine by comparison with the rest of the city, but was still ten or fifteen metres tall, comparable to the Egyptian figures in the Temple of Kings. The buried city was built to an approximate quarter-scale, based on comparisons with other digs. The full-size counterpart of the spire figure would have been at least forty metres tall. But if this city had ever existed on the surface, it would have been lucky to survive the firestorms of the Event, let alone the subsequent nine hundred and ninety thousand years of planetary weathering, glaciation, meteorite impacts and tectonics.
“Doesn’t fit?”
“It isn’t Amarantin—at least not any kind I’ve ever seen.”
“Some kind of deity, then?”
“Maybe. But I don’t understand why they’ve given it wings.”
“Ah. And this is problematic?”
“Take a look around the city wall it you don’t believe me.”
“Better lead me there, Dan.”
Their twin points of view curved away from the spire, dropping down dizzyingly.
Volyova watched the effect the voices had on Khouri, certain that somewhere in Khouri’s armour of self-assurance was a chink of fearful doubt—the thought that maybe these really were ghosts after all, and that Volyova had found a way to tune into their phantom emanations.
The sound that the ghosts made was moaning and cavernous; long drawn-out howls so low that they were almost felt rather than heard. It was like the eeriest winter night’s wind imaginable; the sound that a wind might make after blowing through a thousand miles of cavern. But this was clearly no natural phenomenon, not the particle wind streaming past the ship, translated into sound; not even the fluctuations in the delicately balanced reactions in the engines. There were souls in that ghost-howl; voices calling across the night. In the moaning, though not one word was understandable, there remained nonetheless the unmistakable structure of human language.
“What do you think?” Volyova asked.
“They’re voices, aren’t they? Human voices. But they sound so… exhausted; so sad.” Khouri listened attentively. “Every now and then I think I understand a word.”
“You know what they are, of course.” Volyova diminished the sound, until the ghosts formed only a muted, infinitely pained chorus. “They’re crew. Like you and me. Occupants of other vessels, talking to each other across the void.”
“Then why—” Khouri hesitated. “Oh, wait a minute. Now I understand. They’re moving faster than us, aren’t they? Much faster. Their voices sound slow because they are, literally. Clocks run slower on ships moving near the speed of light.”
Volyova nodded, the tiniest bit saddened that Khouri had understood so swiftly. “Time dilation. Of course, some of those ships are moving towards us, so doppler-blueshifting acts to reduce the effect, but the dilation factor usually wins…” She shrugged, seeing that Khouri was not yet ready for a treatise on the finer principles of relativistic communications. “Normally, of course, Infinity corrects for all this; removes the doppler and dilatory distortions, and translates the result into something which sounds perfectly intelligible.”
“Show me.”
“No,” Volyova said. “It isn’t worth it. The end product is always the same. Trivia, technical talk, boastful old trade rhetoric. That’s the interesting end of the spectrum. At the boring end you get paranoid gossip or brain-damaged cases baring their souls to the night. Most of the time it’s just two ships handshaking as they pass in the night; exchanging bland pleasantries. There’s hardly ever any interaction since the light-travel times between ships are seldom less than months. And anyway, half the time the voices are just prerecorded messages, since the crew are usually in reefersleep.”
“Just the usual human babble, in other words.”
“Yes. We take it with us wherever we go.”
Volyova relaxed back in her seat, instructing the sound-system to pump out the sorrowful, time-stretched voices even louder than before. This signal of human presence ought to have made the stars seem less remote and cold, but it managed to have exactly the opposite effect; just like the act of telling ghost stories around a campfire served to magnify the darkness beyond the flames. For a moment—one that she revelled in, no matter what Khouri made of it—it was possible to believe that the interstellar spaces beyond the glass were really haunted.
“Notice anything?” Sylveste asked.
The wall consisted of chevron-shaped granite blocks, interrupted at five points by gatehouses. The gatehouses were surmounted by sculptural Amarantin heads, in a not-quite-realistic style reminiscent of Yucatan art. A fresco ran around the outer wall, made from ceramic tiles, depicting Amarantin functionaries performing complex social duties.
Pascale paused before answering, her gaze tracking over the different figures in the fresco.
They were shown carrying farming implements which looked almost like actual items from human agricultural history, or weapons—pikes, bows and a kind of musket, although the poses were not those of warriors engaged in combat, but were far more formalised and stiff, like Egyptian figurework. There were Amarantin surgeons and stoneworkers, astronomers—they had invented reflecting and refracting telescopes, recent digs had confirmed—and cartographers, glassworkers, kitemakers and artists, and above each symbolic figure was a bimodal chain of graphicforms picked out in gold and cobalt-blue, naming the flock which assumed the duty of the representational figure.
“None of them have wings,” Pascale said.
“No,” Sylveste said. “What used to be their wings turned into their arms.”
“But why object to a statue of a god with a pair of wings? Humans have never had wings, but that’s never stopped us investing angels with them. It strikes me that a species which really did once have wings would have even fewer qualms.”
“Yes, except you’re forgetting the creation myth.”
It was only in the last years that the basic myth had been understood by the archaeologists; unravelled from dozens of later, embroidered versions. According to the myth, the Amarantin had once shared the sky with the other birdlike creatures which still existed on Resurgam during their reign. But the flocks of that time were the last to know the freedom of flight. They made an agreement with the god they called Birdmaker, trading the ability to fly for the gift of sentience. On that day, they raised their wings to heaven and watched as consuming fire turned them to ash, for ever excluding them from the air.