Cryptum Read online

  Neither took offense. The humans I had met seemed remarkably thick-skinned. Or more likely, the pronouncements of a Forerunner meant little on a world they thought was theirs.

  Daylight finally arrived, and swiftly. The sky went from mellow orange to pink to blue in a few minutes. From the short jungle came no sound, not even the rustling of leaves.

  I had experienced few islands in my short existence, but had never known any of them to be as quiet as a tomb.

  TWO

  I FOLLOWED THE little human’s persistent, quick pace through low brush and past the naked, scaly trunks of many palms, topped with bristling, branching crowns. The undergrowth was not thick but it was regular—too regular. The pathways, if any, were invisible to me.

  Chakas followed a few steps behind, wearing a perpetual light smile, as if preparing to unleash some joke upon us both. I had not yet learned how to read human expressions with confidence. Grinning might mean mild amusement. It might also be a prelude to aggression.

  The air was humid, the sun high, and our water—carried in tubes made from a kind of thick-stemmed grass—was warm. It was also running out. The hamanune passed one of the last tubes around. Forerunners can’t catch human diseases—or any diseases, if they wear armor—but only reluctantly did I share the warm liquid.

  My good mood faded. Something odd and unexpected was in the air.… Without my armor, I was discovering instincts I didn’t know I could trust. Old talents, old sensitivities, hidden until now by technology.

  We paused. The Florian noticed my growing irritation. “Make hat,” he told Chakas, wiggling his fingers. “Forerunner has hair like glass. Sun burns his head.”

  Chakas looked up, shading his eyes, and nodded. He glanced at me, sizing up my head, before shinnying up a naked trunk. Halfway, he husked off a dried branch and tossed it down.

  The little one chuffed.

  I watched Chakas finish his inchworm ascent. At the top, he pulled a knife from his rope belt and hacked loose a green branch, also letting it drop. Then he shinnied back down, leaping the last half and landing on bent legs with a wide-armed flourish. In triumph, he raised his hand to his mouth and lipped a musical blatting sound.

  We paused in the shadow of the tree while he wove my head cover. Forerunners are fond of hats—each form, rate, and Maniple has their own ceremonial designs, worn only on special occasions. On one day during Grand Star Season, however, all wear the same style of headgear. Our hats were much more dignified and lovely than what Chakas finally handed me. Still, I placed it on my head—and found that it fit.

  Chakas put his hands on his hips and surveyed me with critical mien. “Good,” he judged.

  We continued on for hours until we came to a low wall assembled from precisely cut lava stones. The wall pushed between the trees. From above, it would have ascribed a sinuous curve like a serpent crawling through the jungle.

  Riser sat on the wall, crossed his legs, and chewed on a green blade left over from my hat. His head turned slowly, large brown eyes shifting right and left, and he pushed out his lips. The hamanune had no chin—nothing at all like the prominent feature that made Chakas bear a resemblance to my kind. But the little human more than made up for this with his elegant, mobile lips.

  “Old ones did this, older than grandfather,” he said, patting the stones. He tossed aside the green shred, then stood and balanced on the wall, arms out. “You follow. Only hamanune walk on top.”

  Riser ran along the top. Chakas and I followed on either side, pushing aside brush and avoiding the occasional pugnacious land crustaceans that stood aside for nobody, waving their powerful claws. I almost walked through them … until I remembered I had no armor. Those claws could take off a part of my foot. How vulnerable I was to everything! The excitement of adventure was starting to wear thin. The two humans had done nothing overtly threatening, but how long could I count on that?

  We had a tough time keeping up with the little Florian.

  A few hundred meters later, the wall branched. Riser paused at the juncture to study the situation. He swung his arm right. The chase resumed. Through thicker trees on our left, I saw the inland beach. We had crossed the ring. Beyond loomed the central peak, surrounded by the ring island’s inner lake, the whole shaping a kind of archery target within the crater.

  I wondered if merse lived in those waters as well.

