Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
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| Author | Alastair Reynolds |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Gollancz |
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Publication date
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2 January 2003 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 240 pp |
| ISBN | (Hardcover) |
| OCLC | 226091867 |
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days is a 2003 compilation of two science fiction novellas by writer Alastair Reynolds. Both are set in the Revelation Space universe, but are almost entirely unconnected with the plots of any of the novels in the same story arc.
Set around the late 25th century, Diamond Dogs is a new treatment of the classic SF plot of the deadly maze. While visiting the Monument to the Eighty in Chasm City, Richard meets his old friend Roland Childe, who has been presumed dead for over a century and a half. Childe takes Richard back to his home, and reveals that he is assembling a team to tackle a curious artificial - alien - structure found by probes sent out secretly by his family ages ago.
The team consisted of Richard, Celestine (Richard's ex-wife who underwent Pattern Juggler neural transforms that left her with a brilliant capacity at mathematics, and who divorced Richard around 2490), Hirz (sometime hacker, sometime infiltrator, who has herself frozen between missions), Dr Trintignant (expert doctor and cyberneticist, infamous for conducting horrific medical experiments on allegedly unconsenting subjects), Forqueray (an Ultranaut, captain of the lighthugger Apollyon) and, of course, Childe himself.
From Chasm City, they travel to the alien artifact, which they promptly name "Blood Spire". Remains of the previous human explorers to visit the place lie around - supposedly they belonged to another Ultranaut crew led by a captain called Argyle, whom Childe's probe interrogated during his dying moments to gather information about the Spire.
The Spire is a series of rooms, each containing a mathematical puzzle. The doors get smaller as the rooms progress, and the rooms proceed in a spiral up the tower, which is about 250 meters high. The tower, interestingly, floats off the surface of the planet without any detectable force or support holding it up. The puzzles cover most of mathematics, with various questions tackling triangular numbers, rotations of four-dimensional figures and their corresponding shadows, and arcane aspects of prime number theory. It is not known what the Spire guards, or why there should be so many puzzles.
Disturbingly, the Spire also seems to be alive. Initially cold and silent, it "wakes up" and starts to warm up and vibrate once Childe's crew enters the structure. It also inflicts painful and often gruesome punishments for getting wrong answers or going over some unspecified time limit (which becomes shorter with each puzzle). Forqueray and Hirz are killed by these punishments. Celestine abandons the quest.
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