“They angered the gods,” Sylveste said.

“Yes,” Pascale said. “I think we all agree that they would have interpreted the Event as evidence of theistic displeasure, within the constraints of their belief system—but there wouldn’t have been time to express that belief in any permanent form before they all died, much less bury bodies for the benefit of future archaeologists from a different species.” She lifted her hood over her head and tightened the drawstring—fine plumes of dust were starting to settle down into the pit, and the air was no longer as still as it had been a few minutes earlier. “But you don’t think so, do you?” Without waiting for an answer, she fixed a large pair of bulky goggles over her eyes, momentarily disturbing the edge of her fringe, and looked down at the object which was slowly being uncovered.

Pascale’s goggles accessed data from the imaging gravitometers stationed around the Wheeler grid, overlaying the stereoscopic picture of buried masses on the normal view. Sylveste had only to instruct his eyes to do likewise. The ground on which they were standing turned glassy, insubstantial—a smoky matrix in which something huge lay entombed. It was an obelisk—a single huge block of shaped rock, itself encased in a series of stone sarcophagi. The obelisk was twenty metres tall. The dig had exposed only a few centimetres of the top. There was evidence of writing down one side, in one of the standard late-phase Amarantin graphicforms. But the imaging gravitometers lacked the spatial resolution to reveal the text. The obelisk would have to be dug out before they could learn anything.

Sylveste told his eyes to return to normal vision. “Work faster,” he told his students. “I don’t care if you incur minor abrasions to the surface. I want at least a metre of it visible by the end of tonight.”

One of the students turned to him, still kneeling. “Sir, we heard the dig would have to be abandoned.”