  My mind wandered. Perhaps a powerful, ancient Precursor vessel had crashed down from space, and the central peak was an effect of waves of molten rock lapping inward before solidifying. I wished now I had spent more time listening to my swap-father’s tales of how planets formed and changed, but I didn’t share his Miner’s fascination with tectonics, except where it might conceal or reveal treasure.

  Some Precursor artifacts were old enough to be cycled again and again through hundreds of millions of years, dragged down with subsumed crust and pushed up again through volcanoes or vents. Indestructible … Fascinating. And for now, useless.

  Chakas was bold enough to poke me. I flinched away. “You wouldn’t do that if I still had my armor,” I said.

  His teeth gleamed. Was he becoming more aggressive, or was this just his way of showing affection? I had no way of judging.

  “Over here,” Riser called from where he had run ahead.

  We broke through a particularly dense patch of twiggy green trees with bright red trunks and branches. The Florian was waiting for us where the long, low wall came to an abrupt end. Beyond lay a flat white plain, the inner lake on one side, its beach forming a line of black and gray, and jungle on the other. Once again the central peak was revealed, naked of vegetation, like a dead black thumb thrusting from the pale greenish blue center of the target.

  “Okay, young Forerunner,” Chakas said, coming up behind me. I turned swiftly, believing for a moment he was about to knife me. But no—the bronze-colored human simply pointed across the white waste. “You asked. We brought you here. Your fault, not ours. Remember that.”

  “There’s nothing here,” I said, looking across the flats. Heat waves broke the outline of the far side of the waste into velvety shimmers.

  “Look again,” Riser suggested.

  At the base of the shimmers, what seemed like more water was in fact refracted sky. But through the shimmers, I thought I saw a line of large, hulking apes … great white apes, no doubt from the low end of the Librarian’s folly. They came and went with the mirage—and then steadied, not alive but frozen: carved from stone and left to stand out on the flats like pieces on a game board.

  A cooling wind whispered outward from the black peak, brushing away the rising heat, and the ape figures vanished.

  Not a mirage after all. Something more deceptive.

  I bent to pick up a bit of the soil. Coral and white sand mixed with fine hard volcanic ash. The whole area smelled faintly of ancient fire.

  I looked between the human guides, speechless.

  “Walk,” Riser suggested.

  The walk to the center of the white waste took longer than I expected, but soon enough it dawned on me that we were crossing a baffler—a place protected by geometric distortions—or at the very least a dazzler, protected by delusions.

  A Forerunner had apparently long ago decided the waste should be hidden from curious eyes. I shaded my eyes and looked up at the blue lid of sky. That meant it probably couldn’t be seen from above, either.

  Minutes passed into an hour. We couldn’t keep to a straight line. We were most likely walking in circles. Still we kept on. My feet, shod in ill-fitting human sandals, crunched lightly. Sharp grains dug at my sensitive soles and crept between my toes.

  The two humans showed great patience and did not complain. Chakas lifted the hamanune to his shoulders when it became apparent the little one’s bare feet were suffering from the hot sand.

  The last of our water tubes gave out. Riser tossed it aside with a resigned whicker, then looked back at me, covering and uncovering his eyes with one hand. I thought this was a
sign of embarrassment, but he did it again, then gave me a stern look.

  Chakas explained. “He wants you to blinker yourself. It helps.”

  I covered my eyes.

  “Keep walking,” Chakas said. “If you stop, we might lose you.”

  I couldn’t help lifting my hands to peek. “Don’t look. Walk blind,” Riser insisted.

  “We’re walking in circles,” I warned.

  “Such circles!” Riser enthused.

  The sun was affecting them. I felt like I was in charge of a pair of heat-stroked humans.

  “Left!” Chakas shouted. “Left, now!”

  I hesitated, lifted my hands, and saw my two guides—several paces ahead of me—abruptly vanish, as if swallowed by empty air. They had abandoned me in the middle of the flat, surrounded by white sand and distant jungle. Off to my right rose a lumpy blur that might or might not be the central peak.

