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

There had been liveried servitors moving through the guests with sweetmeats and liqueurs; drapes
of coloured crepe spanning the belvedered ceiling; the air bright with sickly entoptics in the current
vogue: seraphim, cherubim, hummingbirds, fairies. He remembered guests: most of them associates
of the family; people he either barely recognised or detested, for his friends had been few in
number. His father had been late as usual; the party already winding down by the time Calvin
deigned to show up. This was normal then; the time of Calvin's last and greatest project, and the
realisation of it was in itself a slow death; no less so than the suicide he would bring upon himself at
the project's culmination.
He remembered his father producing a box, its sides bearing a marquetry of entwined ribonucleic
strands.
'Open it,' Calvin had said.
He remembered taking it; feeling its lightness. He had snatched the top off to reveal a bird's nest
of fibrous packing material. Within was a speckled brown dome the same colour as the box. It was
the upper part of a skull, obviously human, with the jaw missing.
He remembered a silence falling across the room.
'Is that all?' Sylveste had said, just loud enough so that everyone in the room heard it. 'An old
bone? Well, thanks, Dad. I'm humbled.'
'As well you should be,' Calvin said.
And the trouble was, as Sylveste had realised almost immediately, Calvin was right. The skull
was incredibly valuable; two hundred thousand years old -- a woman from Atapuerca, Spain, he
soon learned. Her time of death had been obvious enough from the context in which she was buried,
but the scientists who had unearthed her had refined the estimate using the best techniques of their
day: potassium-argon dating of the rocks in the cave where she'd been buried, uranium-series dating
of travertine deposits on the walls, fission-track dating of volcanic glasses, thermoluminescence
dating of burnt flint fragments. They were techniques which -- with improvements in calibration
and application -- remained in use among the dig teams on Resurgam. Physics allowed only so
many methods to date objects. Sylveste should have seen all that in an instant and recognised the
skull for what it was: the oldest human object on Yellowstone, carried to the Epsilon Eridani system
centuries earlier, and then lost during the colony's upheavals. Calvin's unearthing of it was a small
miracle in itself.
Yet the flush of shame he felt stemmed less from ingratitude than from the way 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, the skull had travelled with him to Resurgam, to
remind him always of that vow.
He could not fail now.
'If what you're implying is the case,' Pascale said, 'then they must have been buried like that for a
reason.'
'Maybe as a warning,' Sylveste said, and stepped down towards the three students.
'I was afraid you might say something like that,' Pascale said, following him. 'And what exactly
might this terrible warning 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; as if by
forcing him to state them repeatedly, she might eventually cause him to expose some logical error
in his own theories; one that even he would have to admit 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, too. They didn't have time to go about burying bodies in dire warning, even if
they'd had any idea about what was happening to them.'
 'They angered the gods,' Sylveste said.
'Yes,' Pascale said. 'I think we all agree that they would have interpreted the Event as evidence of