B00AQUQDQO EBOK Read online

  “Crèche-mate … What did you have against him, or her?”

  “Him. He was destined to bond with the heir to a powerful family, highest in our rate. I had been passed over. It was not just, so I felt.”

  “You blew him up?”

  “Utterly. And twelve of his crew.”

  This put my stalwart companion in an entirely new light. “The Juridicals chose you anyway?”

  “They did.”

  “You must have a very special quality.”

  “Yes.” Again the hum. “Depth of depravity.”

  “I once tried to destroy an entire species,” I said.

  “Perhaps you are destined to become like me,” Catalog said.

  “Perhaps. I don’t judge. You don’t judge. We’re here to observe. And to do our best to survive.”

  “Correct.”

  “Glad to have that resolved.” I held out my hand and gripped one shoulder. Catalog raised one of its hands and we clasped palms, then each of us drew a Y with a finger, me, over my nose, Catalog, over the front portion of its forward sensor. A Warrior’s awareness of shame.

  “Now, you’re an honorary Warrior-Servant,” I said.

  “If you insist, Didact.”

  We waited.

  “You’re still connected with the Juridicals, aren’t you?”

  “No,” it said. “All our channels have closed. The Domain is also blocked.”

  “They’re moving Halos again?” I asked with a shudder.

  “A possible explanation,” Catalog said. “Or that.”

  We were approaching the middle of the tangle, nudged along by a coiling ribbon of star road, shoved toward an assemblage unlike any Precursor structure I had ever seen.

  The star roads had combined to sketch out a great, parallel double-arc, like two arrow-shooting bows pulled from an ancient armory. And at the center of each double bow glowed a brilliant ring surrounding a pit of blackness deeper than space.

  “It’s not a ship,” I said.

  “Is it like the Ark?” Catalog asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they hope to collect us, as the Librarian collects her beasts?” Catalog withdrew most of its sensors. “Before all connections closed, Haruspis supplied me with a number of records. I have conducted a search and can now recognize the structure.”

  “How?”

  “Testimony from the Lifeshaper and others across the ecumene,” Catalog said.

  “She was deposed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you received her testimony?”

  “Before the network closed, yes.”

  The double bow overwhelmed our visual field.

  After a long, agonizing moment—Catalog no doubt luxuriating in its knowledge but utterly silent and still—I asked, “Willing to share?”

  STRING 10

  LIBRARIAN

  I LOVE PLANETS—those agglomerations of rocks and volatiles found around most stars throughout the galaxy, and even between the stars.

  Most living things are born on gas-infused, stony orbs. Still, the exceptions are fascinating. I have long studied those ice-bound moons where blind scuttlers arise in secret oceans to stack rocks and burrow deep. Stifled beneath kilometers of mineral-cold ice, they rarely if ever get to see the stars, living out a dreaming existence in perpetual, sulfur-rich darkness.

  Three times I have liberated icy moons—opened crevices in the deep frozen shields and freed the inbred scuttlers. They climbed up and out, were astonished by the depth and emptiness of the unbounded void of space—and then fell back, terrified and discouraged, to seek refuge again beneath the ice. They wiped their minds and their histories of what I had shown them. Now, they do not remember anything about Forerunners.

  I do not know if their ice will protect them against the Halos. Likely not. However, a great many were small … less than the size of my hand. That might save them.

  How much like those scuttlers all young species are! The empty greatness of space is a thick wall erected between lovers, harsh and cruel.

  When Forerunners were young and bound to our natal planet, we must have wondered who and what we were, how we would measure up if we met our peers—or our superiors—out there in the void. But the challenge of simply crossing the void was so tremendous that for millennia after we acquired speech, fire, art, machines, we still clung to our rock and shunned the endless vacuum.

  Inexperience—naivety—hope and fear.

  Young wisdom.

  * * *

  Hulk after ancient hulk we carved open without resistance, without reaction. All records within the equivalent of our ancillas—primitive memory stores, huge and bulky—had decayed to random patterns of binary garble.

