Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion

Chapter Fourteen

Nothing in an airship was ever enacted without an extreme surfeit of caution. This maxim was especially applicable to a hydrogen-filled airship sailing beneath a sky of rock, above a bottomless sea of black, miles beneath the natural surface of the Earth, far from the least possibility of assistance. We advanced with the utmost trepidation, traversing the distance to the Edifice at scarcely more than a walking pace. The throb of our engines rattled back at us from the ceiling, creating a horrible echoing resonance. If there were ghosts down here, then surely we had roused them by now. But we had come to explore, and so we crept on, nervous intruders in the house of the dead, yet galvanised by the work of science. Each foot gained closer to that object was a victory for the intellect over base superstition, and slowly, as our searchlights groped across the abyss and began to daub more light on the object, our collective will was rewarded.

It was hard to describe, because what we could see of its form owed nothing to familiar experience. It did not really resemble any citadel, even an inverted one, except perhaps some mad Babel conjured up by the likes of Bosch. It did not have the form of a barnacle or a stalactite. Nor was it much like a chandelier or a half-emerged maggot.

But it had emerged, or was in the process of emerging, or was in some fashion half-in and half-out of the ceiling, such that only a portion of it extended into the void. How much was up there, entombed in rock, we could but guess, but the visible portion was far larger than Demeter, extending a quarter of a mile down from the ceiling and about the same distance across at its widest point. In our searchlights it had two kinds of surface, arranged in distinct areas. One had a smooth, grey, tinlike lustre, and a faint patterning of scales. The other kind was a sort of bristling cityscape of close-set towers and spires, projecting out like defensive spines. These areas interchanged across the entire object, hinting at some rationale, some organisational principle, that yet eluded us.

Its shape was impossible to convey except in the broadest generalities. It looked a little like a fat-bladed propeller, a little like a coiled python, a little like a piece of candy that had been twisted and re-twisted until all notion of its prior form was lost. Its projections, lobes and concavities were either smooth or spined, but never an amalgam of the two.

We commenced a slow encirclement of the object. Miss Cossile exposed herself to risk while exposing more reels of film, and Dupin went into a fit of sketching, muttering, sketching, tearing out sheets and muttering again. He drew as furiously and precisely as ever, but something about the form defeated his efforts, as if the object itself were not just presenting a changing aspect to us, but also oozing slowly from one deceptive configuration to another.

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