  I braced myself for the worst. Without armor, without water, I’d die out here in days.

  Chakas reappeared on my left. He took my arm—I shook him loose instantly—and he stood back like a flattened cutout, his edges loose and seeming to flap. Blinking did not clear this apparition. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Turn left, or go home. If you can find your way out of here.”

  Then he vanished again.

  I slowly turned left, took a step … and felt my entire body shiver. I now stood on a low black walkway curving to the right and then back to the left, surrounded on both sides by gritty white sand. So it had been a baffler and not a dazzler. A Forerunner had hidden this place long ago, using outdated technology—as if expecting that the old tech would be penetrated by clever, persistent humans.

  Ahead, clearly visible now, not white apes but twelve midsize Forerunner fighting suits, arranged in a wide oval about a hundred meters across the long axis. I had spent long hours studying old weapons and ships, to better distinguish them from more interesting finds. Swallowing back disappointment, I recognized them as war sphinxes—flown into battle by Warrior-Servants in ages past but now found only in museums. Antiques, to be sure, and possibly still active and powerful—but of no interest to me whatsoever. “Is that all you have to show me?” I asked, indignant.

  Chakas and Riser kept out of reach, posing in postures of reverence, as if engaged in prayer. Odd. Humans praying to antique weapons?

  I turned my eyes back to the frozen circle. Each war sphinx was ten meters high and twenty long—larger than contemporary Forerunner suits that served the same function. An elongated tail contained lift and power, and from that, at the front, rose a thick, rounded torso. Atop the torso, smoothly integrated with the overall curvilinear design, perched an abstract head with a stubborn, haughty face—a command cabin.

  I took a step forward, deciding whether to cross the remaining stretch of flat between the walkway and the white “giants” arranged around the center of the waste.

  Chakas lifted his crossed arms and sighed. “Riser, how long have these monsters been here?”

  “Long time,” Riser said. “Before grandfather flew away to polish the moon.”

  “He means, more than a thousand years,” Chakas interpreted. “You read old Forerunner writing?” he asked me.

  “Some,” I said.

  “This place doesn’t like humans,” Riser said. He pulled back his lips and shook his head vigorously. “But grandfather caught bees in a basket.…”

  “You’re telling him the secret?” Chakas asked in dismay.

  “Yes,” Riser said. “He’s not smart, but he’s good.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Riser showed his teeth and shook his head vigorously. “Grandfather put bees in a big basket. When they buzz loud, stop and wave the basket this way, then that. When they stop buzzing, go that way.”

  “You mean, there are markers—infrared markers?” I asked.

  “What you say,” Riser agreed with a pout. “Bees know. If you live, you drop rocks so others can follow … as far as you make it.”

  Now that I knew what to look for, I saw—through the dazzle—that there were indeed broken, veering lines of small pebbles marking the otherwise smooth white sand.

  Riser guided us along this jagged path, pausing now and then to chitter to himself, until we stood just a few meters from the nearest sphinx. I paused in its shadow, then leaned over and reached out to touch the high, white surface, pitted with centuries of battle debris and stardust. No response. Inert.

  Towering over me, the scowling features were still impressive. “They’re dead,” I said.

  Riser’s voice took on a tone of some reverence. “They sing,” he said. “Grandfather heard.”

  I drew my hand back.

  “He said these are trophies from war. Important to old, big guy. Somebody put them here to guard, watch, wait.”

  “Which war, I wonder?” Chakas asked, and looked at me as if I might know.

  I did know. Or strongly suspected. The sphinxes were about the right age to be from the human-Forerunner wars, ten thousand years or so. But I still did not feel comfortable discussing this with my guides.

  Riser left the walkway and walked carefully around the fighting unit. I went next, observing the smooth points of the suit’s forked tail, the gaping tunnels on each fork leading, no doubt, to thrusters. There were no visible guidance points. On the opposite side, I noticed the outlines of retracted manipulators and folded shields.

  “Locked down for thousands of years,” I said. “I doubt they’re worth anything.”

