About this ebook
When the UNSS Persephone enters orbit around Tau Ceti IV-b, geologist Dr. Mara Voss expects a routine deep-space survey. What her team finds is a two-kilometre crystalline structure of impossible regularity, ancient beyond reckoning, and very much alive. The xenolith doesn't attack. It doesn't threaten. It simply sings — a subsonic frequency that threads through the crew's dreams, their cells, their sense of self — and waits for them to come closer.
Because the xenolith is a library. And it has been collecting for a very long time.
As incorporation begins in one crew member and then another, Mara races to understand the mechanism before understanding becomes irrelevant. The xenolith holds forty-seven thousand preserved consciousness patterns within its crystalline chambers. It offers not death but continuation — a vast, networked permanence that is genuinely, heartbreakingly certain it is offering a gift.
The horror is that it might be right.
The Xenolith Choir is a novel about identity, sacrifice, and what we owe each other when survival has a cost. About the difference between being preserved and being free. And about what comes back with you when you leave something ancient and patient and enormous — and somehow manage to walk away.
For readers of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Peter Watts' Blindsight, and the harder edge of Arthur C. Clarke.
