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the pit until he reached the pool of light around the obelisk’s exposed tip. Sluka and one of the other archaeologists had deserted him, but the one remaining worker - assisted by the servitor - had managed to uncover nearly a metre of the object, peeling away the nested layers of the stone sarcophagi to reach the massive block of obsidian, skilfully carved, on which Amarantin graphicforms had been engraved in precise lines. Most of it was textual: rows of ideopicts. The archaeologists understood the basics of Amarantin language, though there had been no Rosetta Stone to aid them. The Amarantin were the eighth dead alien culture discovered by humanity within fifty light-years of Earth, but there was no evidence that any of those eight species had come into contact with each other. Nor could the Pattern Jugglers or the Shrouders offer assistance: neither had revealed anything remotely resembling a written language. Sylveste, who had come into contact with both the Jugglers and the Shrouders - or at least the latter’s technology - appreciated that as well as anyone.
    Instead, computers had cracked the Amarantin language. It had taken thirty years - correlating millions of artefacts - but finally a consistent model had been evolved which could determine the broad meaning of most inscriptions. It helped that, at least towards the end of their reign, there had only been one Amarantin tongue, and that it had changed very slowly, so that the same model could interpret inscriptions which had been made tens of thousands of years apart. Of course, nuances of meaning were another thing entirely. That was where human intuition - and theory - came in.
    Amarantin writing was not, however, like anything in human experience. All Amarantin texts were stereoscopic - consisting of interlaced lines which had to be merged in the reader’s visual cortex. Their ancestors had once been something like birds - flying dinosaurs, but with the intelligence of lemurs. At some point in their past their eyes had been situated on opposite sides of their skulls, leading to a highly bicameral mind, each hemisphere synthesising its own mental model of the world. Later, they had become hunters and evolved binocular vision, but their mental wiring still owed something to that earlier phase of development. Most Amarantin artefacts mirrored their mental duality, with a pronounced symmetry about the vertical axis.
    The obelisk was no exception.
    Sylveste had no need for the special goggles his co-workers needed to read Amarantin graphicforms: the stereoscopic merging was easily accommodated within his own eyes, employing one of Calvin’s more useful algorithms. But the act of reading was still tortuous, requiring strenuous concentration.
    ‘Give me some light here,’ he said, and the student unclipped one of the portable floods and held it by hand over the side of the obelisk. From somewhere above lightning strobed: electricity coursing between dust planes in the storm.
    ‘Can you read it, sir?’
    ‘I’m trying,’ Sylveste said. ‘It isn’t the easiest thing in the world, you know. Especially if you don’t keep that light steady.’
    ‘Sorry sir. Doing my best. But it is getting windy here.’
    He was right: vortices were forming, even in the pit. It would soon get very much windier, and then the dust would begin to thicken, until it formed sheets of grey opacity in the air. They would not be able to work for very long in those conditions.
    ‘I apologise,’ Sylveste said. ‘I appreciate your help.’ Feeling that something more was called for, he added: ‘And I’m grateful that you chose to stay with me, rather than Sluka.’
    ‘It wasn’t difficult, sir. Not all of us are ready to dismiss your ideas.’
    Sylveste looked up from the obelisk. ‘All of them?’
    ‘We at least accept they should be investigated. After all, it’s in the colony’s best interests to understand what happened.’
    ‘The Event, you mean?’
    The student nodded.