Revelation Space 2 - Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds

Author:Alastair Reynolds [Reynolds, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-06T11:57:28+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Finally, I woke. For a long time, lying in the golden morning light which streamed into Zebra's room, I replayed the dreams in my head, until at last I could put them to rest and start examining my injured leg.

Overnight the healer had worked wonders, utilising a medical science well in advance of anything we'd had on Sky's Edge. The wound was now little more than a whitish star of new flesh, and what damage remained was mainly psychological-the refusal of my brain to accept that my leg was now fully capable of performing its intended role. I rose from the couch and took a few awkward, experimental steps, finally making my way over to the nearest window, navigating the stepped levels of the broken floor, furniture helpfully shuffling aside to ease my passage.

In the light of day, or what passed for day in Chasm City, the great hole at the city's heart looked even closer, even more vertiginous. It was not difficult to imagine how it had lured the first explorers who had come to Yellowstone, whether birthed from robot wombs or riding the first, risky starships that had come afterwards. The blotch of warm atmosphere spilling from the chasm was visible from space when other atmospheric conditions were favourable.

Whether they had crossed land in crawlers or come skimming down through cloud layers, that first sight of the chasm could never have been anything but heart-stopping. Something had injured the planet thousands of centuries earlier, and this great open wound had still not healed. Some, it was said, had made the descent into the depths equipped only with fragile pressure suits, and had found treasures upon which empires might be founded. If so, they had been careful to keep those treasures to themselves. But it had not stopped others coming, other chancers and adventurers; around them had accreted the first hints of what would eventually become this city.

There was no universally accepted theory to explain the hole, although the surrounding caldera-in which Chasm City lay, sheltered from winds, and the predation of flash-floods and the encroachment of methane-ammonia glaciers-hinted at something fairly catastrophic, and recent, too, on the geologic timescale-recent enough not to have been erased by the processes of weathering and tectonic reshaping. Yellowstone had probably had a close encounter with its gas giant neighbour which had injected energy into the planet's core, and the chasm was one of the means by which that energy was slowly being bled back towards space, but something must have opened this escape route in the first place. There were theories about tiny black holes slamming into the crust, or fragments of quark matter, but no one really knew what had happened. There were also rumours and fairytales: of alien digs beneath the crust, evidence that the chasm had in some sense been artefactual, if not necessarily deliberate. Perhaps those aliens had come here for the same reason that humans had, to tap the chasm for its energy and chemical resources. I

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