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,
‘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.
So that they might remember their arrangement, the Birdmaker gave them useless, clawed wing-stubs — enough to remind them of what they had forsaken, and enough to enable them to begin writing down their history. Fire burned in their minds too, but this was the unquenchable fire of being. That light would always burn, the Birdmaker told them — so long as they did not try to defy the Birdmaker’s will by once more returning to the skies. If they did that, it was promised, the Birdmaker would take back the souls they had been given on the Day of Burning Wings.
It was, Sylveste knew, simply the understandable attempt of a culture to raise a mirror to itself. What made it significant was the complete extent to which it had permeated their culture — in effect, a single religion which had superseded all others and which had persisted, through different tellings, for an unthinkable span of centuries. Undoubtedly it had shaped their thinking and behaviour, perhaps in ways too complex to begin guessing.
‘I understand,’ Pascale said. ‘As a species, they couldn’t deal with being flightless, so they created the Birdmaker story so they could feel some superiority over the birds which could still fly.’
‘Yes. And while that belief worked, it had one unexpected side-effect: to deter them from ever taking flight again: much like the Icarus myth, only exhibiting a stronger hold over their collective psyche.’
‘But if that’s the case, the figure on the spire…’
‘Is a big two-fingered salute to whatever god they used to believe in.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Pascale said. ‘Religions just fade away; get replaced by new ones. I can’t believe they’d build that city, everything in it, just as an insult to their old god.’
‘Me neither. Which suggests something else entirely.’
‘Like what?’
‘That a new god moved in. One with wings.’
Volyova had decided it was time to show Khouri the instruments of her profession. ‘Hold on,’ she said, as the elevator approached the cache chamber. ‘People don’t generally like this the first time it happens.’
‘God,’ Khouri said, instinctively pressing herself against the rear wall as the vista suddenly expanded shockingly; the elevator a tiny beetle crawling down the side of the vast space. ‘It looks too big to fit inside!’
‘Oh, this is nothing. There are another four chambers this large. Chamber two is where we train for surface ops. Two are empty or semi-pressurised; the fourth holds shuttles and in-system vehicles. This is the only one dedicated to holding the cache.’
‘You mean those things?’
‘Yes.’
There were forty cache-weapons in the chamber, though none exactly resembled any other. Yet in their general style of construction, a certain affinity was betrayed. Each machine was cased in alloy of a greenish-bronze hue. Though each of the devices was large enough to be a medium-sized spacecraft in its own right, none exhibited any indication that this was their function. There were no windows or access doors visible in what would have been their hulls, no markings or communications systems. While some of the objects were studded with what might have been vernier jets, they were only there to assist in the moving around and positioning of the devices, much as a battleship was only there to assist in moving around and positioning its big guns.
Of course, that was exactly what the cache devices were.
‘Hell-class,’ Volyova said. ‘That was what their builders called them. Of course, we’re going back a few centuries here.’
