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  The Old Council saw my logic, but the war had already cost Forerunners much blood and treasure. The councilors insisted that we must balance our quest for a solution to the Flood with other concerns. We had to safeguard against human resurgence.

  The Didact as well had mixed feelings, though he rarely expressed them to me—not then. He supported the rule of the Mantle, but as a Promethean he had sworn to preserve Forerunners at all cost. He knew what fierce enemies humans could be, should they escape our forces and rise again to power. Yet even to the Didact, it was obvious preservation of one sort or another was necessary.

  The Builders finally came around and agreed with me—in part. They combined forces with Lifeworkers to push hard for a program of relentless research. The Flood, after all, might return and endanger the systems we had captured—reducing Builder profit following the war.

  In the end, the Old Council and I struck an awful bargain. Humans would be reduced to a powerless remnant of their former selves. And Lifeworkers were commanded to use any means necessary to discover the secret of human resistance. There was a strong component of punishment in our instructions—that much was obvious. Our grief burned. It burns still.

  The human-Forerunner war ground on to its inevitable conclusion. While the fate of the humans was being finalized, Charum Hakkor held out to a bitter end, sacrificing tens of thousands of ships and millions of lives on both sides.

  Then—Forthencho, that awful name, that awful, magnificent presence! Forthencho, Lord of Admirals, the Didact’s greatest opponent—surrendered his fleets, disbanded his forces, and awaited whatever we might bring.

  * * *

  And so it was that at Charum Hakkor, the Didact and I moved among the captured commanders and warriors and their families, surrounded by those who had fought against us for decades, often bravely, more often still with unique treachery. We could not avoid bitterness—we are only Forerunners, after all. But the cost the humans had paid, and would continue to pay, was horrendous.

  The debris of battle lay all around, ruins of human structures but also, visible through the haze and smoke as long slender streaks in the sky, the untouchable and perpetual star roads of the Precursors, placed there more than ten million years before. These gray, eternal whorls stretched to middle orbit, where their rotating bands drew constantly and silently from the neurophysical energy of raw space in ways we still do not understand.

  Life—achingly beautiful, impossibly difficult.

  What we brought for Lord of Admirals and his last warriors were the Composers. These large, ugly machines had originally been designed by Builders in a failed attempt to attain immunity against the Flood. Composers broadcast high-energy fields of entangled sympathies to gather victim mentalities—essences—and then translated them into machine data. In the original scheme, new bodies were constructed, and the subjects’ essences were imprinted over them—minus any trace of Flood patterns.

  The results were not at all satisfactory. In fact, they were horrible. The Forerunner bodies so treated did not live very long. None survived outside of mechanical storage.

  But here—Composers were all we had. All we were given. Builders and vengeful councilors made sure of that.

  The hundreds of thousands of humans still alive on Charum Hakkor were handed over to Lifeworkers to be studied, probed, analyzed molecule by molecule, thought by thought, down to their very cells—and then subjected to the wide-ranging, rippling fields of Composers.

  After the Composers had done their work, draining these last survivors, these exhausted and dying warriors, of their memories and patterns, their remains were reduced to scattered atoms. It was manifest holocaust. Once the second greatest fighting civilization and species in the galaxy, humans were stomped down, reduced, effectively eliminated as a threat.

  Throughout, the hardest part was processing the human children. They had been formed into their own cadres, given their own defensive orders. Raised in times of continuous war, they seemed to understand what was about to happen better than their elders. I remember their wise eyes, unafraid, terrible.

  CATALOG NOTE: The Lifeshaper’s ancilla transfers sensory data recorded at the time described. What Catalog glimpses of Composer procedures is disturbing. I have never directly witnessed such events. And yet, even this does not rise to the level of a crime against the Mantle.

  Not yet.

  LIBRARIAN

  Despite our feverish preparations, Builders and the Old Council had kept the Flood’s existence secret from the great centers of Forerunner population, ostensibly to avoid panic during time of war.

  Most of the ecumene celebrated a newfound security, unaware even of the existence of the Flood.

  The second part of my deal with the Council, to preserve humans as a potentially renewable species, required a selection of intact and vital specimens. Thousands more were extracted from hiding in shattered redoubts around the conquered human territories and carried to Erde-Tyrene, which even today exhibits the fossil remains of humanity’s most ancient ancestors.

  Yet while honoring my request, the Old Council insisted that the last surviving humans were to be devolved. Human epigenetics would be played backward, reversing their time-enriched evolutionary music. Individuals, the Council mandated, would be forced to consciously experience this reversal, as a reminder and balance for their arrogance and cruelty.

  Each and every day, for months, my specimens felt their bodies lose memory, complexity, mass—and finally, intelligence.

  The Council and the Builders then put another, even stranger twist on my hopes to preserve human cultural patterns. As the humans devolved, the Composer-gathered personalities and memories of their fellows at Charum Hakkor would be holographically stored within their changing flesh. Not active, but dormant—thus avoiding the consequences of Composer decay.

  Each devolved human would in effect carry the memories of tens of thousands of their kind, preserved for future study and investigation—and passed along to their offspring.

