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  “It seems so.”

  “Then under the compelling influence of an ancient leader, you joined the Didact’s cause.” She was trying to put a kind mask on the whole—in her view—sordid episode. “He no doubt required your help to accomplish his peculiar ends. And because of your youth, you could not have understood how that might complicate your father’s work and cause great harm to our family.”

  “My body isn’t the only thing that’s changed,” I said. “I learned much that is hidden from Manipulars and even most Forerunners. I learned about something called the Flood.”

  My sister looked between us, uncomprehending.

  Mother’s expression shifted in an instant from patient sadness to stiff formality. “Where did you hear of that?” she asked.

  “Partly from the Didact, and some from the Domain itself.”

  “Then you have experienced the Domain,” my sister said. “And from the perspective of an ancient warrior! What’s that like?”

  “Confused,” I admitted. “I haven’t integrated my perceptions. The knowledge is primitive at best, and I can’t go back without further guidance … I think. At any rate, I haven’t accessed the Domain since my armor was taken away on the San’Shyuum quarantine world.”

  “Quarantine!” my sister exclaimed. “I’ve heard about the San’Shyuum. Was it marvelous and sensuous?”

  “Enough has been said of that.” Mother looked around the veranda and seemed to be surveying the entire estate through her ancillas, as if anticipating Council spies, more fines, and even more severe correction. “I’ve heard of the Flood. It was a mysterious stellar disease that caused radiation anomalies. It severely damaged a number of Forerunner colony worlds in the outer reaches of the galaxy, several centuries ago.” This seemed to cost her considerable effort. I saw clearly the burden that had been placed upon her in the last few months. I could bear responsibility for only so much of that burden. “We must await the judgment of your father,” she finally said, drawing back her survey, no doubt to the relief of ancillas around the planet.

  “Father’s changed, too—he looks as if he’s been groomed and tutored for great advancement,” I said. “Did the Master Builder mentor him for his last mutation?”

  “Enough!” Mother cried, and stood. Dozens of little servant units scattered. With a shiver, she suggested we retire to contemplate the Mantle before spending the hours of darkness in private study. She then walked out quickly, scattering the units again, and left my sister and me under the faint wisps of nebular glow and stars both diffuse and sharp, as if caught behind a sweeping, broken veil of tattered fog.

  “What is happening to this family?” my sister asked. “It can’t all be your fault. Even before you left—”

  “Mother’s right,” I said.

  “What is the Flood?” she asked abruptly, her instincts sharp. “Mother seems to know something … I certainly don’t.”

  I shook my head. “Frightful stories concocted for political gain, and perhaps that’s all.” Was I now misleading my own sister? With a shrug, I added, “I defer to Father’s judgment.”

  “Oh you do, now?” she said.

  We parted at the gate to the veranda, and I returned to my room high in a tower looking out over the nearest disk-sea, its rim surrounded by cascading waters, beneath the ever-changing gallery of our sky: newborn stars, dying suns, the great turmoil in which Forerunners had seen first light.

  I had done nothing for my family. Perversely, I now felt more connection with the Didact than I did with them—and even more perversely, perhaps that was how I would redeem myself to family and Forerunners alike.

  How many betrayals could it take to go full circle?

  It was now even more imperative that I learn who I actually was, and what I was about to become. No one could tell me. No one could teach me.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THAT NIGHT—AND many after—were tumbled and confused. I sat surrounded by gently flickering displays that delivered little of the information that I requested and needed. The Domain was still a closed puzzle box. Sometimes I felt its touch, but never long enough to immerse myself or study its nature and contents.

  Instead, I watched the sky, tracking the reentry trails of hundreds of Builder transports coming and going. So many ships of late. So much activity. I had always known my father was important, but suspicion had blossomed into certainty that he was in fact crucial to the Master Builder’s plan. So much hatred directed at the Warrior-Servants.

  What part did Father play in their reduction? Was he aware of the damage to our traditions, to the protection of the Mantle itself?

  Visions of the prisoner of Charum Hakkor, whatever that was, now loose and beyond the reach of the Didact.

  Missing for forty or fifty years.

  And, always looming, the specter of that vast slender ring—underscored by the strange horror of Master Builder’s destruction of the war sphinxes and their impressions of the Didact’s children.

  * * *

  What I had managed to learn about the Forerunner schism was a slender thread, but still intriguing. My other memories still withheld those times from me, perhaps waiting for more sophistication—or the right moment.

  Ten thousand years ago, just after the conclusion of the human-San’Shyuum war, the most exalted of the Warrior-Servants, the Prometheans, had been ascendant among Forerunners, as high in social standing and power as they would ever reach. Their downfall came as a great strategic decision was being made. Behind this maneuvering lay a threat from outside the galaxy—theoretical, perhaps, but terrible nonetheless. Remembering what the Didact had told me, I surmised that this threat was what humans had once fought against and defeated, or pushed back, even while warring against the Forerunners: the Flood. Of that I could still learn little or nothing, but I was sure my mother’s tale of stellar disease was simply a cover.