  “Not to me,” Riser said, looking up at the younger, taller human with pouched lips.

  “To him, maybe,” Chakas said softly, waving at the center of the oval—an empty stretch of distorted sand. “Or her.”

  “Him or her?” I asked.

  “Who chose you? Who guided you?” Chakas asked.

  “Do you mean the Librarian?” I asked.

  “She comes to us when we’re born,” Chakas said, his face dark with indignation and something more. “She watches over us as we grow, knows good and bad. She joys at our triumphs and sorrows at our passing. We all feel her presence.”

  “We all do,” Riser affirmed. “We’ve been waiting for just the right time, and just the right fool.”

  No doubt under her protection, these humans had grown arrogant and presuming. But there was nothing I could do. I needed them. “She’s out there?” I asked, pointing at the central peak.

  “We never see her,” Chakas said. “We don’t know where she is. But she sent you, I’m sure of that.”

  My ancilla. They were more right than they could possibly know. “She must be a great power indeed, to arrange all this,” I said. But my voice lacked conviction.

  “Luck is her way,” Chakas said.

  Once again, old Forerunners were conspiring to guide my life.

  Riser bent and waved his hand over what appeared to be an empty span of sand. This motion pushed aside a low mist, revealing for a moment a single large, flat lump of black lava. “Good for walls.”

  We stepped over the rock onto the central oval bordered by the sphinxes. Suddenly, I felt a chill—an awareness that I was on a space sacred not to humans, but to some other power. Something great and old was nearby—a Forerunner, of that I was sure—but of what rate? Given the sphinxes, a Warrior-Servant seemed most likely.

  But how old?

  From the human wars. Ten thousand years ago.

  “Don’t like it here,” Riser said. “Not brave like grandfather. You go on. I stay.”

  “Follow the pebbles and the rocks,” Chakas said quietly. “Where the rocks stop, no human has ever stepped—and lived. What needs to be done, I can’t do—nor can Riser.” The young human was sweating, his eyes unfocused.

  The Forerunner universe has a rich history of impossibilities that became truth. I considered myself a pragmatist, a realist, and found most such stories unsatisfying, frustrating, but never frightening. Now I was not only irritated, I was frightened—far more frigh
tened than I had been on the boat.

  When Forerunners die—usually by accident or, on rare occasions, during war—elaborate ceremonies are enacted before their remains are disposed of in fusion fires associated with the activities of their rates—a melting torch or planet cutter.

  First, the Forerunner’s last memories are abstracted from his armor, which preserves a few hours of the occupant’s mental patterns. This reduced essence—a spectral snatch of personality, and not a whole being—is placed in a time-locked Durance. The body is then torched in a solemn ceremony attended only by close relations. A bit of plasma from the immolation is preserved by the appointed Master of the Mantle, who secures it along with the essence in the Durance.

  The Durance is then given to the closest members of the dead Forerunner’s family, who are charged with making sure that it is never abused. A Durance has a half-life of more than a million years. Families and rates are very protective of such places. In the treasure-hunting manuals I had read over the years, seekers are frequently warned to observe the signs and avoid such locations. Stumbling upon such a family Durance would definitely be considered sacrilege.

  “This is a disgraceful world,” I murmured. “No Forerunner would want to be buried here.”

  Chakas set his jaw and glared at me.

  “It’s all nonsense,” I persisted. “No high rate would be buried here. Besides, what treasure would possibly be kept near a grave?” I continued, drawing my arrogant words to a stronger point. “And if you never met the Librarian, how…”

  “When I first met you, I knew you were the one,” Chakas said. “She comes to us at birth—”

  “You said that.”

  “And tells us what we must do.”

  “How could she know what I’d look like?”

  Chakas dismissed this. “We owe our lives to the Librarian, all of us.”

  A Lifeworker as powerful as the Librarian certainly had the means to impose a generations-long genetic command upon the objects of her study. Such a compulsion in past times would have been called a geas. Some students of the Mantle even believed that the Precursors had imposed a geas upon Forerunners.…