  Those same memories and personalities would also be transferred to machine storage and subjected to constant rote interrogation—creating a library of enslaved ghosts subjected to mechanized torment for thousands of years to come. Thus, the Council believed, the secret to human resistance to the Flood would eventually be found.

  Our perverse nod to the Mantle exhibited cruelty far beyond simple extinction. The Builders had gained practically everything they wished for. But that did not stop another and very different war from breaking out—between my husband and the Master Builder.

  Powerful forces within the Council and among Warrior-Servants still supported the Didact’s strategy for containing the Flood: hundreds of enormous Shield Worlds, placed at key locations around the galaxy to both survey for Flood incursions and conduct carefully chosen, system-wide operations. The Didact had worked with me to provide these huge constructs with a tremendous capacity to preserve imperiled species—on a localized basis.

  Thus, he said, his defenses did not violate the Rule of the Mantle. Unlike the Master Builder’s proposed Halos, the Shield Worlds did not require a great extinction, and in fact they could be used as immense refuges in time of crisis.

  In response, the Master Builder ordered that his Halos also be adapted to support and preserve species. Playing politics better than any of us, the Master Builder knew that this removed the Council’s last objection to his Halo strategy—the threat of violating the Mantle, of destroying the galaxy in order to save it.

  Worse, in asking me to design these sanctuaries, a request I could not refuse, I was perceived as working with the Master Builder, against the wishes of my husband.

  The Master Builder, sensing a winning strategy, now volunteered that the great extragalactic factory used to manufacture Halos, known as the Ark, would also safely carry protected populations—at tremendous expense and great profit for Builders. Builders heartily approved.

  And he suggested that a second Ark be constructed, in secr
et, to expand that role. More species could be saved, more Halos could be made. Additionally, all of the problems now apparent with the first Ark could be addressed.

  The choices my husband and I faced were narrowing. Politically, our paths would soon diverge.

  * * *

  Life roils with competition, death, and replacement, from the tide pool borders of our natal ocean to the farthest stars. Its cruelty and creativity are interwoven.

  And yet this was a time—far from the first time—when Forerunner defiance of the dictates of the Mantle pushed us perilously close to tyranny, desecration, and—I use the oldest of our words here—outrage.

  We had the excuse that Lifeworkers and Warrior-Servants were not in supreme power, that the Old Council was being managed by Builders, that even the Juridicals were under their sway … And that the Flood might again place the entire galaxy in peril.

  But was even all of that justification enough?

  * * *

  The Builders made the first Ark and the earliest Halo installations … large revolving rings, thirty thousand kilometers in diameter, capable of sustaining millions if not billions of organisms on their inner surfaces. Paradises for research, in one way—but designed ultimately to destroy all life for hundreds of thousands of light-years around.

  The Old Council had the wisdom at least to delay construction of the second Ark. No need to make the Builders too powerful to be controlled.

  The last physically intact humans arrived on Erde-Tyrene. They were very few, much fewer than I had planned. Almost immediately, I began my program of rebuilding their populations—away from the critical eye of the Master Builder, the Council, and even the Didact.

  In this familiar environment, my humans thrived. In fact, they demonstrated an astonishing, almost supernatural resilience. To the shock of my Lifeworkers, the reverted humans bred to more and more advanced forms over just a thousand years, diverging into distinct varieties like a bush blooming with a thousand brilliant flowers. Their numbers grew as well, from thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions.

  I could not explain this effect. I sought for it in their genetics, and found nothing. Was there something else at work here—something that had somehow remained hidden from us?

  My humans soon gathered into bands, tribes, villages. Tilled the soil and raised crops. Took wolves and goats and sheep, cattle, birds, and charmed them into domestication. Made many tools, developed crude trade and industry.

  Within a thousand years, some of them reminded me of the Lord of Admirals.

  Others—of the wise-eyed children …

  I kept their extraordinary progress hidden from the Old Council and the Builders. I did not tell my husband. Erde-Tyrene was far outside the usual runnels of Forerunner commerce. I removed my Lifeworkers, trimming their numbers to a few, and then, to none. The planet became a forgotten backwater.

  Every now and then, I dropped by in person to study their progress. I gave them all my geas, my mark of instruction, utility and pride. I wished to be remembered. My own existence seemed so frail, after what we had done. When I worked with the humans, studying their genetics and personalities, I could almost forget the larger conflicts that loomed.

  But that time was also spent away from my husband, and his difficulties were growing. The Didact continued to stubbornly promote his Shield Worlds, demonstrating their effectiveness again and again to Council audiences. He continued to make dangerous enemies.

  As for the memories of his victories … they slipped into the past.

  They dimmed.

  The Master Builder brilliantly chipped away at the Didact’s remaining base of support. The political war between Builders and Warrior-Servants came to a head. Warrior-Servants were reduced as a rate. Many moved to the Builder rate, taking on the role of Builder Security. The insult was obvious—but at least they survived, found prosperity, and became of value to the new regime.

