But that turned out not to be the case.

'Oh, something I've been meaning to ask you,' Volyova said, breezily. 'Does the phrase Sun Stealer mean anything to you yet?'

'No,' Khouri said. 'Should it?'

'Oh; there's no reason it should -- just a question, that's all. Too tedious to explain why, of course -- don't worry about it, will you?'

She was about as convincing as a Mulch fortune-teller.

'No,' Khouri said. 'I won't worry, no...' And then added: 'Why did you say "yet"?'

Volyova cursed inwardly: had she blown it? Perhaps not; she had delivered the question as blithely as she dared, and there was nothing in Khouri's demeanour to suggest that she had taken it as anything other than a casual enquiry... and yet... now was emphatically not the time to start making errors.

'Did I say that?' she said, hoping to inject the right degree of surprise-mingled-with-indifference into her voice. 'Slip of the tongue, that's all.' Volyova groped for a change of subject, quickly. 'See that star, the faint red one?'

Now that their eyes had adjusted to the ambient light-levels of interstellar space, with even the blue radiance of the engine exhausts no longer seeming to blot out everything, a few stars were visible.

'That's Yellowstone's sun?'

'Epsilon Eridani, yes. We're three weeks beyond the system. Pretty soon you wouldn't have such an easy time finding it. We're not moving relativistically now -- only a few per cent of light -- but we're accelerating all the time. Soon the visible stars will move, the constellations warping, until all the stars in the sky are bunched ahead and behind us. It'll be as if we're poised midway down a tunnel, with light streaming in from either end. The stars will change colour as well. It isn't simple, since the final colour depends on the spectral type of each star; how much energy it emits in different energies, including the infrared and ultraviolet. But the tendency will be for those stars ahead of us to shift to the blue; those behind us to the red.'

'I'm sure it'll be very pretty,' Khouri said, somewhat spoiling the moment. 'But I'm not quite sure where the ghosts come into it.'

Volyova smiled. 'I'd almost forgotten about them. That would have been a shame.' And then she spoke into her bracelet, vocalising softly so that Khouri would not hear what it was she had to ask the ship.

Voices of the damned filled the chamber.

'Ghosts,' Volyova said.

Sylveste hovered in midair above the buried city, bodyless.

The encaging walls rose around him, densely engraved with the equivalent of ten thousand printed volumes of Amarantin writing. Although the graphicforms of the writing were mere millimetres high and he floated hundreds of metres from the wall, he only had to focus on any one part of it for the words to slam into clarity. As he did so, parallel translating algorithms processed the text into something approaching Canasian, while Sylveste's own quick semi-intuitive thought processes did likewise. More often than not he came to broad agreement with the programs, but occasionally they missed what might have been a crucial, context-dependent subtlety.

Meanwhile in his quarters in Cuvier, he made rapid, cursive notes, filling page after page of writing pad. These days, he favoured pen and paper over modern recording devices where possible.

Digital media were too susceptible to later manipulation by his enemies. At least if his notes were pulped they would be lost for ever, rather than returning to haunt him in a guise warped to suit somebody else's ideology.

He finished translating a particular section, coming to one of the folded-wing glyphs which signified the end of a sequence. He pulled back from the dizzying textual precipice of the wall.

He slipped a blotter into the pad and closed it. By touch he slipped the pad back into a rack and removed the next pad along. He opened it at the page marked by its own blotter, then ran his fingers down the page until he felt the roughness of the ink vanish. Positioning the book exactly parallel with the desk, he stationed the pen at the start of the first new blank line.

'You're working too hard,' Pascale said.

She had entered the room unheard; now he had to visualise her standing at his side -- or sitting, whichever was the case.

'I think I'm getting somewhere,' Sylveste said.

'Still banging your head against those old inscriptions?'

'One of us is beginning to crack.' He turned his bodyless point of view away from the wall, towards the centre of the enclosed city. 'Still, I didn't think it would take this long.'

'Me neither.'

He knew what she meant. Eighteen months since Nils Girardieau had shown him the buried city; a year since their wedding had been mooted and then put on hold until he had made significant progress on the translating work. Now he was doing exactly that -- and it scared him. No more excuses, and she knew it as well as he did.

Why was that such a big problem? Was it only a problem because he chose to classify it as such?

'You're frowning again,' Pascale said. 'Are you having problems with the inscriptions?'

'No,' Sylveste said. 'They aren't the problem any more.' And it was the truth; it was now second nature for him to merge the bimodal streams of Amarantin writing into their implied whole, like a cartographer studying a stereographic image.

'Let me look.'

He heard her move across the room and address the escritoire, instructing it to open a parallel channel for her sensorium. The console -- and, indeed, Sylveste's whole access to the data-model of the city -- had come not long after that first visit. For once the idea had not been Girardieau's, but something Pascale had initiated. The success of Descent into Darkness, the recently published biography, and the upcoming wedding had increased her leverage over her father, and Sylveste had known better than to argue when she had offered him literally -- the keys to the city.

The wedding was the talk of the colony now. Most of the gossip which reached its way back to Sylveste assumed that the motives were purely political; that Sylveste had courted Pascale as a way of marrying his way back into something close to power; that -- seen cynically -- the wedding was only a means to an end, and that the end was a colonial expedition to Cerberus/Hades. Perhaps, for the briefest of instants, Sylveste had wondered that himself; wondered if his subconscious had not engineered his love for Pascale with this deeper ambition in mind. Perhaps there was the tiniest grain of truth in that, as well. But from his current standpoint, it was mercifully impossible to tell.

He certainly felt as if he loved her -- which, as far as he could tell, was the same thing as loving her -- but he was not blind to the advantages that the marriage would bring. Now he was publishing again; modest articles based on tiny portions of translated Amarantin text; co-authorship with Pascale; Girardieau himself acknowledged as having assisted in the work. The Sylveste of fifteen years ago would have been appalled, but now he found it hard to stir up much self-disgust. What mattered was that the city was a step towards understanding the Event.

'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.

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.'