  Binary! After our great memory catastrophes, digital storage had been given way to substrates of quantum foam. Yet on these ships, the last dim hope of log and history crumbled at a touch.

  Ten million years is a long time for machines.

  We finished knowing little more than when we began—a vague recognition of shared heritage, a realization that these ships, gathered about the star roads like so many flocks of dead birds suspended in a silent gray cathedral, reminded us of archaic designs in Builder ritual. No more. And no less.

  “They were Forerunner, that’s all we may ever know,” Clearance said.

  “We could transport the best Builder technicians out here,” Keeper suggested. “We could set loose our finest researchers to go ship by ship … Then we would learn!”

  But Keeper’s enthusiasm was not convincing. Back in our home galaxy, where nearly all of Forerunner history had played out, preparations to fight the advance of the Flood would certainly take precedence.

  The one thing we could all surmise about the great fleet we were leaving behind, mute and pitifully old, was that no species had ever mounted such an effort except to save itself. No species had ever gone to such great lengths for any purpose other than all-out war.

  And what about the Precursors, whose cathedral roads stretched around so many planets and interlaced the stars?

  Where had they gone?

  * * *

  Audacity took us to the inner stars of the great Spider in yet another jump, toward the tiny orange sun.

  Fresh light from the unique living world greeted us as we arrived in the target system—light less than two seconds old. “Wonderful, fresh light,” Chant noted. “Makes me feel more connected to reality.”

  What had been statistical from a great distance now resolved to certainty. Here, there were no star roads, no orbiting constructs, no ships. Audacity brought us sharp images even through the planet’s wavering atmosphere.

  We studied individuals—most seen from above—as well as gatherings in small towns or villages. Tens of thousands, perhaps more. But certainly not millions.

  A lonely and simple planet.

  Our emotions reached down.

  “Their technological status is minimal—fire, ceramics, some metal-working,” Dawn said. “Because they are so few, even compared to their resources, they must exercise population control. Beyond that, they seem to have returned to a state of natural evolution.”

  Chant continued with less startling details. “Subsurface and volcanic vent biota is nonexistent. There’s nothing in the way of an underground biosphere. No signs of ancient reservoirs of fuel—carbonaceous or petroleum-based.”

  “If they arrived with the fleet,” Keeper said, “they’ve been here ten million years.”

  A prospect so astonishing it could scarcely be believed. Either their ancestors had been forced to colonize a desperately impoverished planet, or they had long ago shed most of their knowledge.

  We absorbed this with the proper silent respect.

  “Lack of resources could hold back progress,” Keeper said. I noticed a certain doubtful disdain in his tone.

  “Even so, they must have stripped themselves of everything,” Dawn said in wonder.

  “Or they were abandoned, left here
with nothing,” Clearance said. “Judging from the mineral evidence, life didn’t exist before it came here with the Forerunners. There is a fair percentage of radioactive ore, however, and the oceans—such as they are—are rich with deuterium.”

  “They could have escaped if they had wanted to,” I concluded. “Weapons?” I asked Audacity.

  “Nothing that can harm us,” the ship responded. “They live and work by fire alone. And not a great deal of that.”

  “But why?” Chant asked.

  Audacity entered low orbit.

  “We’re intercepting sounds,” Dawn said, and with a lift of her fingers, played for us words being spoken in a small village just a few hundred kilometers below. We understood nothing.

  “It’s not ancient Digon?” Keeper asked.

  “That reached its peak less than three hundred thousand years go,” Dawn said. “We have no idea what form of Digon, if any, even existed when the fleet left our galaxy. Ship will gather sounds from as many points a possible, but already, the language seems far simpler than our own.”

  “Simpler language is often more advanced, syntactically,” Keeper said, and brightened at a thought. “Their technology and structures might be hidden—they might be in defensive mode, hiding them! There could be threats in Path Kethona we do not recognize.”

