“That’s where you come in, isn’t it? I’m just here to offer commentary.” Pascale Dubois was a young journalist from Cuvier. She had been covering the dig since its inception, often dirtying her fingers with the real archaeologists, learning their cant. “The bodies are gruesome, though, aren’t they? Even though they’re alien, it’s almost as if you can feel their pain.”

To one side of the pit, just before the floor stepped down, they had unearthed two stone-lined burial chambers. Despite being buried for nine hundred thousand years—at the very least—the chambers were almost intact, with the bones inside still assuming a rough anatomical relationship to one another. They were typical Amarantin skeletons. At first glance—to anyone who happened not to be a trained anthropologist—they could have passed as human remains, for the creatures had been four-limbed bipeds of roughly human size, with a superficially similar bone-structure. Skull volume was comparable, and the organs of sense, breathing and communication were situated in analogous positions. But the skulls of both Amarantin were elongated and birdlike, with a prominent cranial ridge which extended forwards between the voluminous eye-sockets, down to the tip of the beaklike upper jaw. The bones were covered here and there by a skein of tanned, desiccated tissue which had served to contort the bodies, drawing them—or so it seemed—into agonised postures. They were not fossils in the usual sense: no mineralisation had taken place, and the burial chambers had remained empty except for the bones and the handful of technomic artefacts with which they had been buried.

“Perhaps,” Sylveste said, reaching down and touching one of the skulls, “we were meant to think that.”

“No,” Pascale said. “As the tissue dried, it distorted them.”

“Unless they were buried like this.”

Feeling the skull through his gloves—they transmitted tactile data to his fingertips—he was reminded of a yellow room high in Chasm City, with aquatints of methane icescapes on the walls.