"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

tops of the baulks with practised ease. Spaced around the grid like down-pointed cannon, the
delicate imaging gravitometers swayed slightly as the wind began to increase.
Sylveste waited, then followed a similar path, deviating when he was a few boxes into the grid.
Near the centre of the excavation, four 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 quickly down the side. He had made the journey up and down this ladder so many times
in the last few weeks that the lack of vertigo was almost more disturbing than the thing itself.
Moving down the cofferdam's side, he descended through layers of geological time. Nine hundred
thousand years had passed since the Event. Most of that stratification was permafrost -- typical in
Resurgam's 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 single, hair-fine black demarcation -- the ash of burning forests.
The floor of the pit was not level, but followed narrowing steps down to a final depth of forty
metres below the surface. Extra floods had been brought down to shine light into the gloom. The
cramped area was a fantastical hive of activity, and within the shelter of the pit there was no trace of
the wind. The dig team was working in near-silence, kneeling on the ground on mats, working away
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 phases, the final work could never be entirely
trusted to them. Next to the party a woman sat with a compad balanced on her lap, displaying a
cladistic map of Amarantin skulls. She saw Sylveste for the first 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. 'Whatever it is, it's big. And it looks amazingly well-preserved,
too.'
'Any theories, Pascale?'
'That's where you come in, isn't it? I'm 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 archaeologists, learning their cant. 'The bodies are gruesome, though, aren't
they? Even though they're alien, it's almost 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 nine hundred thousand years -- at the very least -- the
chambers were almost intact, with the bones inside still assuming a rough anatomical relationship to
one another. They were typical Amarantin skeletons. At first glance -- to anyone who happened not
to be a trained anthropologist -- they could have passed as human remains, for the creatures had
been four-limbed bipeds of roughly human size, with a superficially similar bone-structure. Skull
volume was comparable, and the organs of sense, breathing and communication were situated in
analogous positions. But the skulls of both Amarantin were elongated and birdlike, with a
prominent cranial ridge which extended forwards between the voluminous eye-sockets, down to the
tip of the beaklike upper jaw. The bones were covered here and there by 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 place, and
the burial chambers had remained empty except for the bones and the handful of technomic
artefacts with which they had been buried.
'Perhaps,' Sylveste said, reaching down and touching one of the skulls, 'we were meant to think
that.'
'No,' Pascale said. 'As the tissue dried, 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.