  “More likely, they chose to suppress technology at the deepest level,” Dawn said. Keeper fell back in dismay. He could not bring himself to believe Forerunners would ever abandon advanced engineering.

  “No doubt they still dig,” Clearance said with a smug air. “They’ve become Miners. All of them. How else would they find stone and clay?”

  I have difficulty knowing when Miners are trying to be funny.

  None of us had ever seen Forerunners so abject and primitive. They averaged about two thirds the height and mass of a healthy Manipular. Their structures were rarely taller than one or two stories, or wider than five or ten meters.

  “How can we learn anything from them?” Keeper asked. “How can they maintain any sort of culture?”

  “They likely rely on oral histories,” Chant said. “We’ve seen it in other species.”

  “Maybe they’re some sort of Flood residue—an inept crossbreeding,” Keeper said.

  “The genetic heritage is clear,” Chant insisted. “At the cellular level, they aren’t very different from us. I think the first group to arrive made the best of a tough situation. They could not overburden meager resources. But there are other animals down there, some serving as beasts of burden.”

  With a twist of judgment, she added, “And some as food.” She paused to enjoy our surprise. Forerunners have not consumed animals for many millions of years. “More interesting still, their animals show descent from the original population. Including those they eat. Even the plants have Forerunner genetics—if they are in fact plants. They likely arrived without a genetic library—hence no way to create a complex ecosystem. They used what they had.” She looked up, eyes round. “I wonder if they’d enjoy eating us?”

  Keeper could not contain his disgust. “What could they have done to deserve such degradation?”

  “Nothing like it in our history,” Dawn said.

  Chant did her best to put together a useful social picture of our long-lost relatives.

  Audacity decided that landing directly on the planet still posed too much risk. We could not yet be sure whether what we were seeing was real, or whether the Forerunners below—even should they be the sole masters of this strange world, and not peculiar pets—might be hiding their true level of technology. Keeper in particular favored this view. He preferred an explanation of camouflage and hidden danger over what he deemed Forerunner disgrace.

  Audacity brought forth two excursion craft, seekers with the lightest of armaments. A quick lottery of needs and circumstance determined that three of us would descend and two would remain in orbit.

  I insisted on joining the excursion.

  * * *

  Our seekers penetrated a low deck of thin clouds, then followed the sinuous contours of the greatest range of craggy mountains, between which lay immense freshwater lakes. Because the planet’s axis was perpendicular to its orbit, and had been for many hundreds of millions of years, the land had never been subject to heavy winters or severe glaciations. The weather was steady and dull—low overcast much of the time, infrequent but violent thunderstorms, heavy precipitation that nonetheless brought only light snow to the highest mountains.

  The planet had only one small ocean that covered the southern polar regions, its dense, salty waters filled with bitter minerals. All the other water on the planet was fresh and contained in the deep, clear lakes.

  Our seekers flew over a low mountain ridge, then dropped and hovered a few thousand meters above a brown, gently sloping plain. The breaking of thin lava dikes had long ago broached one of the deep lakes, loosing immense floods that had shaped chaotic terrain across the northern third of the plain. The plantlike growth here was scrubby, set low to resist channeled winds between the wrinkled mountain ridges—winds that blew sand and carved tumuli, caprocks, and other grotesque formations.

  At the southern end of the rugged mountains, the mouth of a narrow valley revealed a great cleft in the range, faced with pale vertical faces of granitic rock.

  Clearance was not impressed by the local geology. “A place of exile, not opportunity,” he said. “I would not have chosen it.”

  “Spoken like a Miner,” Chant said. “Lifeworkers would see other opportunities, other forces at work.”

  In my experience, a lean and barren world could force rapid cultural growth that would in turn promote a quick renewal of technology. We do enjoy our creature comforts. But that was not the case here. Who or what had compelled them to seek this strange penance, to become a focus of all evolution, with the unavoidable result of cannibalism?