  The secret of the human victory against the Flood had never been revealed.

  But all had anticipated that the Flood would return.

  The Master Builder seemed to have asserted that a new grand strategy (and a new weapon, as well?) made old-fashioned warriors and armies and fleets unnecessary.

  Shortly thereafter, the Didact and all his fellow Prometheans were removed from the Council. I presumed this was when the Didact was forced into exile and entered the Cryptum.

  From that time until now, over a thousand years, Warrior-Servants had been increasingly marginalized, their rates reassessed, their forces and fleets and armies disbanded.

  * * *

  Night upon night I struggled with the limited feeds, and day after day I suffered under the polite condescension of my father and the sad reckoning of my mother.

  I had hardly even begun to explore the depths of the Didact’s imprint, still slowly opening and expanding within me. There was a reason for the concealment and slow unfolding. Those resources were not for my personal entertainment, nor even for my own growth and edification. They had to be buried deep against intrusive access—to be unlocked only if I returned to a position of importance, responsibility.

  Only if I dared.

  If I lost the protection of my father and fell into the hands of the Master Builder one more time, I might be dangerous to the Didact as well. My other memories could be painfully yanked out and put on display for the Master Builder’s benefit, to scour for incriminating information.

  Perhaps that had already happened to the humans.

  I could not bear the thought that the Master Builder might even now be tossing aside the spent corpses of Chakas and Riser and laying low Erde-Tyrene, snuffing out potential resistance—shoving aside and burying anything and anyone that stood in his path.

  THIRTY

  MY RESTLESSNESS TURNED me into a wanderer.

  A Forerunner household never sleeps. There is no equivalent of nighttime and rest, but there are moments of repose when all retire for individual contemplation and to prepare for the next round of activities. In traditional Builde
r households, these moments are sacrosanct. Thus during any given day-night cycle, there are hours when the house—and in our case, much of the planet—becomes quiescent. The streets and byways reduce their flow. Even the ancillas and automated systems reduce their on-call activities.

  But I did not. I preferred to take my exercise alone, without armor, simply to allow my developing self—whatever that might be—to communicate its direction. I was still mutating, still changing in ways none could predict. The Didact had done a real number on me.

  And so I walked. I paced. I explored kilometers of corridors leading to hundreds of empty chambers, chambers that re-created their elaborate hard-light decor only in the presence of Forerunners. Parts of our house and estate buildings had not been visited for hundreds of years. Many contained tributes and records of past members of our clan and allied clans, including ancestors of the Master Builder himself. I took a perverse interest in the Master Builder’s relation to my family, and learned through reactivated displays—pitifully enthusiastic about finally being observed—of great contracts and political alliances stretching back twenty-five thousand years, long before my Father’s inception.

  I spent many hours listening to a small, slightly dotty ancilla devoted to cataloging and researching the historical consequences of my family’s millions of contracts and constructions. A diminutive, fading sapphire figure whose edges barely cohered, her resources had not been updated or renewed for the last three thousand years, yet she remained on duty, ever-hopeful of serving, faithful beyond reason but increasingly eccentric. She toured me through the records of more than a thousand worlds transformed by my father and his Builder cohorts, and then unveiled with obvious pride even greater contracts: dozens of stars harnessed by containment and collection fields, including, it seemed, the ingenious quarantine around the San’Shyuum system.

  In these records, to my great interest, were hints of large-scale weapons. Under the old name of Faber, the Master Builder had partnered with my father in creating and offering up these designs to the Council. Expunged from the records were any indications of Council approval or denial of these weapons. None took on the final, ring-shaped aspect of the great Halos, however.

  A thousand years of politics and progress.

  My father had never bragged about his works and influence, of course, and as a Manipular, I had never shown much interest. But I understood now how he had been able to secure my return.

  Yet this was not explicitly what I was seeking.

  My restlessness had its own motives. What I was becoming—who I was becoming—had a separate set of curiosities, and I indulged them. The problem with being potential is that one contains multitudes of outcomes, candidates vying to become final personalities, and as the hours and days passed, the strongest ruled for a time until toppled by others even stronger.…

  Matters would be coming to a head soon enough. One of me would suffice and rule, supplemented by the unfolding wisdom of the Didact.

  * * *

  During one long repose, two hundred domestic days after my return, I came upon my father and a visitor under a seldom-used nave-and-cupola reception chamber, halfway across the main length of our household, about ten kilometers from my own tower chambers.

  I happened to be crossing a skybridge connecting two higher floors in that wing, beneath the cupola, when I heard voices echoing from a hundred meters below. One voice was that of my father, clear and precise—but not at all commanding; rather, unexpectedly subservient.

  I cautiously leaned over the railing. My father and another Builder, both free of armor, were engaged in a heated conversation they obviously did not wish audited or recorded. The local support services had been shut down, leaving floors and walls frosted with cold.

  The other Builder was much younger than my father, a first-form much as I would have been had my mutation proceeded normally. Despite his youth, he seemed to speak with considerable authority.

