‘Took us weeks to find the way in,’ Girardieau said. ‘Originally the trench was plugged by basalt. It was only after we’d chipped it all out that we found this one place where the basalt seemed to continue inwards, as if it were plugging some kind of radial tunnel which emerged in the trench.’
‘You’ve been busy little beavers, I can see.’
‘Digging it out was hard work,’ Girardieau said. ‘Excavating the trench was easy by comparison, but here we had to drill and remove material through the same tiny hole. Some of us wanted to use boser torches to cut a few secondary tunnels in to make the job easier, but we never went that far. And our mineral-tipped drills couldn’t touch the stuff.’
Sylveste’s scientific curiosity momentarily beat his urge to belittle Girardieau’s attempts at impressing him. ‘You know what this material is?’
‘Basically carbon, with some iron and niobium and a few rare metals as trace elements. But we don’t know the structure. It’s not simply some allotropic form of diamond we haven’t invented yet, or even hyperdiamond. Maybe the top few tenths of a millimetre are close to diamond, but the stuff seems to undergo some kind of complex lattice transformation deeper down. The ultimate form — far deeper then we’ve yet sampled — may not even be a true crystal at all. It could be that the lattice breaks up into trillions of carbon-heavy macromolecules, locked together in a co-acting mass. Sometimes these molecules seem to work their way to the surface along lattice flaws, which is the only time we see them.’
‘You’re talking as if it’s purposeful.’
‘Maybe it is. Maybe the molecules are like little enzymes tooled-up to repair the diamond crust when it becomes damaged.’ He shrugged. ‘But we’ve never isolated one of the macromolecules, or at least not in a stable form. They seem to lose coherence as soon as they’re removed from the lattice. They fall apart before we can get a look inside them.’
‘What you’re describing,’ Sylveste said, ‘sounds very much like a form of molecular technology.’
Girardieau smiled at Sylveste, seeming to acknowledge the private game in which they were enmeshed.
‘Except we know that the Amarantin were far too primitive for such a thing.’
‘Of course.’
‘Of course.’ Girardieau smiled again, only this time to the group as a whole. ‘Shall we forge inwards?’
Navigating the tunnel system which led from the groove was trickier than Sylveste had at first imagined. He had assumed that the radial tunnel would continue inwards for the necessary distance to traverse the shell of the object, and they would then enter the thing’s hollow interior. But it was not like that at all. The thing was a deliberate labyrinth. The path did progress radially, for perhaps ten metres, but then it jerked to the left and soon branched into multiple tunnel systems. The routes were colour-coded with adhesive markers, but the coding system was too cryptic to make much sense to Sylveste. Within five minutes he was thoroughly disorientated, though he had the suspicion that they had not strayed very deep into the object. It was as if the tunnel system was the work of a demented maggot which preferred the part of the apple immediately under the skin. Eventually, however, they crossed what seemed to be a regular fissure in the fabric of the object. Girardieau explained that the thing was structured in a series of concentric shells. They continued to worm their way through another confusing tunnel system while Girardieau regaled them with dubious stories about the initial exploration of the object.
They had known about it for two years — ever since Sylveste had drawn Pascale’s attention to the oddity of the obelisk’s burial sequence. Excavating the chamber had taken most of that time, detailed study of the object’s warrenlike interior only happening in the last few months. There had been a few deaths in those early days. Nothing mysterious, it eventually transpired — just teams getting lost in unmapped sections of the labyrinth and stumbling into vertical shafts in the tunnel system where the safety flooring had not yet been fixed. One worker had starved to death when she ventured too far without laying a breadcrumb trail behind her — servitors found her two weeks after she went missing. She had been wandering in a series of doodle-like circles, at times only a few minutes from the safe zones.
Progress through the final concentric shell was slower and more deliberate than the four they traversed before it. They worked downwards, eventually reaching a gratifyingly horizontal stretch of tunnel, the far end of which was milky with light.
Girardieau spoke to his sleeve and the light dimmed.
They moved on in semi-darkness. Gradually their breathing ceased to echo from the walls as the confining space opened out. The only sound came from the laboured purring of nearby air pumps.
‘Hold on,’ Girardieau said. ‘Here it comes.’
Sylveste steeled himself for the inevitable disorientation when the lights returned. For once he did not mind Girardieau’s theatrics. It permitted him a sense of discovery, albeit at second hand. Of course, he alone understood this surrogacy for what it was. But he did not begrudge the others the moment. That would have been churlish, for after all, they would never know what true discovery felt like. He almost pitied them, though in that moment the sight revealed in the lights purged all normal thought.
It was an alien city.
SIX
‘I expect,’ Volyova said, ‘that you’re one of those otherwise rational people who pride themselves on not believing in ghosts.’
Khouri looked at her, frowning slightly. Volyova had known from the outset that the woman was no fool, but it was still interesting to see how she reacted to the question.
‘Ghosts, Triumvir? You can’t be serious.’
‘One thing you’ll quickly learn about me,’ Volyova said, ‘is that I’m very seldom anything other than completely serious.’ And then she indicated the door at which they had arrived, set unobtrusively into one rusty-red interior wall of the ship. The door was of heavy construction, a stylised drawing of a spider discernible through layers of corrosion and staining. ‘Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.’
Khouri did as she was told without hesitation. Volyova was satisfied. In the three weeks since the woman had been snared — or recruited, if one wanted to be polite about it — Volyova had administered a complex regimen of loyalty-altering therapies. The treatment was almost complete, apart from the top-up doses which would continue indefinitely. Soon the woman’s loyalty would be so strongly instilled that it would transcend mere obedience and become an animating compulsion, a principle to which she could no more fail to adhere than a fish could choose to stop breathing water. Taken to an extreme which Volyova hoped would prove unnecessary, Khouri could be made not only to desire to do the crew’s will, but to love them for giving her the chance. But Volyova would relent before she programmed the woman that deeply. After her less than fruitful experiences with Nagorny, she was wary of creating another unquestioning guinea pig. It would not displease her if Khouri retained a trace of resentment.
Volyova did as she had promised, following Khouri into the door. The recruit had halted a few metres beyond the threshold, realising that there was no way to go further.
Volyova sealed the great iron iris of a door behind them.
‘Where are we, Triumvir?’
‘In a little private retreat of my own,’ Volyova said. She spoke into her bracelet and made a light come on, but the interior remained shadowy. The room was shaped like a fat torpedo, twice as long as it was wide. The interior was sumptuously outfitted, with four scarlet-cushioned seats installed on the floor, next to each other, and space for another two behind, though nothing remained but their anchor-points. Where they were not upholstered in cushioned velvet, the room’s brass-ribbed walls were curved and glossily dark, as if made of obsidian or black marble. There was a console of black ebony, attached to the armrest of the front seat in which Volyova now sat. She folded down the console, familiarising herself with the inset dials and controls, all of which were tooled in brass or copper, with elaborately inscribed labels, offset by flowered curlicues of differently inlaid woods and ivories. Not that it took much familiarising, since she visited the spider-room with reasonable regularity, but she enjoyed the tactile pleasure of stroking her fingertips across the board.