  And then came the final blow. Juridicals ruled against my husband. The Didact was found in contempt of the Council, ordered to stop making Shield Worlds, turn over his records and ancillas, end his planning, and submit to the authority of the Builders—and in particular to Faber, the Master Builder.

  The Didact refused.

  Even as my humans revived classic forms, then flowered into new and unexpected variations, the possibility grew to certainty that I would have to proceed alone, because of the my husband’s pending exile—or execution.

  STRING 4

  LIBRARIAN

  I LAST SAW the Didact on our estate around Far Nomdagro, a small orange star seven light-years from the Capital system. We shared this world with a million Warrior-Servants. Many of our neighbors were already pulling up their estates and families, abandoning their birth rate to enlist in Builder Security.

  Nomdagro was temperate, ancient of birth and low of mountains, half-ocean and half-land. I suppose by comparison our estate was humble, but I had never lived anywhere more luxurious. Unlike Lifeworkers, Warrior-Servants were not inclined to live frugally.

  The Didact, when he designed our nuptial house, demonstrated a style some would call severe, but still inclined to majesty. I have seen ancient fortresses with less grandeur. Our central quarters were cut from blocks of lava filled with the fossils of Nomdagro’s only indigenous species, a lovely variety of silicon worm, long since extinct. They seemed to have swum through the lava before it cooled, but that had likely not been the case; more true to imagine them having died in great, contorted coils, their immensely strong cuticles and cartilaginous members resisting as the lava washed over, entombing them until masons split the solid blocks.

  The Didact had picked those stones with me in mind, and they were lovely, in a forbidding sort of way. The fossils bore enough residual thorium and uranium to glow softly at night, lighting our way as we went to that last supper before he entered his Cryptum.

  I remember those hours with crystal clarity. An associate of Haruspis had been called and had arrived the night before. Those were brilliant nights indeed. An unstable star on the far side of the Orion complex had supernovaed one hundred years before. That long-traveling radiation was now, to our eyes, lighting up the vast nebula, washing over the far-spreading clouds and wisps of gas as if in preternatural warning.

  “A well-chosen occasion. The delay of space is profound,” the Haruspis’s associate intoned. Its attitude—it was a self-gelding like all associates—irritated the Didact. More so was my husband annoyed by the implication that we might have chosen this occasion to highlight the occasion, to grandstand.

  Still, he controlled himself, and faced off with the associate under the burning streamers of yellow and orange and deep purple. At the associate’s signal, the Didact’s armor lifted from his hard light under-sheath, uncoiling and separating, protruding wedges and spikes as if preparing for battle—and then slumped into a compact egg.

  The Didact lifted his hands to receive the cup containing the first full measure of inchukoa and drank it back in one swallow.

  This began the process of living desiccation.

  Our conversation around that spare supper was mostly gentle and loving. The Didact and I had been a highly unsuitable match, and yet we had been married for thousands of years. What some might have interpreted as disagreement, debate, barely contained irritation or competition, was in fact the fire of our deepest love. We still took delight in the sparks we struck.

  I remember this so clearly.…

  Household monitors arranged towels and cups around the Didact’s chair as his skin wept salty drops. The skin of his broad, noble face stretched tight.

  Face glistening—shedding his water—flesh turning to leather, blood a glassy gel.

  His speech became slow and precise; he had difficulty moving his lips. “I hate to abandon you,” he said. “If there was another way…” He shook his great head and reached to massage a shrinking shoulder. His skin, normally gray and rich purple, had darkened to reddish brown.

  And then
he smiled—most unexpectedly. I had not seen him smile since we had been Manipulars, and did not know he still had it in him. Perhaps the mature musculature was being liberated by this awful process. Perhaps he was simply expressing a final ironic amusement.

  “I know you’ve made plans best carried out in my absence,” he said.

  “Our own plans are not finished,” I said.

  “There will be many voices,” the Didact said. “The Master Builder may not find me, but that does not mean he won’t find a means by which to invoke my support.”

  “He will hold off such treachery for a good long while,” I suggested.

  “And if he does not, still you’ll carry out your pact with him.”

  “Probably.”

  “To save your beloved species.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your humans.”

  “Those as well.”

  “Even those who killed our children.”

  “You told me it was honorable, that they fought well—and you agreed this was our best strategy.”

  “You agreed too quickly.” Again that odd, tightening smile. The Didact meant his words kindly. The pain we had suffered during the long war—and the loss—had inured us to such recrimination. Our children had followed the way of their Warrior-Servant father. They had proved themselves capable and courageous. It was the Warrior’s creed within the Mantle to honor one’s finest enemies, and humans had been that. “I sometimes wish you were more bloody-minded, more vengeful, Wife.”

  “Not the way of the Warrior or of the Mantle—and of course not mine.”

  “Of course.”

  The Didact’s discomfort increased. He swallowed half of the second cup of inchukoa, then lifted the cup and turned it in his fingers. “The ecumene has become confused. The Council steeps itself in lies and dishonor. But … you foresee my return, in one form or another, and the resumption of our struggle.”