  Curious indeed, that one so young could command an audience with my father. I managed to catch little more than half of what was being said.

  “More incidents in the outer reaches … twelve systems lost in the last three hundred years…”

  And: “… traces remain of the test bed near Charum Hakkor, even after forty-three years … decimation of San’Shyuum … uprising insufficient cause…”

  “… trial pending … charges of gross violation of the principles of the Mantle…”

  Was he referring to the Master Builder?

  “… A metarch-level ancilla’s assigned to the test-bed device sent to Charum Hakkor. Both went missing after the action against the San’Shyuum…”

  “… vote of no confidence in the Master Builder’s leadership…”

  And then my father, his voice rising loud and clear in the vast space as the air currents blew my way: “How could they be used in such a way? Tuned so broadly and without safeguards … It goes against all the designers had planned and hoped for, not as final defense, but as brutal punishments.…”

  “It was your science that allowed them, Builder. The opposing faction in the Council never authorized such a use, but that is secondary to the blame of building and enabling.”

  I drew back, shivering not just with the chill. I knew what they were talking about. It seemed that the forces of the Master builder had used the Halo tested at Charum Hakkor to finish what they had begun with the San’Shyuum. I had been there. I had survived the cruelties of the Master Builder.

  But what of the Didact and the humans?

  And what of a missing metarch-level ancilla? These great artificial minds, far more powerful than any personal or shipboard ancilla, usually administered the most complicated construction projects and were tightly constrained by law. There were fewer than five in existence, and they were never allowed to serve any entity but the Council. My other memory flared with its own anguish and anger.

  A metarch-level ancilla—assigned to defense—commanding a Halo!

  “… has been recalled for debriefing. All but one of the installations have been returned to a parking star, guarded by my own myrmidons. I am requesting their destruction. As well, on Zero-Zero…”

  All but one. A moment of crisis approaches. Days at most, perhaps sooner.

  The Didact’s wisdom again, this time cold and concise.

  Here the momentary clarity of sound faded and I found myself listening to noises from elsewhere under the cupola, like distant whispers. But we were the only living Forerunners in this wing of our ancient home. What I heard had to be mere currents of air in the great volume. And soon enough, snow begin to fall and the cupola’s reactivated lighting systems, taking an interest in the potential beauty of the internal weather, began to highlight the swirling flakes.

  The building was rousing again from its temporary stupor, showing off, I thought perhaps for my father and his visitor, but when I leaned forward again, they had both departed.

  Tell him.

  Tell him now. He needs to know.

  * * *

  I descended from my tower to the veranda to join my family for the first glow of morning. They wore only white shifts, allowing their armor to be polished and meticulously checked, and were taking a first meal of fruits and nuts, which with a pang I realized would meet with Riser’s full approval. Though the Florian might also bring along little meats and disrupt my mother’s peace of mind.

  My father stood by the ledge, looking out over our disk-sea and the vast fields of lilies. Once, he had seemed impossibly large, forbidding and cold. Now he simply looked tired, stretched too thin even to join in the small talk of my sister and mother, which had once offered him diversion and relief.

  Now.

  Words came to me suddenly. “I think I bear a message,” I said, before I could stop myself. “But I don’t know whom it’s for.”

  My father turned slowly and looked at me. “Not unexpected,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  “A Halo released something that was kept b
y both Precursors and humans at Charum Hakkor.”

  My father put his arm around my mother as if to protect her, the first time I had seen them engage in physical contact without armor. I found the gesture both reassuring and disturbing. “I know nothing of a Halo at Charum Hakkor,” he said.

  “This is not the time for lies, Father.”

  My sister flinched, but both my mother and father remained still, perhaps shocked into silence by my insubordination.

  “Your visitor from the Council informed you. There was also a Halo in the San’Shyuum quarantine system,” I said. “I saw it.”

  Father released my mother, turned, and swept out his arm. “I need my ancilla.” His armor floated forward. He watched impatiently as it rotated for his approval. Finally, he shoved it aside, straightened, and with an effort, his voice choked, said, “I have done all I can to protect you. But they—this—this has taken you away from our family, our rate, our shield of society and law. And now you question my judgment. Is this truly you speaking?”

  “What is the Flood?” my sister asked again.

  Father turned on her swiftly, as if to reprimand her, but his voice choked off. “We meant to protect the entire galaxy,” he finally managed. “Builders have been designing and planning for this since before I was born. Many have failed and been demoted. After three thousand years, my team and I succeeded. Our Master Builder took that work and advanced it to field-testing … in a way that apparently has met with the disapproval of the Council.”

  My mother looked between us, dismay turning slowly to horrified realization that a turning point had been reached.

  “What did he do to the San’Shyuum?” I asked.

  “What’s a Halo?” my sister asked.

  “It’s a giant ring,” I said, “a horrible weapon that destroys all life—”

  “Enough about that has already been said,” my father proclaimed. His look was both sad and challenging. “Charum Hakkor seems to be a matter of grave concern to the Council. So, messenger, what did you find there?”