  The seekers landed us within a kilometer of a town. Low, flat dwellings lay like sedimentary layers on the slope of a low ridge.

  We climbed down to survey the plain and the flat town. Clearance, on my instruction, stayed close to his vehicle.

  A low wall lay within forty meters of our landing. Within the wall, ten squat, tawny-furred animals, each massing about five hundred kilograms, grazed on the few dusky green shoots that poked up through cracked and crumbled soil. The wall was likely a channel to keep small floods from intruding into the town. The grazing animals easily stepped over it to find fresh shoots.

  Clouds blew free from the mountains. Sunshine played over the rolling, crackled ground.

  “Look at their faces,” Chant said. I already had—and did not like the resemblance. I approached the closest animal. It stood its ground and patiently watched through closely spaced gray eyes.

  “Looks like Clearance,” Chant said.

  Clearance framed his face with his gloves and looked domestic.

  “Stop that,” I said.

  “Apologies.”

  “More like Keeper,” I suggested. Chant covered her mouth.

  I stooped a few meters from the beast—rather, the adapted Forerunner—to more closely examine its feet. The digits and phalanges were indeed based on a stem Forerunner body plan. These creatures were as related to us as their herdsmen in the buildings beyond. But intelligence was not apparent.

  The grazer turned its head, incurious, and bent its neck to pluck more shoots.

  A few hundred meters to the north, closer to the town’s outlying buildings and surrounded by another low wall, lay a plot of gray-green bushes. If we approached that plot, almost certainly we would be noticed and challenged.

  I looked back to Clearance. “It’s much more likely they’ll see our kinship without armor.”

  Clearance, standing beside the first seeker, was not enthusiastic. In our helmets, we heard him say, “I doubt they’d recognize us even if we were naked. They’ve fallen so very far.”

  “Even so,” I said, then instructed my ancilla. My armor unfolded, pull
ed away, and arranged itself neatly on the compacted dry mud. My ancilla and I had long ago reached an agreement about solicitous warnings. None were given. It knew my mind.

  “I shall go in without armor as well,” Chant said.

  “No. Just me.

  “Lifeshaper!”

  Both of my shipmates looked distressed.

  “Just me,” I insisted. “Clearance will stay here to back us up.” I preferred for the Miner to remain by the seekers, in case Chant and I were suffering from that willful blindness that sometimes afflicts Lifeworkers too fascinated by nature to recognize a threat.

  She and I walked across the dried mud. I wore only underlinings, feet bare but for thong-socks. The ground was hard and cold, the air brisk but not dangerously so.

  At my signal, Chant fell back about twenty paces—she had wanted to precede me but I forbade it. Our training was explicit in how to approach indigenes, but never had we approached Forerunners in such circumstances. At any rate they were indigenous only by courtesy. The courtesy of ten million years’ habitation was real enough, however.

  Beyond a waist-high mud and stone wall, no doubt built to keep out the grazers, a tilled field supported many rows of gray-green stalks topped by spiky leaves, below which hung wrinkled-looking fruit or pods. The wind rustled leaves and fruit. They sounded dry and unappetizing, but whatever their genetics, they looked the part of fixed plants, not Forerunners doing penance rooted in dirt.

  Neither of us intruded on the patch. Rather, we kept outside the wall and thus were directed toward the nearest complex of buildings, irregular pentagonal structures made of mud brick, with stones pieced out along their foundations. The mud had been scored with crude strings of unfamiliar symbols. Oblong doorways were spaced one or two to each building, each covered by a rough woven hanging.

  In the nearest doorway, a wrinkled, thick hand drew back a hanging, and for just a moment, a shadowy figure stood there, striking an odd pose, naked, as if hoping for inspection and approval. A female, I was fairly sure, but not in her prime, with shrunken belly-teats and very different patterns of facial hair. Most distinct, a line of gray fur reached around from her cheeks to join beneath a flat, pushed-back nose. At least that was classically Forerunner.