Читать онлайн «Foreigner: Book Three of the Quintaglio Ascension»

Автор Роберт Сойер

The cliff it was embedded in was more than a hundred paces tall, showing the best uninterrupted sequences of sedimentary rock on all of Land. Toroca had uncovered the ship while studying these layers, looking for fossils. He found lots of them above a certain point — the lowest chalk stratum, known as the Bookmark layer — but none below. It had been as if the Bookmark indicated the point of the divine creation of life. But most scholars now agreed that it was instead the arrival point, marking where transplanted lifeforms had first been released by other arks onto this world.

But this ark had crashed, its five-eyed crewmembers killed, its cargo of plants and animals never released. The ark had been buried in sediment that later turned to rock, but it had not been crushed: the blue material of the ship’s hull was harder than diamond and impervious to corrosion. The part now projecting out of the cliff had been exposed by blasting, and, big though it seemed, it was only a tiny fraction of the total ship.

It was noon. The purple sky was shot through with silvery-white clouds. To Novato’s left were choppy waves — the world-spanning body of water. In front of her, running along the edge of the cliff, was a narrow strip of beach, crabs scuttling amongst the rocks. Leading up the cliff face to the blue ark were webs of climbing ropes left over from the early excavations as well as scaffolding made of adabaja wood, added later to make getting up to the ark easier. Oil lamp in hand, Novato began climbing the rickety stairs of the scaffolding.

As she ascended, she could see, far overhead, the green forms of several Quintaglios working with picks at the sides of the giant ark.

Others, Novato knew, were likewise hacking away at the rock on top of the ship. To date, only one entrance to the ship had been found, and passage through it was hampered because its outer door was jammed partway shut. Miners had been working steadily at uncovering more of the ship in hopes of finding another way in. So far they had failed, but as they exposed more of the ship’s roof, they had found that much of it was covered with black hexagonal cells. No one knew what the black honeycomb was for, but Novato had noticed one startling thing: rather than heating up in the sunlight, as dark objects normally did, these cells remained cool, as if — Novato couldn’t fathom the mechanism involved — as if the heat falling on them were somehow conducted into the ship.

At last, Novato reached the top of the stairs. She crossed the wooden platform leading to the ship’s half-closed door. That door led into a tiny chamber, the far wall of which contained another door. The chamber itself was completely empty, except for some grillwork on the walls.

This double-doored room was the subject of much debate.

Some thought it was an animal trap. Bait might have been used to lure prey into the outer chamber, then the outside door would have been closed quickly and the inner door not opened until the animal within had asphyxiated or starved to death. Certainly no hunter would catch food that way, but the bodies of the snip’s crew were so bizarre that one could scarcely imagine them actively pursuing food.